Characters / Danganronpa — Junko Enoshima

Danganronpa | Main Character Index
Monokuma
Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc | Male Students (Makoto Naegi | Byakuya Togami) | Female Students (Kyoko Kirigiri | Toko Fukawa | Celestia Ludenberg | Junko Enoshima)
Danganronpa Zero
Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair | Male Students (Hajime Hinata | Nagito Komaeda) | Female Students (Peko Pekoyama)
Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls
Killer Killer
Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School | Future Arc | Despair Arc
Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony | Male Students (Kokichi Oma) | Female Students (Miu Iruma)

Junko Enoshima

Warning: Unmarked spoilers for the Danganronpa franchise

Ultimate Despair (Ultimate Fashionista/Ultimate Analyst^note her true talent)

"For me, despair is not a goal, or a set of principles, or a lifestyle, or even an instinct... It's what defines me as Junko Enoshima! It's just my characterization! That's why I'm able to pursue despair with such purity!"

Voiced by: Megumi Toyoguchi (Japanese), Amanda Céline Miller and Erin Fitzgerald (English), Jamie Marchi (anime - English)

Played by: Sayaka Kanda (stage plays)

Appearances: Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Danganronpa Zero, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, Killer Killer, Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School

Junko Enoshima is the main antagonist of the Danganronpa franchise. Junko was originally believed to be the Ultimate Fashionista of Hope's Peak Academy's Class 78, but her true talent is being the Ultimate Analyst; the person who took Junko's place was her sister Mukuro Ikusaba. Junko's analytical abilities led her to believe that Good Is Boring, sparking her despair obsession several years before she was scouted into the academy.

Aside from forcing most of Class 77 into becoming a Brainwashed and Crazy terrorist group called Ultimate Despair, Junko also masterminded the events which led to the Tragedy, leading to billions of deaths. After the End, she ruled the world's remains, with Monokuma serving as her public persona. Being voted guilty during the final class trial in Trigger Happy Havoc, Junko gleefully committed suicide by executing herself. From that point on, the Future Foundation is left to clean up the colossal mess made by her and Ultimate Despair.

While Junko is outwardly a Large Ham, she's inwardly a Misanthrope Supreme who believes that humanity is naturally inclined towards despair. Her Goal in Life is to drive all of humanity past the Despair Event Horizon to prove her point. Junko thus has No Sympathy towards anyone, and will kill even her own allies out of a twisted desire to bring about as much despair as possible. This leads to a lack of impulse control, and being blind to the nature of humanity and The Power of Friendship as possible means to defeat her.

For Tropes pertaining to her in individual works, see the folders below. Beware of massive spoilers.

For Tropes about Ryōko Otonashi, see Danganronpa Zero.

To hear Junko herself talk about these tropes, check out her self-demonstrating page.

