Manga / Undead Unluck

I've decided that this is the last time he'll ask, "What happens when you die?"

"Undead" Andy. "Unluck" Fuuko Izumo. This is the story of their quest for the greatest death ever.

—Ending narration of Chapter/Episode 1

Undead Unluck (アンデッドアンラック Andeddo Anrakku) is an ongoing manga series written and illustrated by Yoshifumi Tozuka that began serialization in Weekly Shōnen Jump on January 20, 2020. The series is based off a one-off titled Undead + Unluck that was released a year earlier on January 28, 2019.

The story follows an 18-year-old girl named Fuuko Izumo, who has a mysterious superpower that causes anyone she touches to suffer great, and often fatal, misfortune. Having lost her family to her power and become a shut-in most of her life, she decides to end her life after finishing her favorite shojo manga. However, her suicide attempt is interrupted by a man who charges into her knife, falls in front of a train, and yet somehow regenerates completely. "Undead" Andy has the power to never die and recover from any injury, and he thinks that "Unluck" Fuuko might finally be the key to give him a proper death.

The duo soon finds themselves being pursued by the Union, an organization comprising other superpowered individuals, who are dead-set on recapturing Andy and eliminating Fuuko. However, the duo end up joining the organization instead, working with the other "Negators" in the group to complete the quests given to them by Apocalypse, a talking book which the God of the world lies on the other side of. The Union wishes to build up their power in the hopes of one day defeating this god and freeing the Earth from its control, and Fuuko's power might just be the key to doing so.

The manga is officially translated with a simultaneous Japanese and English release available on VIZ Media's website here and Manga Plus's website here. The collected volumes are available to buy in print and digital, and colorized digital volumes are available only in Japanese.

A light novel by Sawako Hirabayashi (不揃いなユニオンの日常 Fuzoroina Yunion no Nichijou, roughly translated as Irregular Union's Daily Life) was released in Japan in February 2023.

An anime adaptation produced by TMS Entertainment and animated by David Production was confirmed in August 2022 and began airing in October 2023.

---

Undead Unluck contains examples of:

• Above the Influence: Seeing that they don't have a way to defeat Shen and that Andy is willing to go back to being a lab experiment so Fuuko can enter the Union, she makes the offer to Andy (who had been claiming that he would make her fall in love with him since they discovered that her powers depend on the affection she feels for the objective, and before that he directly tried to have sex with her in an alley in the hopes that that kind of contact would be enough to kill him) to have sex right there, hoping that the gratitude she feels would be enough to either kill him or kill Shen. After Shen decides to give then a chance to kill another member of the Union so they can both become members, Andy angrily tells Fuuko that he's not rotten enough to take advantage of a desperate woman, and to never try something like that ever again. Then proceeds to reaffirm that he will make her truly love him.
• Actually, I Am Him:
  • During the Gina Arc, Andy and Fuuko are sent by Shen to hunt down a member of the Union so the two can join the organization themselves. After arriving in Russia, Andy leaves Fuuko by herself to recruit some allies to assist in the upcoming battle, and Fuuko ends up spending the day painting with a woman she meets on the beach. As it turns out, the woman is actually Gina, the member of the Union they were sent to kill.
  • During the Unrepair Arc, Andy and Fuuko must infiltrate a mafia auction in order to find the Unrepair Negator. They end up clashing with a rival group known as the Negator Hunters who are also searching for other Negators to recruit, led by a man named Rip. It turns that Rip is Unrepair, the very Negator they were sent to find.
• Afraid of Their Own Strength: Top is capable of running fast enough to circle the globe in seconds, but the trauma of accidentally killing his friends makes him deliberately avoid speeds he can't control. It's only after making friends with Chikara, whose power can stop him with ease, that he's willing to go all out.
• Alien Invasion: One occurs right after the release of UMA Galaxy, in which an alien species known as the Acks travel to Earth in search of a new home. It's ultimately an Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion, however, as Juiz's Unjustice results in them destroying themselves before they can attack.
• Alien Sky: The only celestial objects in the universe at the start of the series are the Earth, the sun, and the moon. This changes with the release of UMA Galaxy, which brings with it stars, other planets, and extraterrestrial life.
• Alternate Calendar: The calendar is similar to ours, except there are no days of the week until UMA Galaxy is released.
• Angry Cheek Puff: When expressing jealousy under the assumption that Fuuko and Andy are a couple, Gina briefly pouts before shouting to Fuuko that she fell in love with Andy first.
• Animated Actors: Following the anime's announcement, the manga had a couple of cover pages where the characters were recording their lines for the anime (usually when the characters' voice actors were announced), with Anno Un directing.
• Arc Number: 101. Union can only handle 100 punishments before the 101st sets off Ragnarok, To You, From Me is an 101 volume book series that chronicles pretty much the cast's entire journey, and while the world is on its 100th loop, the endgame one takes place in the 101st.
• Arc Villain: Each arc has its own primary antagonist for the heroes to face.
  • The Gina Arc has Gina, whom Andy and Fuuko must kill in order to safely join the Union.
  • The Spoil Arc has UMA Spoil, whom Andy, Fuuko, and Shen are sent to capture as part of a quest.
  • The Unrepair Arc has Rip, the leader of the Negator Hunters, who Andy, Fuuko, and Tatiana clash with as they search for Unrepair.
  • The Unbelievable Arc has Billy, who betrays the Union by revealing himself to be a mole for Under, alongside being the group's leader, and attempts to steal the Union roundtable for himself.
  • While the Autumn Arc has a multitude of opponents for Fuuko and Andy to face in it, the titular UMA Autumn is the most applicable for this trope due to capturing her being a prime motivator for the arc as whole, and for being the final opponent faced in the arc itself.
  • The Summer Arc has Feng, an Under member sent to capture Fuuko who also has an interest in Shen. He ends up forming a Villain Team-Up with the titular UMA Summer as well, whom he helps grow by feeding it explosive material.
  • The Spring Arc has two: the titular UMA Spring, whose takedown is the main driver of the arc's events, and Under, who aim to be the ones to kill it.
  • The Ragnarok Arc has Ruin, a Negator pursuing his own agenda who's captured Fuuko's soul, driving Andy to track him down in order to get her back and return her to life, and God itself, who moves to take action as Ragnarok finally comes.
  • The Union Arc in the 101st loop doesn't have a proper antagonist, as it focus more on Fuuko collecting the first Negators of the loop - Nico, Ichico and Gina - so the closest to a antagonist in this case is Void, who Fuuko has to defeat to make him join the group.
  • The Negator War Arc has the armies that Billy, Tella and Creed are part of alongside the American militia, as the Union has to navigate the war in search of recruiting the aforementioned Negators and obtain Remember.
  • The Unfeel Arc has the aliens invading the space station where Phil and his mother are, as they try to hinder the evacuation efforts of the Union.
  • The Untruth Arc is a straightforward Tournament Arc, with no real antagonists from a protagonist's perspective. From Shen's, however, Fuuko is this, as she throws the members of the Union against him to test his skill and force the awakening of his Negator ability. Feng is also in the background, looking for an opportunity to face Fuuko once more.
  • The Unmove Arc is the first one with no antagonists, as it's more of a slice of life arc with Fuuko and co. being part of Chikara's school as they wait for the manifestation of his Negation and solve the tasks given by Apocalypse in the background. Even UMA Color is more of a nuisance than a proper Big Bad.
  • The Sick Arc has the Master Rule Sick, who is the first big opponent the Union faces in a long time, as they need to protect the hospital Rip works into while Fuuko treats Leila.
