Undead Unluck Succeeds In a Genre Often Criticized For Poor Endings

Undead Unluck has officially ended with Chapter 239 in Weekly Shonen Jump. The series ran for 5 years in Jump and will receive Season 2 of its anime adaptation soon, with a 1-hour special already announced for WInter 2025. While running alongside megahits like My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, and of course, One Piece, Undead Unluck still managed to stand out in the magazine and achieve success in an incredibly cutthroat business.

But with the series ending, the inevitable discussion of its quality will come as well. Even the mega-hits mentioned before, who enjoyed heaps of praise while they were running, but whose endings polarized fans across the world. This is not new to Shōnen Jump, or even the Shonen Genre. Attack on Titan, Bleach, and many older series have led to the idea that the Shonen Series often fail to live up to their potential in their endings. So, how does Undead Unluck hold up? Did it manage to stick the landing?

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Was Undead Unluck’s Ending Rushed?

Fans Felt Like the Series Could Have Gone on For Much Longer

It’s difficult to say definitively how to determine if a series is “rushed”. You can infer from what the author has planned out how much they want to include in the story, but it could also just the author making nods to things that sound interesting, without any intention to move forward. Ultimately, any successful story will have its fans asking for more, but a rushed ending often has fans asking if the story did enough.

In the case of Undead Unluck, the reason why some fans might consider it rushed makes sense. There had been growing discussion for months that Undead Unluck may be at risk of being axed from the magazine, and fans felt that it began moving more quickly in response to these rumors. For all the amazing and creative things shown in Undead Unluck’s run, there was definitely still a lot more that felt like they could be shown. Things like:

• More explanations and time with the master rules
• Extending the fights to increase stakes and spectacle
• Make problems harder to solve

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The Master Rules Could Have Used More Time

The Master Rules in Undead Unluck represent one of the coolest aspects of the series. While the fights fans did get to see were cool, they definitely could have benefitted from more time in the story, to build up their threat level and stakes in the final confrontations. It’s one thing to say that villains are powerful, it is another thing to demonstrate that power in the pages. Also, many of the Master Rules abilities we did not get to explicitly see. If there is an argument for the series being rushed, this is one area where extended time could easily be justified.

Not only could the villains benefit from more development time, when they are confronted, the confrontations could be more difficult. Undead Unluck contains a lot of emotional high points, and it’s not that we never fear for our main cast, but sometimes fights do feel that they end prematurely. While they can be taxing for authors to write and illustrate, and longer fights do not necessarily mean better ones, Undead Unluck could have benefitted a lot from extended conflicts.

The Main Cast Needed to Toil Some More

Outside of physical confrontations, though, the solutions to the more emotional or intangible problems could have also used more time. At the end of the story, one of the key ways that the Union overcomes the entities of God and Soul, is that they must rely on The Heart, which is revealed to actually be Fuuko’s heart. The team uses The Heart, and wins the battle, but the cost is that Fuuko loses her memories of Andy and all of her friends.

This could have been a very interesting falling action for the story. Andy promises that he will make Fuuko fall in love with him again, and assures her that they would all still care for her, but the story could have made that process a very emotional journey. Whether that be through flashbacks throughout the years of the story, reframing past events now that characters in the stories have changed, or even “looping” back to chapter 1 to walk Fuuko through her memories again. Much like the aspects mentioned before, there was potential for even more interesting story plots and arcs here, but the manga ended without fleshing them out as much as they could.

If An Ending is Rushed, Can it Still Be Good?

Despite Rushed Feelings, Undead Unluck Manages to Have A Great Ending

Now, even if the argument is that Undead Unluck is rushed, could it still possibly be a good ending? While a rushed ending may leave readers wanting more from the story, that doesn’t mean it is necessarily a failed ending. Every story has more than it can show readers, and more that it can elaborate on, but ultimately, any ending should serve to wrap up the main threads in a story and leave readers with some sense of finality. In the case of Undead Unluck, this ending should feel like a success.

Looking back from chapter 1, all the way until this final chapter, you can see the progress that the characters went through, and how they managed to solve their problems and achieve their dreams. With our main characters Andy and Fuuko, you perhaps couldn’t have asked for a better way to end the story.

Fuuko, who the fans were with from page one, gets to leave off with her happy love story. It might not be the same as Kimi ni Todoke, but she can finally look at her life and say she feels lucky. Andy, who struggled with the reality of being an Undead from the very first chapter, has had this “curse” lifted. But while he originally would have used this opportunity to immediately end things, he is happy spending his life helping people and being with Fuuko, until they can accomplish the “greatest death ever”.

Undead Unluck is currently streaming on Hulu where available. You can also read the Undead Unluck Manga on VIZ’s Shonen Jump App.

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Undead Unluck

Release Date

October 7, 2023

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