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In General

• Abstract Apotheosis: Junko's "Ultimate Despair" is treated less like her Talent, aside it not being her real Talent, but as her identity with the concept of Despair and vice versa, which she tries to spread to humanity. Even her death doesn't stop the formation of cults around her ideology.
• Allergic to Routine: Because of her real talent as the "Ultimate Analytical Prowess", everything around her became predictable and she became apathetic to how boring the world is to her. This is why she's obsessed with despair, as she believes it's the only thing in life that excites her, due to it being unpredictable.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • Besides to humanity in general, she's also this to Makoto Naegi, Nagito Komaeda, and Izuru Kamukura.
  • Also strong implications she's this to Kyoko as during Chapter 5, she sets up Mukuro's murder to cause her to be accused as the culprit.
• Armor-Piercing Response: Any time someone asks her why she does what she does (either in-person or as Monokuma), her answer will always be something about "despair."
  Despair is contagious, you know. It's almost like... a natural phenomenon. Everyone is capable of it. And now, the entire world has fallen into despair.
• Attention Whore: It's suggested in her hammy narcissism that she wants people to pay attention to how great she is, both in intellect and physical beauty, by any means necessary, including starting the apocalypse and leaving behind a legacy of villainy so she can make her mark on human history.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Danganronpa Zero reveals her true talent to be her analytical mind, which allows her to easily pick up new skills and predict future events. Because of this, everything became predictable to her and she became quickly apathetic to how boring life can be. Despair was the one thing contradictory and random enough to hold her attention.
• Ax-Crazy: Her passion and life's goal is forcing despair onto others, making Genocide Jack look sane in comparison. She switches between personalities out of boredom. And she's incredibly violent and impulsive because of her obsession with despair. Nothing in this girl's head suggests any semblance of being mentally sound.
• Bad Boss: Even people who worship and have devoted themselves to her aren't safe from her. Junko belittles her sister Mukuro whenever she can, and kills her (or tries to kills her in IF) even though Mukuro was doing exactly what Junko told her to do. She also took pride on being the "better" twin during the final class trial in Trigger Happy Havoc by claiming to have surpassed her sister in every way... all while insulting Mukuro's accomplishments. It's also suggested that while Junko genuinely did love her sister, Junko killed Mukuro because it would mean feeling the rush of despair from a loved one's death.
• The Bad Guy Wins: She wanted to feel the ultimate despair, and she got it. In fact, by Junko's own description of her philosophy, she technically can't lose. If she succeeds in her plans, the entire world is plunged into despair; if she fails, she gets to experience the despair of having her plans come crashing down around her. Both of which end up happening. Even though Junko dies at the end of the first game via self-inflicted punishment, she dies having gotten everything she wanted. It takes the entire series before things start to clear up for the good guys with a "Ray of Hope" Ending.
• Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: She loves despair and hates hope. It's made clear when she calls the first peaceful and happy year the class spent together at Hope's Peak "the worst school life ever!" When she's voted to be executed, she's ecstatic because she gets to experience one of the ultimate forms of despair: having your evil plan to plunge humanity's survivors completely into despair backfire right as you were about to succeed, and then dying an incredibly cruel death too.
• Barbaric Bully: Invoked, in a more traditional yet quite horrific sense. Junko takes legitimate pleasure in making people's lives terrible for no other reason than personal gain, with no real good intentions to back it up, and she just happens to also be a high school student, the type of character that is usually depicted as a bully.
• Batman Gambit: Her forte being Flaw Exploitation, naturally, this is Junko's preferred gambit type. She expects people to react the way they do upon analyzing their character, and then formulates a devious plot entirely based around what she concludes from it. Most of this is even used to lure the Killing School Life survivors into the Neo World Program in 2 as she specifically makes the Ultimate Despairs' murders reflect the Killing School Life murders.
• Beauty Is Bad: She's attractive, to the point she made herself a career being a top fashion model, but is one of the most despicable people in the franchise.