  • The Unburn Arc has Enjin, who Fuuko challenges to a cooking competition in order to obtain his Negation.
  • The Unjustice Arc has no antagonists as it focuses on the new life Juiz has in the 101st loop.
  • The Unstoppable Arc has the Master Rule Beast, who attacks while the Union try to recruit Top and has to be dealt with if they want to survive.
• Artifact of Power: Powerful items, simply called artifacts, litter the world of Undead Unluck. Each one has its own magical abilities that can be used to turn the tide in battles.
• Ascended Extra: The 101st Loop gives a lot of focus to the Negators who had minimal focus in the 100th Loop, either due to dying early on or simply not getting much time in the spotlight. This is particularly evident with the Negators Fuuko first recruits as, aside from Billy, all of them were rather minor characters in the 100th Loop: Nico, Ichico, Gina, Void, Yusai, Sean, Tella, Creed, and Phil. It's only after that does the story return to some of the Negators who had a lot of focus prior, like Shen, Chikara, Rip, and Latla.
• Author Appeal: Most of the Ship Tease moments in the manga is between Huge Guy, Tiny Girl duos. One of the exceptions, Top/Haruka, is instead an example of Tiny Guy, Huge Girl, keeping up the theme of size difference.
• Banana Peel: In her first meeting with Andy, Fuuko's attempt to flee causes her to slip on a banana that's fallen from a crate on top of Andy after it was brought by her Unluck.
• Barrier Maiden: Juiz, in a roundabout way. It's revealed in the 101st Loop that she constantly kept the Master Rules in check with her abilities with her blade and Unjustice, allowing the Union to deal with relatively weaker UMAs in comparison.
• Bequeathed Power: According to Rip, when a Negator dies, their powers will transfer to a random different person. This is later confirmed with the location of the Negator with Unchange after Gina, who originally had the power, died. However, the Beast arc reveals that the truth is not quite that: the past users of the Negation decide who is the next wielder, which explains why Mui just happened to receive Untruth when Shen dies during the 100th loop, and why Unbreakable is hereditary.
• The Big Damn Kiss: One occurs between Andy and Fuuko during the battle with Victor after Fuuko manages to temporarily bring out Andy by shooting him in the head. While the kiss meant to simply bring upon a giant bout of Unluck that could disable Victor long enough for the others to put that card back into his head, Fuuko's reaction to it implies that she enjoyed it beyond that, even if she doesn't admit it outright.
• Black Market: The mafia runs auctions that deal in Negators, UMAs, and artifacts. Fuuko and Andy must infiltrate one of them in order to find Unrepair.
• Bland-Name Product: The Union's Hard-Work Montage in Episode 19 has them drinking a dozen cans of Dead Bull to push through.
• Blessed with Suck: While Negators gain tremendous abilities that border on Cursed with Awesome, the costs far outweigh the benefits these individuals get, and in many cases they gained them at the worst possible timing. Even abilities that lack any inherent downsides are shown to cause issues for their respective Negators.
• Boss Subtitles: Whenever a character's ability's name is first revealed or is being shown off, it's done so by having said name appear in massive letters next to the character, usually having a large panel dedicated to it. The only characters whose abilities were revealed without this happening so far are Fuuko, Andy, Void, Isshin, Top and Phil. When Billy uses the powers he's copied from other negators, the name of the power is shown, but with an Ominous Visual Glitch.
• Bottomless Magazines: Averted. Ammo supply follows real-life conventions in this universe, with Fuuko asking to borrow Juiz' sword after agreeing to become Under's hostage because she exhausted all the bullets in her gun in the previous fight with Feng. Creed does play this straight as he fires his minigun without reloading once, but it's because of Undecrease basically allowing him to negate an item (such as ammo) from being exhausted, and Andy immediately notes him not needing to reload in their initial encounter as a Negator power.
• Breather Episode:
  • After several chapters of Billy betraying the Union and stealing the Round Table, chapter 37 features a relatively light story of Fuuko and a few other Union members creating their own manga so they can break into Shueisha to investigate To You, From Me.
  • After a whole arc where the world ends, with everyone aside from the two gods, Fuuko, and Andy dying, the next few chapters are about Fuuko rebuilding the Union better than before and are significantly lighter in tone - particularly with Fuuko being able to Set Right What Once Went Wrong for Ichico, Gina, and Void.
• Brick Joke: Shen in Chapter 4 comments about how Fuuko, considering her ability activates on physical contact, would be invincible if she got some proper fighting training in. Over 100 chapters and a time loop later, Fuuko is shown to have gotten proper combat training from Shen that she honed over the years, and is now able to defeat Feng with Unluck on multiple occasions despite him outclassing her in terms of both strength and technique.
• Byronic Hero: Andy starts as one: early on he didn't care much for the people around him, as he kept looking for ways to die and he was pretty rude at times with Fuuko early on. As time went on, however, he grew to genuinely care for her and later for the other members of the Union, bringing his more heroic traits to the forefront.
• Caffeine Failure: Episode 19 has Fuuko and the group assisting with her manga creation drinking loads of energy beverages to keep themselves from tiring out until Fuuko is the only one left awake with Exhausted Eyebags just to fully complete the product.
• Call-Back:
  • In Chapter 8, Andy while falling into the Roundtable room attempts to use Parts Bullet to shoot at the members as a form of a greeting. When Fuuko ends up in a similar situation falling into the Master Room in the 101st loop, she does exactly the same thing at the Master Rules using Bad Bullets.
  • Fuuko wears the same dress she wore during the Unrepair arc to infiltrate the black market auction to Rip's wedding in the 101st loop.
  • The shot of Andy successfully preventing Sean from stabbing Fuuko to death in the Autumn arc is mirrored when Fuuko disarms Sean's attempt to stab her while trying to capture him in the 101st loop.
• Cast Full of Pretty Boys: The majority of the male characters are easy on the eyes and tend to have a Heroic Build, to the point that even the Older Than They Look Mad Scientist with Creepy Shadowed Undereyes still manages to be a Hunk.
• The Cavalry: Andy (well, his clone, at least) comes to help save the day as the Union fights Sick in Chapter 180.
• Censor Box: Due to him being exposed from the waist down quite a bit, Andy has one of his own that covers his penis. The volume extras describe it as his "seaweed" and a reoccurring Running Gag is noting all of the times it appears. This also applies to Victor.
• Chalk Outline: Played for Laughs in Episode 19 when Chikara passed out during the group's work on Fuuko's manga with his body being outlined by tape.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Even outside of Negator abilities, individuals with remarkable talent and/or simply an absurd amount of practice can achieve inhumanly impressive feats of physical prowess. This is most evident with the Shin Hakkyoku practitioners, who can easily mow down squads of expert opponents in seconds, jump dozens of feet in the air, and create massive craters with pure kung fu.
• Chekhov's Gun: Initially, the "card" in Andy's head just seems to be a Restraining Bolt, locking away his hundreds of years worth of memories so he doesn't "lose control"/let Victor out, but it has a much bigger purpose. Chapter 31 reveals the reward for the neutralization of UMA Winter is the location of an Artifact called "Remember". The Ragnarok Arc reveals "Remember" is the card's true identity and it's the reason for Andy's existence, as Juiz used one of its functions to seal Victor's memories away, his body then creating the "Andy" personality thanks to "Undead". Its second function is the more important one though: the ability to restore the memories of prior Loops to all members of Roundtable, which Juiz wanted to use it for before Victor tried to kill her, and now Fuuko wishes to use in the 101st Loop since Andy no longer needs it.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Early on in the story, while Andy and Fuuko dealt with their first UMA, one of the tasks related to have been completed is the subjugation of UMA Language. Not only does the Union have to deal with it again in the 101st loop, but it's out for Nico's blood.
