u/Coldcow

The reunion of "Sun" and "Luna" millions of years after the destruction of Earth would just be another happy ending in a story filled with pain and violence, if not for the genius of the final double-page spread that comes right after their embrace, where Agni and Luna walk out of an empty movie theater.

The brilliance here is that the scene introduces a massive ambiguity.

Was Fire Punch just a movie, or was it a whole reality lived by the characters, only they no longer recognize themselves as part of it?

This ambiguous ending is tied together by two earlier scenes.

The first is when Agni and Luna arrive at the theater (which is a massive visual break from the previous scene). This happens right after Judah transforms into the tree and extinguishes the Fire Punch so that Agni can have a new life.

Yet, these two vastly different scenes are connected by Agni’s own narration, remembering his very first lie. It was a lie so good that they actually forgot their hunger, to the point that they fell asleep quickly that night after talking. There, the lie created a reality the moment it was accepted as truth by Luna and Agni.

It’s interesting to note that the end of this memory of Agni's is exactly the same as the final reunion of "Sun" and "Luna": they fall asleep together after a brief conversation.

The second scene is "Sun" watching the recorded footage of the movie about Fire Punch. Even though he sees himself, he can't recognize himself in the film, though some residual feeling still lingers. To him, he is just looking at a character in a movie. What is on the screen is fiction (or rather, Agni the "protagonist," though "Sun" doesn't remember this).

When we connect all of this, the ending of Fire Punch doesn't close with an answer (that after all the suffering, Agni and Luna finally reunited and the feelings that bound them survived until the end of time), but rather with a question:

Was everything that happened just a movie shown to ordinary people in an empty theater? Or was it the record of a forgotten era that the protagonists actually lived through, but can no longer remember?

Or, to put it better:

What is the difference between a life lived and a story watched when we can no longer recognize ourselves in it?

The genius of Fire Punch’s ending is that the movie ends. The fire starts burning in the viewer.

Today I lost track of time, and my name was already waiting in the exit ledger under “permanent nocturnal asset.”