• Big Bad: She's the mastermind of the Tragedy and the spread of despair across the world, and the Evil Overlord of the post-Tragedy world and the mastermind behind the killing games. The primary goal of the saga's protagonists is to defeat her and prove that the rest of humanity doesn't yearn for despair like she does. Her suicide doesn't stop her, as she posthumously continues to serve as the Greater-Scope Villain and Predecessor Villain all the way up until Side:Hope.
• Big-Breast Pride: She's quite aware of the appeal of her busty figure and flaunts it when she can. Especially in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair when she becomes a digital Giant Woman and her chest becomes even more prominent, leading her to make gags about it and even coyly threatens to kill Kazuichi by squishing him between her breasts.
  Junko: I see, I see... An estimated bust size of fifteen meters, huh? My boobs are hopelessly huge...
• Blessed with Suck: Her real talent is much of the reason she's such a disturbing person overall. Her ability to predict everything made the world boring for her, and she became obsessed with despair because it's unpredictable even for her.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Due to her ability to predict everything around her, Junko's morality is skewed compared to that of a normal person. Instead of having a balance between feelings of hope and despair, the only thing she can feel is despair. At the same time, however, she claims that she is able to love people, which is a total contradiction of the aforementioned, making her ideology sound utterly nonsensical. By the time of her reveal in the finale, everyone is understandably perplexed by how one person can think in such an odd way and not realize why it's wrong, and they also fail to understand it because of how little sense it really makes.
• Break Them by Talking: She's able to drown others in despair with words alone. Too bad for her that people like Makoto and Komaru Naegi are able to break through the despair that Junko wants to inflict by being Hope Bringers.
• Bright Is Not Good: She has light hair, and is one of the most outright evil characters seen in an anime or visual novel.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: As expected from a top fashion model, she has a well-endowed figure, which is noted by several characters across the games and is a focus of Male Gaze shots whenever she shows up. Toko in Ultra Despair Girls in particular seems to focus on Junko's large breasts whenever she comes up (likely due to Toko's A-Cup Angst issues), even describing Junko as a "big-chested despair goddess".
• The Caligula: A rather unstable Shadow Dictator who has effectively destroyed at least a good chunk of society out of an obsession with causing as much despair as possible. Unlike most examples however, Junko's insanity makes her very competent in doing what she does; she is capable of staging well-executed schemes to make sure she unleashes the Tragedy without much opposition, and by the definition of her plan, she can't fail at it.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Junko's entire character is being one of these, as someone who revolves entirely around spreading despair and thinking nothing of it. If anything, Junko is annoyed that her victims don't become despair addicts like she is, and she is aware that despair is bad. This is why she is an iconic example of The Corrupter, because doing that is precisely her aim.
• The Charmer: She recruited the Warriors of Hope to help her in Ultra Despair Girls by being nice to them and telling them what they wanted to hear by using her natural charm, even if her niceness was all an act. It still got them to try and do terrible things to Komaru and Toko because "Big Sis Junko" told them to.
• The Chessmaster:
  • It's initially hard to believe that Junko is one of the smartest characters in the Danganronpa franchise. Episode 7 of the anime unveils that the Tragedy of Hope's Peak Academy, Izuru's participation in it, and the Parade were all part of a three-step plan that was just another cog in her scheme.
  • She didn't create the Killing School Trip just to kill off her subordinates all at once and usurp their bodies. She also did it to lure Makoto, Kyoko, and Byakuya into the program by using the threat of the Ultimate Despairs' killing game against them, taking advantage of the mortality risk to kick in their "fight or flight" instinct, and she expected them to fight, which they did. This would also serve as her vengeance for them killing her real self beforehand.
• Chewing the Scenery: Subtle is not in Junko's dictionary.
• Classic Villain: As the Big Bad of the franchise with the Central Theme of "Hope VS Despair" and the one responsible for civillization's collapse, she is a living embodiment of Despair, while The Hero opposing her is the Hope Bringer. She is properly introduced only in the final chapter where she is defeated, and her outfit is stylized after the Mascot Villain.
• Combat Sadomasochist: A despair obsessor who ravishes in the pain that she brings unto herself and others both.
• Concepts Are Cheap: She'll litter any sentence she says with "despair" in one way or another, though that's mostly to make her ideology seem more straightforward than it actually is.