• Color Failure: In Episode 19, Fuuko goes blank upon being hit wth Writer's Block when she's tasked with making a manga.
• Common Tongue: As a reward for UMA Language's neutralization, Apocalypse unifies the world's languages. Now, everyone in the world speaks English, except Negators. This has the side effect of making it far easier to identify Negators that didn't already speak English, such as Chikara. The fact that the manuscript for To You, From Me wasn't affected by the said language unification is what reveals that it was written using an artifact.
• Contrived Coincidence: Fuuko happened to be trying to kill herself at Shinjuku Station over the fact her ability can potentially kill someone she touches when a man unable to die and wanting to die happened to be passing by and decided to intervene on a curious whim.
• Cooperation Gambit: At the beginning of the Spring arc, Fuuko voluntarily defects to Under in exchange for them destroying UMA Winter and preventing an eternal ice age while also giving her the chance to further develop Unluck.
• Cosmic Retcon: Downplayed with the introduction of new UMAs. The memories and culture of every non-Negator on earth are altered to believe that reality had always been influenced by the UMAs' rules, even if they'd only been added to the world seconds prior.
• Costume-Test Montage: In the Unrepair Arc, Fuuko is thrust into wearing a variety of dresses that she immediately dislikes for being too revealing and is only willing to wear a more modest outfit after being given a red dress.
• Cowboy Episode:
  • As well as being the Episode of the Dead, the Spoil arc is set in a small town in Nevada with an Old West aesthetic that Andy notes was used as a set for a lot of cowboy movies. Chapter 11's cover even sees Fuuko and Andy dressed in genre-appropriate attire.
  • The section of the Autumn arc focused on Andy's past is mostly set in the Old West.
• Creator Provincialism: A mixed example - Fuuko is Japanese, but Andy's nationality is unknown, and the rest of the Union is a Multinational Team who goes on missions around the world.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Pick a Negator. Any Negator. The degree of issue is rather diverse, though: those lower in the scale became unable to pursue their passions, but the majority of them have at least one skeleton in the coffin - like Fuuko's parents or Gina's entire town.
• A Day in the Limelight: While most Negators do get an arc putting a major focus on them, many did not before the endgame was set in motion. Gina, Nico, and Void go on to get major roles at the beginning of the 101st loop after their battles against Andy and co. Even Sean Datz, who was unceremoniously killed in a previous loop, gets a dedicated mini-arc.
• Despair Event Horizon: Victor. Seeing him and Juiz continue to fail at winning their eternal war with God makes him finally snap and attempt to kill Juiz during the 99th loop. As Victor had Undead, Juiz used Remember to seal his memories, which led to the birth of Andy.
• Downer Beginning: The opening of the manga features Fuuko's Dark and Troubled Past before her attempting suicide.
• The Dragon: Of the 10 Master Rules, the one who leads them in their crusade against the Union is the first among them, the Soul rule. What is noteworthy, however, is that rather than being a creation of the Sun, he was created by the Moon, who is supposedly aligned with humanity. He proves to be a competent leader as he tries to escape the sun while Andy is blocking the way, and once he realizes Fuuko realized the hidden truth of Negations, he guides Language to put a stop to the one member of the Union who could give further insight on the matter - Ichico.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The original one-shot has a few differences from the serialized first chapter: Fuuko was about 10 when her parents died rather than 8, and part of the story involves her figuring out how her power can affect more than one person, Andy has dark roots and the card in his head is an ATM card, the Scarred Man is part of an Under-like group seeking violent revenge on a world that discriminates against them, and there's no To You, From Me.
  • The first few chapters are far more perverted and ecchi than later on. Fans often tell others just to skip those as it's not indicative of what the series is really like.
• Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion: After UMA Galaxy is unleashed, an invasion of aliens called Acks arrives to attack the Earth. Juiz takes off her helmet and forces the fleet to fire at themselves with Unjustice, putting a swift end to the invasion.
• The End of the World as We Know It: If the world is given 100 penalties by Apocalypse's creator, the 101st penalty will be "Ragnarök," which the Union believes signifies the end of the world. At the start of the series, the world had received a total of 98 penalties, with the release of UMA Galaxy in chapter 20 marking the 99th. As it turns out, the world has experienced this 99 times at this point.
• Episode of the Dead: The fight against UMA Spoil takes place in the small U.S. town of Longing, where Spoil has turned the majority of the populace into zombies.
• Eternal Recurrence: While not explicit, bits of dialogue imply that Victor has lived through the universe ending and resetting multiple times. Chapter 35 confirms that the world is on a loop.
• Exact Words: The quests have a strict rule that no outsiders other than the named participants can harm the UMA. However, it does not penalize instances that obstruct but don't directly harm the UMA. In the 101st loop, Nico and Ichico are able to use a wall of chuff to distract Autumn long enough for Gina to learn the secret to Unchange to finish the UMA off. Simiarly, Julia during the Beast fight grabbing the split pieces of Beast's soul so Fuuko can hit it with a piece of her soul to give Beast a fatal stroke of Unluck also isn't against the rules, which Soul notes.
• Exploited Immunity: Andy's regenerative powers let him survive the lethal accidents caused by contact with Fuuko. There's a delay during which Andy can get up close to enemies so they'll be hurt by the same incidents that he'll withstand.
• Face Doodling: After the group's Hard-Work Montage in Episode 19, Bau is shown with doodles drawn on his face after falling asleep.
• Face–Heel Turn:
  • During the Unbelievable arc, Billy outs himself as the leader of Under and immediately cuts ties with the Union by trying to steal the Round Table and Apocalypse. However, things are more complex than it seemed at first glance.
  • In the end of the 100th loop, Nico does one, as he's promised the chance to meet with Ichico one last time if he sets off Ragnarok and defeats Andy. However, the actions of Andy and the UMA Ghost during the arc make him perform a Heel–Face Turn in order to defeat the latter.
• Fake Memories:
  • When the world changes due to a UMA or quest reward, non-Negators have their minds altered to believe that the changes were there from the beginning. The most extreme case of this is the Acks, who boast about their millennia-old galactic civilization despite literally having been created seconds beforehand by UMA Galaxy.
  • During the Autumn Arc, Anno Un inserts Fuuko's soul into Andy's memories to make the duo stronger, resulting in a new version of said memories with Fuuko present it them being created in Andy's mind. Thankfully, the new, "fake" memories don't override the real ones.
• Family Theme Naming: The Vorgeil family. Ichico is spelled with the Japanese number for one, Nico with two, and their daughter Mico with three.
• Fanservice: Even though the ecchi elements get toned down after the first few chapters, the majority of the female cast consists of beautiful women; just about any male is either a classic Hunk or a Pretty Boy (and both are almost always built like lions).
• Fictional Document: "To You, From Me", Fuuko's favorite manga.
• Fiction 500: After the world resets to the 101st loop and Fuuko lands in the 1800s, she uses her knowledge of the future and the power of the artifacts she finds to become unfathomably rich. In the early 1970s, she's able to casually write a check for $25 billion to fund a revolutionary scientific research project, and implies that it's a tiny fraction of her wealth.
• Fighting from the Inside: While not shown to the audience outright, Victor claims that Andy was putting up quite a fight trying to regain control of his body while Victor was fighting the Union.
