How do they really work?
Summary:
- Negators can negate certain rules created by God.
- There are various types of negator abilities.
- These abilities don’t always create an opposite effect.
Undead Unluck is centered around Negators, people with special abilities. The main protagonists, Fuuko and Andy, are also among them. As their name implies, Negators negate something. There is a set of rules created by God, and Negators deny them to make their abilities work.
Types of abilities
There are also different variations of negator abilities: there are self-targeting (the ones Negator can only use on themselves) and external-targeting (can be used on other people) ones.
On top of that, there are various conditions for a power to work. For example, Chikara has the Unmove ability that allows him to prevent his targets from moving. To activate the power Chikara needs to look at his target with both eyes and remain unmoving himself.
When the conditions are met, the power can be activated. But there are some variations here as well. There are abilities that can be activated regardless of the user’s will and those that require the user to want them activated.
Let’s take our main protagonists as an example. Fuuko doesn’t always want her Unluck ability to get activated, but she has no choice: if she touches someone with her bare skin, misfortune is coming.
The same goes for Andy. He doesn’t want to keep living, so he was looking for a way to meet his death at the beginning of the series, but his Undead ability does not allow him to die whether he wants to or not.
They don’t have an opposite effect
Despite the common belief that negator abilities simply perform a 180-degree flip on a rule, it is not entirely true. They do not force the exact opposite of something to occur.
For example, if we take something like Unfast (which is an non-existing ability), it would not imply that the ability would make you move slowly, but rather you would not be moving quickly. But you can still move at a regular pace.
Moreover, abilities can depend on a Negator’s perception of them. There’s a Negator with the Unseen ability. When he perceived it as physically being seen, his only power was to be invisible.
However, “seen” might be a synonym for “being detected” and when the Negator started interpreting it as such, he could become undetected due to his ability. In this way, a Negator can alter their ability based on their own interpretation and make it evolve over time.
Negators usually awaken at some point, that’s why Fuuko didn’t kill her parents right after she was born, but it took some time for the ability to start working.