• The Corrupter:
  • Junko's frighteningly good at bringing out the worst in others. This partially leads to Makoto refusing to lay blame on his friends due to his belief they're basically good people who have been placed in a horrible and violent situation.
  • This is one of her most terrifying abilities, and it gets even worse after she gets the hang of Ryota's brainwashing techniques.
  • Junko specifically tries to invoke this with Kamukura, attempting to woo him over to despair. He does cooperate with her for a time to see if despair is really as interesting as she tries to sell it.
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • Subverted. Due to her Awesomeness by Analysis skills, she's prepared for everything... except for whatever leads up to her defeats. Usually, this is because her Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad philosophy and obsession with crushing as much hope as she can blind Junko to human nature and The Power of Friendship overcoming her plans when she tries to Break Them by Talking. In the first game in particular, she was so sure that she could Break Them by Talking that she hadn't counted on Makoto becoming the Ultimate Hope and talking everyone out of it.
  • On the other hand, this is also Played Straight when she devises an AI copy of herself so she can exist as an artificial intelligence in case her real self dies, and due to the... various weaknesses of technology in the world of Danganronpa, she would be able to manipulate any system to her advantage, including the Neo World Program in 2, to suit her needs and continue spreading despair to others while remaining Nigh-Invulnerable.
  • Her AI counterpart reveals that she had collected data on Class 77-B and knows everything about them, something of which she cruelly uses to taunt Fuyuhiko in the final trial.
• Creepy Blue Eyes: Her deranged blue eyes are part of her disturbing presence.
• Cute and Psycho: She looks like a pretty and fashionable girl, and says people have called her as cute as 100 chihuahuas. Her mental state? Not so much; she's a completely unstable despot who wants to destroy the world and plunge it into despair For the Evulz.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Implied. Junko is strongly implied by Mukuro to have had a bad past, but it's never elaborated on other than the fact they were both homeless at one point and that it was bad enough that Junko found the very act of being born to be despairing.
• Dark Is Evil: Junko actively seeks to cause the deepest despair — an emotional state associated with black throughout the series — for the entire cast, no matter their age (i.e. Kazuo Tengan, the Warriors of Hope), and is willing to become an unrestrained terrorist, an executioner, a brainwasher, an AI program, and an extreme psychological manipulator to achieve that goal.
• Dark Messiah: When she puts forth her ideas about despair's superiority over hope, she gains a legion of followers, up to and including anyone with the power to stop her. She was quite systematic about this, as Junko inspired a lot of others to pick up the torch after she died. For all the problems she brought to the world, The phrasings of these followers imply that they believe forcing people to give into despair was an improvement in the long run. Junko herself, however, shuts this down as an even remotely-solid ideology by saying she did it all without reason or purpose beyond just hurting people. Danganronpa 3 confirms that she desires to stave off the boredom caused by her Ultimate talent by inflicting despair, and that's all.
• Depraved Bisexual: As Monokuma, she frequently made lewd comments about her classmates regardless of sex and talked about spying on them. How legitimate this is is ultimately dependent on how much of the Monokuma personality is an act or not.
• Despair Event Horizon: Claims to have been born on the other side of it, and her goal is to drive all of humanity past it as well. She is essentially a living embodiment of the famous phrase, "All it takes is one bad day to drive the sanest person alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day."
• Despair Gambit: Her modus operandi, obviously. Junko just loves to weaken people by driving them beyond the Despair Event Horizon so they can feel what she feels throughout her personal life. It's her identifying trait, no doubts about that.
• Dirty Coward: For all of her talk of enjoying feeling despair, Junko is deep down a coward who doesn't like losing. At the end of 1 and 2, she quickly backs down as soon as Makoto turns the Class 78th students against her and Hajime gains his awakened form, no longer having control over the situation.
• Dystopia Justifies the Means: Her main counterargument and one of the most recognizable examples of this trope, Junko wholeheartedly believes that spreading her despair around so other people can "experience it before they're disappointed by hope" justifies destroying the whole world and killing masses of people just to set up a killing game for her classmates out of a twisted love.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: She's evil alright, but her classmates got along well with her before the Tragedy. Yasuke, Mukuro, and Monaca also cared about her.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Unlike most examples, this aspect of Junko's character is used to make her even viler.