• Finger Firearms: One of Andy's attacks involves him biting his fingers before launching them like bullets, courtesy of his Undead ability.
• Fixing the Game: Language has an indirect one: her main method of fighting other people is to challenge them to deadly games of shiritori, where the winner is decided by who says a word that ends with "n" in Japanese first or the loser gets killed by the materialized constructs. However, the additional rules of adding more languages as turns go on means that, as time goes on, she gets more and more words to use while others get less and less as they go through their whole vocabularies. It's implied that Unforgettable's ability to remember everything is what allows Nico to beat her in the 100th loop.
• Fling a Light into the Future: Rather than following the world into its final loop, Juiz allows Fuuko, with her optimistic vision and key power to defeat God, to take the Ark and stay behind with the rest of the 100th loop Union to stop God from destroying everyone.
• Foil:
  • The Union and Under are this to each other. Both are groups made of Negators who have come together to achieve a goal, but while the Union all are united under the single goal of killing God to protect the world, Under are united by their mutual interests and have different goals depending on the member. Also, while both groups are willing to kill other Negators outside of their ranks, the Union only does so to keep the rest of the world safe, while the hunters do so simply because they deem them useless. Individual members also act as foils to one another as well.
    • Andy and Rip are both Awesomeness by Analysis combatants that use blades to fight and are assisted by squeamish female companions. Both have prominent facial wounds (Rip's eye and Andy's scar), though Andy's is on the left of his face while Rip's is on the right. Both are also capable of returning from the dead, and have strong central goals that motivate them. That said, while Andy is a hot-blooded guy who is ultimately kind and caring, Rip is a calm man that is cold-hearted and ruthless. Adding to this, their powers are direct opposites: Andy's Undead allows him to regenerate from any damage, while Rip's Unrepair stops others from healing. Also, while Andy wields a single large katana in battle, Rip uses multiple tiny scalpels to fight. Finally, while Andy's feelings of Fuuko lead him to becoming a better person and choosing to support her in killing God for the sake of those she cares for, Rip's love for Leila leads him to becoming The Unfettered so he can use any means possible to save her, despite stealing Ark meaning humanity's loss against God and even the fact what he's doing is nothing that Leila wanted him to do.
    • Fuuko and Latla are both squeamish women who assist their male companions in battle as support. Both also have short black hair and large breasts. However, while Fuuko's Unluck pulls in things (like meteors or eruptions) to attack the specific people she's touched, Latla's power pushes attacks away from herself and those near her. While Fuuko is a Reluctant Fanservice Girl who hates exposing her body (in part due to Unluck's activation requirement), Latla is a Ms. Fanservice who has no issue exposing her skin. Also, while both have a He Is Not My Boyfriend reaction to people assuming otherwise about their relationships with their male counterparts, Fuuko's reaction is embarrassment while Latla's is annoyance at the mistake.
    • Shen and Feng are both Chinese martial artists who fight using staffs who enjoy good fights. But while Shen is a talkative Blood Knight whose desire to fight trumps his own self preservation at times, Feng is The Quiet One who will retreat when necessary. Also, while Shen chastises Mui for using too many artifacts due to their power being bad for one's mind, Feng is an avid collector of them.
    • Both Juiz and Under's Leader (a.k.a. Billy) lead their respective organizations with the goal of killing God, recruiting other Negators to help achieve their goal and sometimes doing unsavory things to achieve what they want. That said, Juiz ultimately wants to protect the entire Earth from God and its rules and does what she does for the sake of everyone, while Billy only cares for Negators and is perfectly willing to sacrifice the masses to do so.
  • Feng with his 101st loop self. Both are some of the greatest martial artists in the world, both reached Shen, gave a rooftop to him and his sister to live under and both are thirsty for fights. However, the Feng from the 100th loop had as his main rival Shen and was an old man past his prime who couldn't even die because of Unfade, and had to use Life Is Strange to return to his younger self and, despite his antagonistic relation with Shen for making he and his sister fight, it's shown that he holds some regret over his actions. His 101st loop interaction never made the siblings fight and, despite taking care of them under Fuuko's request, he treated them well. He also got Unfade way younger, which led to a different tragedy for him, as he now kept his prime strength, but saw every single martial artist he wanted to face through the years die, leaving him alone. The reason why Fuuko is his rival is they share the trait of never aging.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Andy takes the card out of his forehead for a few moments in Chapter 1 to draw on the experiences sealed away, his hair looks much more unruly and spiky in a way that resembles Victor's.
  • The pages of You-Me's final chapter shown have the heroine lead the hero away by the hand before kissing him on the cheek. The framing of the kiss mirrors later in the chapter where Fuuko kisses Andy on the cheek to summon a meteorite and save him from getting captured for her safety. Both hint that the manga is actually a disguised record of the future by its author.
  • Flashbacks in chapter 25 reveal that Fuuko and Tatiana became good friends shortly after Fuuko joined the Union. Chapter 18, which takes place after said flashbacks chronologically, hints at their friendship by having Tatiana drop off a stuffed animal for Fuuko while the latter girl is hospitalized.
  • Chapter 26 confirms that Billy is blind, but there were several hints of this fact in past chapters. Notably, he doesn't realize Tatiana is aiming her weapons at him under Juiz's power and instead notes that the room has gotten hotter in chapter 9, he doesn't know what's going on when Fuuko wraps her shirt around Victor in chapter 17, he could only tell that Fuuko had a good gun based on the sound of the gunshot in chapter 18, and he has no idea what was going on when Juiz destroyed the alien spaceships in Chapter 20.
  • The nature of Tatiana's Negator ability is first hinted at in Chapter 10, where Billy is shown feeding Tatiana sushi via a long stick, implying her power involves her being unable to be physically close to people.
  • Top is shown wearing a cast on his arm multiple times throughout the series, and after the Union retreats from the battle with Victor, his right arm is shown to be broken despite not having been shown to injure it at any point during the preceding battle. Moments later, he mentions having reset his acceleration. Chapter 32 reveals that his many broken arms are due to his power, as his body must go through a dramatic change in shape, such as a bone suddenly snapping, to deactivate the ability.
  • In his first appearance, Victor asks Shen about what day it is. But not the date, but rather the day of the week, much to Shen's confusion. This hints to the fact that Victor knew of UMA Galaxy (the reason days of the week exist due to celestial bodies) before its addition later on, which further hints to the fact the world exists on a loop of creation and destruction by God's hand, and that Galaxy was a prior UMA that Victor had experienced before in a prior loop.
  • During the quest results, it's shown despite UMA Language, the personification of the concept of language, being neutralized, different languages still existed until the quest reward changed all languages to English. Later on, Slice, Magma, and Gravity are killed by Andy during the Ragnarok arc, but their rules still exist despite their disappearance, which Andy notes. The 101st loop reveals this is because said rules are Master Rules, meaning the rule will continue to exist even if the UMA itself is gone.
  • Shen's Untruth is revealed to only work on targets the user is fond of. Billy never uses Untruth despite using the abilities of the other Negators that attacked him (Undead, Unjustice, and Unstoppable) during his betrayal, likely because using that on the Union would have immediately raised suspicions on his actions.
  • To You, From Me has 101 volumes total. Considering the manga is actually Anno Un's disguised way to reveal the future, it also serves as a hint of the 101st loop that Fuuko enters after she's made the new head of the Union.
  • The cover page for Chapter 52 features the current roundtable members, Rip, Latla, Backs, Anno, and Mui, the latter being the only individual in the artwork who isn't a Negator. She becomes the new Untruth in Chapter 63 after Shen dies and becomes a Jiang Shi.
  • The first episode adds an expansion on the final scene of To You, From Me, showing the main characters embracing alone in a ruined and abandoned city in winter before the heroine has multiple visions including skulls, blood, and a statue shrouded in light, many of which hint toward later events and reveals and giving a more explicit hint about the true nature of the manga being a record of the future.
• Forest of Perpetual Autumn: UMA Autumn turns Stanley Park in Vancouver into one of these.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Even after obtaining Clothy, there are still several panels where Andy's pecker preposterously peeks past his pants, though they're easy to miss if one isn't paying attention. There are several bonus sketches posted to the series's official Twitter featuring Fuuko and other members of the cast pointing out all of these instances.
• Funny Background Event: Both times the whole Union is transported somewhere by UMA Move, Isshin is shown failing to stick the landing.
• Genre Roulette: The series already starts as a romantic globetrotting sci-fi/fantasy battle Shonen with radical, literal alterations to the fabric of reality, but this becomes more clearly invoked with Fuuko's recruitment efforts in the 101st loop, which include a championship boxing match, a military drama, a space expedition, a martial arts tournament, a leisurely high school comedy, an emotionally tangled Medical Drama, and a Cooking Duel.
• Golden Ending: Fuuko's goal in the 101st Loop is to create "The Ultimate Union", a combination of the original Union and Under, as well as Ruin and Lucy, as a single group at a much larger roundtable, so as to be at their best when fighting off Ragnarok. To this end, she travels across the globe and time locating the various Negators before the tragedies that resulted from gaining their powers occurred, working to prevent those tragedies from happening and giving them better lives. Only after the entire group is brought together will Fuuko use the artifact "Remember" to restore everyone's memories of the prior Loops, giving them the experience of their past lives at the cost of reliving the trauma, by which point they'll be well adjusted enough to withstand.
• Groundhog Peggy Sue: The Eternal Recurrence of the world causes Juiz to be thrown into the next cycle, each time progressively later than the last; her goal in every cycle has been to seek out a group of people she believes are strong enough to avert the catastrophe, but she has never been successful. It's hinted that Andy, being unable to die, also lives through the destruction and into the next cycle, but he has no memories outside of the current timeline. In truth, Andy is no older than the current timeline; it's his original personality Victor who's been through the previous cycles. When the cycle Andy was born in ends, he proves able to retain his memories in the next and last cycle.
• Hard-Work Montage: In the Autumn Arc, The Union assists in creating Fuuko's manga while having lots of energy drinks to make it by. The other members take an interest in the book Fuuko talked about just as Shen is lifting weights during the montage because his ability would get in the way.
• Harsh Word Impact: When having her manga reviewed in the Autumn Arc, Fuuko is pierced by Tamako's comments that the art is old school and has no taste in design.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: While some Negations are incredibly useful in and of themselves - like Unjustice and Undead - others like Unluck are hard to use by a myriad of reasons - just not being that powerful at first glance or having a handicap that makes them hard to use at their best. However, as the Negation can be affected by the perspective of the Negator, having the right mindset can make even some of the more mundane ones incredibly powerful. One of the prime examples of this is Unburn, which is used to temporarily suppress the fire in the sun so the Union can land on it to find Andy.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Shen sacrifices himself but it's a subversion: he knows that with Game of Death he can return to life as a jiangshi, and letting Mui inherit Untruth means the Union will get a net neutral gain from that fight and allow his group to beat Feng and Summer.
  • The ENTIRE Union and Under minus Fuuko give their lives to allow the Ark to transport the latter to the final loop.
  • Realizing that the fake Luna Language summoned wouldn't be able to be defeated by Feng alone, Ichico convinces him to perform this to unleash an attack strong enough to wound her, betting that the resulting trauma along with summoning Apocalypse in the hands of Nico would give him sufficient knowledge to find a way to find victory by forcefully awakening Unforgettable.
• Heroic Willpower: The children of Longing can counter Spoil's zombification curse by focusing on their dreams. Whenever they do so, their numbers go up instead of down. Fuuko and Shen later do this as well.
• History with Celebrity: In Episode 19, Andy mentions that he previously worked with Osamu Tezuka to work on manga together.
• Irony: Juiz originally intended to use Remember's obverse feature to be able to restore past loop memories of Negators to find a way to kill God, but ended up having to use the reverse feature to seal away her longest partner Victor when he finally decided to kill her. This very action causes a butterfly effect when this inadvertently creates Andy, who interrupts Fuuko from killing herself, and she turns out to be the "beacon of hope" Juiz was searching for.
• I Wrote Our Story:
  • In an attempt to infiltrate the publishing company Shueisha and analyze the original manuscript for "To You, From Me," Fuuko and Andy create a manuscript of their own called "Undead + Unluck," a manga that summarizes the story of their meeting. It's also a giant Mythology Gag, as the manuscript they write is just Undead Unluck's initial one-shot right down to sharing the same title.
  • In the 101st and final loop, Fuuko inspires Anno Un to make the story of Undead Unluck as Fuuko told it to him.
• Jerkass Gods: As the story rolls on, it becomes apparent that God deliberately plays with how they implement Negators, artifacts, and UMAs into the world to the detriment of everyone else. Negators are always given their powers at the worst possible time, seemingly for no other reason than that God likes to see them struggle. Then it turns out that there are two gods, both of them are pretty jerky; Sun is temperamental and had no intentions of making things fair for the Negators, even making sure that the loopers would gradually be sent back at later and later intervals to add rules to the world; and while Luna is willing to aid them, they're more interested in how far they can get in their quest to become gods, suffering be damned.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: In order to train both Andy and Fuuko by deepening their relationship, Anno Un uses an artifact to send Fuuko into the world of Andy's memories. Unfortunately, Victor's there too... Fuuko in the 101st loop later does this to the 101st Gina by turning herself into a book so Gina can converse with the past Gina to learn the secret to Unchange.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • Every criticism Fuuko gets for her manuscript (that the characters and art-style look a little old-school for modern audiences, the bizarre premise of a zombie romance, etc.) sounds like the initial criticism the real one-shot likely got during its own overview.
  • To You, From Me, as Anno Un's way to tell the future despite being rendered imperceptible to the world by his Negator ability, has the various volumes of the manga allude to the actual chapters that the specific arc took place in.
• Like Reality, Unless Noted: The story's setting is actually an Inversion. In every loop, only a handful of things are consistent with reality.^note The Earth, the sun, the moon, God, & humans for God to torment. Every other concept or phenomenon imaginable, from animal species to the four seasons to the days of the week, is tied to the introduction of a new rule of the universe in the form of a UMA. Victor, and later Andy, are also an exception to this thanks to Undead.
  Juiz: Sex. Language. Race. Death. Sickness. These are but a single handful. Once every three months new penalties are added even without our intervention.
• Logical Weakness: Though Negator powers negate the rules of the universe, they are still limited by the rules of how their powers work. For instance, Unchaste activates based on a target's infatuation, so it does not work on either people who have never understood love or people who have someone they sincerely love.
• Loophole Abuse: Fuuko uses quite a bit during the 101th loop, mainly with Apocalypse. The book punishes passing over all the tasks given by him not only by enforcing the punishments, but also by jumping a year on the clock. However, this works for Fuuko, as she needs to find a way to gather as many Negators as possible while keeping them in their prime, and those inside the Round Table are not affected by the repeated Time Skips.
  • Only people selected for a quest can finish it. It doesn't mean more members can't be added or that other people can't help with the quest, however - which Fuuko gleefully abuses on many occasions.