  • When her love for despair and her love for her loved ones coincide, people like Mukuro and Yasuke end up murdered.
  • She got along with all of her classmates prior to the Tragedy. The final trial of Trigger Happy Havoc and the end of Zero reveals that she truly loved them all of them back, driving her to share despair with them as an expression of that love.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Ironically for someone who turned to despair as the one thing she couldn't predict, the only times Junko is surprised are when someone overcomes their despair and carries on anyway; Monokuma makes it clear that he wasn't expecting Chihiro to decide to reveal their dark secret on their own, and the only time Junko drops the crazy acting in the final chapter is when Makoto has his Heroic Second Wind and Kyoko supports him.
• Evil Is Hammy: She's a Card-Carrying Villain and all of her mannerisms are over-the-top. She even puts on a show during the final trial of Trigger Happy Havoc by switching through various types of personalities.
• Evil Twin: Though only by comparison, Mukuro, her twin sister and co-founder of Ultimate Despair, is A Lighter Shade of Black when compared to Junko herself, as Mukuro follows Junko's desire for evil out of loyalty, and has the will to at least treat other people normally when she wants to. Junko is unrestrained and is a genuinely hopeless Misanthrope Supreme who has no issues killing off anyone regardless of how loyal they are to her.
• Evil Virtues: Despite claiming to be defined by despair, she has quite a few traits normally associated with hope, like a tenacious devotion to her cause. Since she sees spreading despair as an act of love, she could even be described as a twisted altruist in her own mind.
• Evil Wears Black: She sports black in most of her appearances, and she lives up to the "Evil" part.
• Excellent Judge of Character: Due to her Ultimate Analyst talent, with the caveat that she is unable to predict any action motivated by hope or a person overcoming their character flaws. The only time she doesn't predict something not hope related is when Sayaka tried to kill Leon; she wasn't expecting anyone to snap that easily and thought she'd have to force Sakura to murder someone. In the anime, she is quickly able to predict that Juzo Sakakura is insecure over his feelings for Munakata and will fold like a wet paper towel if they are used as blackmail, and that Ryota is too cowardly to oppose her even when she deliberately lets him go.
• Face Death with Dignity: She's all smiles when she's about to be executed, because she feels the despair of having her plans ruined. She even pushes the "Punishment" button herself.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: She's a famous fashionista, and one of the most beautiful women in the world. But she's also a despair-inducing monster and a crazed evil mastermind who almost destroyed the world.
• Faking the Dead: In Trigger Happy Havoc, she convinced her classmates that she was dead by murdering her twin sister Mukuru, who was dressed up and acted like Junko.
• The Fashionista: She was scouted by Hope's Peak Academy as the Super High School Level Gyaru/Fashionista, known for her wild and innovative designs, which she's modeled in dozens of magazines and photo shoots seen at the start of Trigger Happy Havoc. Ultimately subverted, though. Junko is the Ultimate Fashionista, but it's more of an Informed Ability, since this talent never shows itself onscreen. Instead, she's the Ultimate Analyst, and the Fashionista bit was a cover. It serves as an early hint at her uncanny ability to manipulate people by understanding their wants and desires.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Lust. Her obsession with indulging in despair at all costs, even at the expense of her own plans, means that she has terrible impulse control and long-term planning skills, despite her analytical prowess. If it indulges her obsession, even for a moment, Junko can't resist giving in and showing her hand.
  • Pride. Junko believes in her own perfection as much as she does the perfection of despair, but she also believes that she's invincible because of this perception. This also means that she's willing to self-sabotage because she believes she can get away with it, and overestimates her abilities. These claims hold up, but the real issue is that she gets many enemies as a result and doesn't seem to care; it also means that, if she's ever disproven of her ideology, she cowers in fear because she thinks that she's a completely flawless individual.