  • Language's deadly shiritori favors the usage of more conceptual objects than physical ones. However, Ichico figures she can, with some help from Fuuko, use those rules to call a person to help her and Nico against the UMA - which leads to her playing the word Unfade to summon Feng to protect them.
• Marry Them All: After the battle with UMA Sick and Leila’s recovery, Rip decides to nip the Sibling Triangle in the bud by proposing to both Leila and Latla, rules be damned, on the predicted happiest day of their lives.
• Meaningful Echo: In the first chapter when asked about his name, Andy tells Fuuko she could call him "Undead" since he doesn't have a name, prompting her to give him the name "Andy", which he clearly isn't keen on and just accepts for convenience. In Chapter 99, when Lucy asks who Andy is after he saves her from a Junior, he at first calls himself "Undead" before nixing it and introducing himself as Andy instead.
• Metafictional Title: The Autumn Arc starts off with Fuuko creating a manga titled Undead + Unluck for an opportunity to look for clues regarding Anno Un.
• Monumental Damage:
  • UMA Spoil attempts to fire a "Disintegration Beam" at the heroes, but Shen makes it fly off into the distance, where it ends up hitting and thus decaying the Statue of Liberty. It's downplayed though, as the Volume 2 extras reveal that the Las Vegas replica was the one hit.
  • In an attempt to intimidate Juiz, the Acks blast a hole straight through Uluru.
  • Burn comes very close to annihilating Stonehenge as it breaks out of the Union headquarters.
• Monumental Theft: You are the head of an organization that wants to take control of the Round Table from the Union. What do you do? Well, if you're Billy, you get a UMA to pick up the entire table and carry it off.
• Multiarmed Multitasking: In Episode 19, Fuuko is given a backpack equipped with robotic arms to triple her work speed. After slight trouble controlling them, Tatiana provides her with training to improve her control.
• Mundane Utility: While trying to recruit Enjin through a ramen battle, Fuuko uses various Negators' abilities to be able to help recreate the previous Enjin's perfected recipe, such as using Unrepair to keep the vegetable fibers from closing after being cut, Unchange to remove the scum from the broth, and Undraw to prevent the umami flavor from being drawn out of the chasu pork.
• Never Was This Universe: At first, the world seems normal except with superpowered Negators. Then we find out there's no stars in the sky or days of the week, and THEN we find out that fundamental rules of the universe like decay and language were artificial creations of a mysterious god and can be added or removed at will.
• New Game Plus: Effectively, what all the loops are for the loopers. They can retain their physical form from when they took the Ark and any knowledge they obtained over the last game, allowing them to build up a better resistance for Ragnarok.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Combined with Failure Is the Only Option as well for the loop the manga is set in for most of the series. Juiz wants to prevent the rule "Revolution" from being created since it actually refers to Earth's revolution around the sun - not in a stable orbit, but rather a spiral that ends up with the Earth falling into the sun. However, defeating enough of the season UMAs will do the exact same thing, since the seasons depend on the planet's position relative to the Sun. Upon defeating Spring, Summer, and Winter, Earth is destined for destruction in three months.
• Non-Standard Game Over: In the Unbelievable arc, it's revealed by Juiz that having the Revolution UMA added to the game means that the planet will start to rotate closer and closer to the sun, leading to the beginning of Ragnarok. However, what Juiz didn't know is that killing at least three of the UMAs representing the stations applies a similar effect, which makes Apocalypse ordering the Union to target them for quests a situation of Heads I Win, Tails You Lose.
• Nuke 'em: Under tries to circumvent the fight against UMA Spring by firing a nuke at it, brushing off the fact that it's currently residing in the middle of Tokyo.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: When Billy uses the powers he's copied from other negators, the name of the power is shown, but with an ominous glitch.
• One-Eyed Shot: There are various close-up moments of Fuuko's eye.
• Only Six Faces: Tozuka has a distinct tendency to draw his male characters with similar faces, regardless of any other differences in their designs; it's especially noticeable on Andy and Void.
• Only the Pure of Heart: Parodied. Similar to its namesake, the Artifact Kinto’un is theorized to only carry the ‘pure of heart’, but given that Shen is the one most commonly using it, it seems to have a very liberal definition of the concept. A volume extra later clarifies that literally every member of the Union’s Roundtable qualifies. Hilariously, the only Union member that ends up "under deliberation" (aka being stuck part-way through) is Sean in the 101st loop.
• Out with a Bang: Discussed early on. After a kiss on the cheek by Fuuko causes her Unluck power to drop a giant meteor, Andy theorizes what sex would lead to. Fuuko is quick to shoot down the idea: since how effective Unluck is depends on how much Fuuko likes the target, Andy would only get crappy results forever if he tried to force himself upon her, causing Andy to wisely change his mind.
• Painting the Fourth Wall:
  • At one point, Nico bisects Victor with a laser, which also cuts his speech balloon in half.
  • Fuuko punches a nude Andy in the crotch during their first meeting, causing his "seaweed" censor box to shatter. She later repeats this with Victor.
• Product Placement: During Fuuko's trips through Andy's memories, Andy pulls out a "new beer" (Budweiser), label and all, and comments on how much he likes the taste. It's also mentioned as one of Andy's favorite foods in his profile. According to Tozuka, it's because his family enjoyed the brand while he was growing up.
• Psychometry: Certain artifacts will funnel visions into the mind of the person touching them the first time they touch them. These images are later revealed to be visions of past loops.
• Public Domain Artifact: Luna's three best artifacts are analogous to Japan's Three Sacred Treasures and are collectively named as such. The shield, Aegis, reflects the Yata no Kagami; Rebellion reflects the Kusanagi no Tsurugi; and the elusive and never-before-seen artifact Heart reflects the Yasagani no Magatama.
• Race Against the Clock: The various quests Apocalypse gives have a time frame in which they must be completed. If the Union fails to complete all of the given quests before time is up, then they're penalized, though the book still gives the promised rewards for the quests they do complete.
• Rotating Arcs: In two distinct ways. Though Fuuko and Andy share the spotlight as the two main protagonists, as the series goes on there are larger sections where one gets the primary focus, most notably with the Ragnarok Arc, where Fuuko is captured by UMA Ghost until the last sequences, which is followed by the 101st loop, where Andy is initially stuck on the Sun. Outside of them, who gets focus in the supporting cast tends to change up every arc, and in the 101st loop, as part of their recruitment it is typically accompanied with a new style, tone, and setting.
• RPG Elements: Apocalypse periodically gives the Union quests, usually to capture UMAs or other Negators. The quests all have a party size limit of Union members who can attempt it, have rewards in the form of information (and sometimes things like unifying all languages), and failure means the release of more monsters.
• Seasonal Baggage: Apocalypse assigns four quests to capture or neutralize UMA Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter all at once.
• Self-Made Orphan: At least three Negators (Fuuko, Tatiana, and Chikara) discovered their powers when they accidentally killed their parents with them.
• Semantic Superpower: The nature of Negators' powers is rooted in the ability to negate the very rules of the universe, so many of their abilities play into perception and the limits of the very concept they're based upon. In the 101st Loop, part of Fuuko's plan to Earn Your Happy Ending for every single Negator is to sometimes invoke the activation of their negation-based tragedy, then avert it at the last second, leaving them with the power, but sometimes manifested in different ways than their prior incarnations due to the current versions having a different outlook from Fuuko's efforts. This is best shown with "Unseen", which originally just turned the user invisible when he closed his eyes, but the 101 version can extend this to outright erasing things that could allow him to be detected, like his weight and can even turn his friends invisible due to the phrasing of his rule that lets him turn anything belonging to him invisible too.
  • Juiz' Unjustice lets her "negate justice". It's about as vague as it sounds - when used, it causes her opponent to act in direct opposition to their righteous moral inclinations at that moment (a race of aliens who believe others must die for their survival will instead kill themselves).
  • Rip's Unrepair is initially established to allow him to create wounds that will not heal or regenerate over time. It's later made clear that it stops all forms of repair and self-recovery, including conscious actions taken in the name of recovery - as a result, if one "repairs" with the intention of using it as an attack, it won't be negated. It also means that if Rip tells someone that his death will cancel his power, they can't attack him with intent to 'heal' themselves as a result because that's a form of repairing.
  • Gina's Unchange can stop the state of anything from being changed in any way, with the exception of herself (and Andy speculates it doesn't directly affect other living creatures either). This means that she can create barriers from air by ensuring nothing warps or passes through it, walk on water by preventing it from changing beneath her feet, and perpetually hold her makeup in place. She started out only being able to make her surroundings unchangeable, but expanded it over time to make it more versatile.
  • Andy and Fuuko end up evolving their powers by taking advantage of this: Andy, through understanding his life and soul, can better control his regeneration and Fuuko, through understanding her target, develops the types of 'disasters' Unluck is capable of invoking, leading to their own Combination Attack, Unluck Bullet, where Andy imparts his soul in Parts Bullets that will trigger a stroke of Unluck.
  • The difference in how a Negator ability can manifest and act depending on the individual is best highlighted concerning Unavoidable. Void, a ex-professional boxer, has his version of Unavoidable manifest as negating his opponent's ability to dodge his attacks. His predecessor, Kenji Yokezu, has his version of Unavoidable implied to manifest in the form of negating an item of his choice's ability to avoid him, which he uses to draw the grand prize in street-corner lotteries.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: When Earth's destruction becomes unavoidable, the heroes' new goal becomes to send Fuuko safely through the next loop, to make sure they can get another round against God, and prevent as many of the deaths and tragedies from the previous one as possible in the process. In the 101st loop, she's able to prevent Akira from becoming Unknown, stop Gina from accidentally suffocating her entire town when she first gains Unchange, and stop Void from accidentally killing his opponent when he first gains Unavoidable.
• Shout-Out:
  • Fuuko's favorite manga is To You, From Me. You-Me's cover in the first episode of the anime also resembles the manga's first volume cover.
  • In Episode 6, when Fuuko mispronounces Spoil's name as Sponge, a pixelated image of Spongebob Squarepants is shown on screen.
  • Design-wise, Victor is likely based on Super Saiyan 3 Goku.
  • Upon seeing UMA Burn for the first time, Chikara considers it being similar to a summoned beast from "FF".
  • The Acks' leader who appears in chapter 20 has a design that is clearly based off of Shredder from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
  • Episode 19 begins with a Star Wars opening crawl.
  • Tozuka is a noted fan of fighting games, and he'll let his favorites slip into the manga occasionally:
    • Creed heavily resembles Guile, with his outfit being close to the latter's outfit in Street Fighter II. His hairstyle in the 101st loop makes the resemblence especially clearer.
    • The special move Shen teaches to Mei in his flashback is Yun's Tetsuzankou from Street Fighter III.
    • Void in his prime and at the time of his abilities manifesting heavily resembles Balrog in his Street Fighter V-era outfit. The person he was supposed to face in his title defense match (and the one he kills in most timelines) resembles Ed.
  • Most of the artifacts' names are references to movies or games:
    • The artifact that makes up Rip's legs is called Blade Runner.
    • Anno Un has a soul-transporting artifact called Soulcalibur.
    • Feng has an artifact called Game of Death that can summon dead martial artists as jiangshi
    • The Volume 6 extras dub the time-control artifact Life Is Strange.
    • The batch of quests that gets revealed on chapter 188 include an artifact called Silent Voice.
  • Nico has posters of Deep Purple in his bachelor pad.
  • In Chapter 173, Ichico sings "Let's do the time warp again".
• Shown Their Work: The cover of the issue of Weekly Shounen Jump the young Akira Kuno carries with him matches that of the real issue of Jump which would have come out in real life on that week (covering September 11, 1972).
• Soft Reboot: Chapter 133 onward is essentially an entirely new series, with the primary holdovers from the previous 132 chapters being Fuuko and Andy. Reflective of this being the beginning of the 101st Loop, all the previous characters aside from those two, Sun, Luna, and Apocalypse are dead, their new incarnations existing in the 101st Loop but fundamentally being different characters than their 100th Loop incarnations, best demonstrated with Juiz and her 101st incarnation Julia. While the events of the 100th Loop still occurred and often inform the general characterization of the cast and Fuuko's decisions going forward, the series effectively started over. This is even reflected in the genre of the series, as the first 132 chapters were a sci-fi/fantasy Battle Shonen, focused primarily on progressing the Myth Arc over characterization, whereas chapters 133 and on are a Genre Roulette ranging from Slice of Life to a Medical Drama to even a Tournament Arc, with characterization now taking center stage thanks to the Myth Arc being long established.
• Space Battle: The climax of the battle with UMA Spoil takes place in space, since Spoil's powers don't work well up there. Shen uses his staff to push Andy and Spoil all the way out of Earth's atmosphere.
• Space Is Noisy: During Spoil and Victor's battle, both combatants are able to talk to one another despite being in space. Tozuka in his author comments for the chapter notes the two wouldn't actually be able to hear each other in the vacuum in space.
• Spit Take:
  • Nico's reaction to hearing Fuuko plans to pass 20 more times on Apocalypse's quests, moving them an equivalent number of years into the future. In the end, they skip 26 years.
  • The 101st loop Gina's reaction to seeing the ghost of her previous self in Fuuko's memories.
• The Stars Are Going Out: Inverted in chapter 20, where the blank night sky is suddenly filled with thousands of stars due to UMA Galaxy's creation.
• Superpower Russian Roulette: Some Negators get powerful abilities with essentially no downside once they learn how it works, while others can't control their abilities and are unable to live anything close to a normal life.
• Time Skip: Not uncommon in the series, as there's usually some reason for a skip between a quest being completed and Apocalypse handing out the rewards and penalties, but two particular skips stand out:
  • First there's the beginning of the 101st loop in chapter 132, where the audience returns to the story in 1972, after Fuuko's already spent 170-odd years there since arriving around 1800.
  • Then there's chapter 138, where it's revealed this is one of Apocalypse's powers, which he uses as a penalty if the Roundtable passes on all of his quests by skipping the outside world a year into the future. This is exactly what Fuuko wants, however, as there's an almost 30-year gap between the earliest Negators she knows (Gina, Nico, and Ichico) and the next generation (Billy, Rip, etc.), and she doesn't want to risk losing anyone on a quest in the meantime.
• Time Travel: The Ark can take the Negator with the most points and grant them the ability to loop back around to an earlier starting point of God's choosing. However, it's actually subverted, as what's happening isn't so much time travel as it is resetting the world while the Ark is transported off-planet and reinserted later.
  Victor: Basically, this loop thing will warp you to a newly formed earth, effectively making it a time warp that only goes to the future.
• Title Drop Chapter: Episode 19 is titled "Undead + Unluck", which is the Metafictional Title for the manga Fuuko came up with.
• Tomes of Prophecy and Fate: A certain book is secretly this, indirectly being a telling of events that have happened to, and may happen to, the Union. As it turns out, that book is To You, From Me, Fuuko's favorite shoujo manga.
• Tragic Keepsake: Negations. No, really. Their meaning in the lives of their respective Negators cannot be understated, and they serve as constant reminders of what the user lost in the past, as they tend to manifest right when something important for the user happens - i.e, Rip's surgery on Laila that ended in tragedy as Unrepair manifested right at that moment, meaning the slices he did inside her body couldn't be healed.
• Undercover as Lovers: In order to infiltrate a black market auction, Andy and Fuuko masquerade as a married couple.
• Unique Protagonist Asset: Played with when Fuuko begins to understand Soul Power in the Union's fight with Beast. Separate from events, the First Master Rule has a conversation in which it's revealed that it takes at least two centuries of diligent effort to start to learn the ability, but otherwise almost anyone can do it. The two people who can't are Juiz and Victor, the two who had prior to this point been the leaders of the fight against God. This is because part of what helps Fuuko, and later Haruka and Top, to understand Soul Power is learning to commune with the past users of their respective powers, but Juiz and Victor were first-generation Negators who, for all the time they had from repeating and living through the Loops, respectively, never had predecessors to learn from. In short, Fuuko's becoming leader of the Union and going into the 101st Loop instead of Juiz put her in a position to begin to understand the power that would most likely become a Game Changer when the only other people in a position to do so couldn't.
• Unorthodox Sheathing: Since he's not the best at keeping any of his outfits intact (aside from Clothy, that is), Andy takes advantage of his Healing Factor by using his forearm as the sheath for his unbreakable katana, with the hilt on his metacarpals and the other end sticking out of his elbow.
• Unperson:
  • According to the cover of chapter 21, the Union erased all data of Longing, the town where the battle with UMA Spoil occurred, making it seem like it never existed. The children who survived Spoil's attack were placed in a Union-run orphanage and will be given the chance to either join the organization or return to normal society when they turn 18.
  • In addition, there is a Negator (Anno Un aka Akira Kuno) with that power. And they can't turn it off.
• Unwinnable by Design: Implied. Luna mentions that they made three ultra-powerful artifacts that would help aid the Negators in the final battle against Sun, but even in their strongest showing, only two of them were able to appear and at best stall Sun's assault. Fuuko hypothesizes that they can't win because the third relic never appeared in any of the previous 100 loops (aka 455.52 billion years), and will only manifest in the 101st.
• Waking Up Elsewhere: After the battle against Victor with Fuuko forcing Andy to reawaken before getting swept and knocked out by a flood in the town of Longing, she awakens in The Union's medical room after resting for several days.
• We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties: In Episode 19, Fuuko's brief difficulty of controlling her backpack-equipped mechanical arms has it tearing off Andy's Gag Censor before cutting to a SMPTE screen.
• Weird Moon: A less bizarre example then most, but still noteworthy. The moon in Undead Unluck is always shown to be full, even after the addition of UMA Galaxy. It is later revealed that this is because the Earth doesn’t actually orbit the sun, and that this property, called Revolution, is the 100th penalty.
• Wham Line:
  • As early as chapter 5, we get our first indication that the setting of Undead Unluck has more weirdness to it than just Negation Abilities when Fuuko draws the night sky, and Gina asks about the sparkles she added to the sky around the moon. What follows is the two casually discussing that there is nothing whatsoever in space except the moon and the sun. Other than what Fuuko added to her painting, there are no stars in the sky.
  • What starts off as another UMA hunt takes a drastic turn when Billy says this:
    ...Why don't we just drop a few nukes on them?
• Wham Shot:
  • In chapter 5, Fuuko and Gina discuss the fact that there's nothing in space except the sun and the moon, casually revealing that there's no such thing as stars in the Undead Unluck universe's sky. This is the first obvious sign that there's more to the Undead Unluck universe than meets the eye.
  • After a long fight against the final seasonal UMA, reflection, and affirmation of Fuuko/Andy's relationship, we see an unknown person having stabbed Fuuko through the back.
  • Rip just helped set Andy free from Seal. Both Ruin and Seal start traveling to Union HQ to usher in God. As Andy moves to pursue them, Rip is shown moving and Andy's leg gets cut off. Rip isn't here to help Andy, he needs him to ride the Ark.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 5: With Gina and Fuuko's talk, it's revealed that the world of Undead Unluck is way different from ours, as there are no stars in the sky.
  • The Unbelievable Arc as a whole: Billy is revealed to be the leader of the Under organization that set up the attack on Chikara in the last arc, and Juiz reveals about the loops of the world, her condition as a survivor from past loops and the ultimate mission of the members of the Round Table: to slay God.
  • During Chapter 177, we are informed of the the existence of the Master Rules, UMAs that are always added at the beginning of a loop and never disappear. At the same time, UMA Sick, the tenth rule, starts his attack against the Union.
• What Year Is This?: Played with when Victor makes his first appearance. When Victor first arrives, it's after having been sealed within Andy for several centuries. Unsurprisingly, his first question upon encountering Shen and Fuuko is to ask what day it is. Shen tells him but is left confused when Victor clarifies he isn't interested in the exact date but rather what day of the week it is. This is because "days of the week" were literally not a Thing that existed until shortly after the arc and the release of the UMA "Galaxy", which adds celestial bodies to the world, from which mythology and, by extension, days of the week are derived.
• Wight in a Wedding Dress: In the Spoil Arc, a zombified teacher dons a wedding dress for her impromptu wedding with Andy, something she'd always wanted to wear when she was human.
• Winds of Destiny, Change!: Fuuko's power "Unluck" causes people to suffer serious, usually fatal accidents shortly after making skin-to-skin contact with her. She cannot prevent this and doesn't know exactly what the accident will be, but the type of contact dictates the severity of the accident. Touching her bare chest caused large pieces of rubble to fall off. Tightly hugging her parents made their plane explode on the runway. Kissing Andy on the cheek brought a meteor down on him. After regenerating from that last one, Andy theorizes having sex together would do something even crazier, though she obviously refuses to explore that one.
• World of Muscle Men: The majority of the male characters tend to be conspicuously muscular, with their physiques being obvious even when fully clothed. Ironically, some of them don't even specialize in hand-to-hand combat, but nonetheless avert Muscles Are Meaningless.
• World of Technicolor Hair: Gina and Kururu's hair is pink, Shen's is aqua, Phil's is green, Nico's is greying purple, and Bunny's is blue.
• World Tour: The series has arcs that take place all over the world. Notable landmarks visible in the series so far include Uluru in Australia, the Copacabana sidewalk in Brazil, and Lake Baikal in Russia.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Negators are fated to get their powers even if circumstances surrounding their past change. Fuuko was even willing to prevent Billy from becoming Unfair if it meant averting his betrayal, but he still became a Negator regardless. However, some factors can change concerning their abilities and activation requirements from their original counterparts, such as Sean's Unseen being able to render other people invisible and Billy's activation requirement for Unfair completely changing due to Fuuko's interference.
• You Shall Not Pass!: During Sick's attack, the other members of the Union plus Rip and Laila have to stop him from getting to Fuuko, as she's currently treating Leila in a very complicated surgery.
  • Extreme example with Andy. To stop the Master Rules from interfering with Fuuko's efforts in empowering the Union, he goes to the sun and, for centuries, stops them from leaving unless there's a mission happening, which allows the Union to fight the Rules in a more controlled manner rather than fighting all of them at once. He also has another minor one when he sends a blood clone to help the Union against Sick.

---