  • Her belief that Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad is used against her in Trigger Happy Havoc, as Makoto turns the argument around on Junko and convinces the other students to not give into despair by embracing hope. While Junko is initially cross at losing, she's so giddy at feeling the despair of a Villainous Breakdown that she offs herself rather than try and escape.
  • Junko kills both her own sister and her own boyfriend, each time on a whim, because it means that she feels despair when they die. Considering that these were two of her only genuine allies, it shoots her plans in the foot. But Junko doesn't care because she gets to feel the rush of despair for a few moments.
• Faux Affably Evil: Her usual personality is that of a relentless and manipulative tyrant desiring for a dystopian world where everyone feels the negativity that she does. However, she doesn't seem to take emotional pride in being that sadistic, and she sounds characteristically acceptable... maybe even charismatic. Mukuro and Yasuke are infatuated by her ability to stay so easygoing even as she casually plotted the destruction of normal human livelihood. However, underneath that is a hedonistic and self-centered hypocrite who killed her sister, her boyfriend, one of her school's sweetest students, and countless others.
• First-Name Basis: Only Mukuro calls her "Junko" with no honorifics. The Warriors of Hope refer to her as "Big Sis Junko", and everyone else calls her by her last name, Enoshima.
• Flaw Exploitation: Her specialty is using her Awesomeness by Analysis skills to get a read on motive, then create situations where their flaws can be exploited up to a point where they break down.
  • All the first game's motives are based around exploiting others' mental weaknesses; Sayaka's abandonment issues, Mondo's temper and guilt over Daiya's death, Celestia's materialism (and her grand, unrealistic dreams), Togami's trust issues, Aoi trusting too much, and Kyoko's isolation.
  • One reason she chose Hope's Peak Academy to begin her plans (aside from easy access to the cutting-edge innovations she'd need) is because she knew that the leadership were so enamored with talent that they'd let her get away with murder in order to further analyze it, and so concerned with their image that they'd cover up whatever atrocities she couldn't hide herself.
  • Ryota's cowardice means that Junko is easily able to get ahold of his brainwashing anime by having Mukuro intimidate him, and she doesn't even need to silence him afterwards because he's too scared to tell anyone. She even gives him a Breaking Speech that sums up to 'you know I'm going to horribly abuse this, but you won't stop me because that would mean doing something.'
  • She blackmails Juzo into submission by threatening to reveal his crush on Munakata; Juzo is so worried about how Munakata would take it that he folds immediately.
  • She gets Chisa brainwashed by taking advantage of her recklessness and care for her students, by using Mikan as bait to lure her into a trap.
• For the Evulz: This is Junko's motive for everything she does and says. She wants to plunge the world into chaos, become a Hope Crusher, and see to it that everyone on the planet is suffering, all because she really likes despair. And inflicting despair alleviates her boredom.She's even asked why she's doing such terrible things by the cast members, and Junko's answers always boil down to "just because".
  • In the first game, Junko kills her own sister Mukuro on a whim, with no justification other than "just think about how despair-inducing it would be!" In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc IF, Junko fails in the attempt, which causes a Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal from Mukuro. In either case, doing this shoots her plans in the foot, but it doesn't matter to Junko, since she feels the despair of her sister's death for a moment.
  • Junko gets an In-Universe Misaimed Fandom from the Warriors of Hope. While Junko treated them better than their parents ever did, it was all a lie to use them to spread despair. The Warriors of Hope make Junko out to be a Dark Messiah, when she's really a horrible Manipulative Bitch who exploited them all.
• Genki Girl: A villainous example. While she is totally an Ax-Crazy woman, she carries a sense of gleeful energy with her that doesn't seem to be an act. However, this also makes her all the more unpredictable, as she can shift out of this attitude at any point and suddenly turn to murderous rage.
• Girlish Pigtails: They gives Junko an appearance of false innocence, which plays into how she seems to be nothing more than a famous fashionista. If anything, it all subtly hints at how she's a Psychopathic Womanchild of a Hope Crusher.
• A God Am I: She calls herself "the avatar of divine punishment" in the final trial of Trigger Happy Havoc, and in Goodbye Despair she (as Monokuma) describes the actions of her Ultimate Despair minions as "offerings to their god".
• Good Is Boring: Due to her analytical talent, she became bored of the world and grew to love despair because she felt it was unpredictable.
• Go Out with a Smile: She smiles throughout the majority of her execution. Unlike most examples, this is actually rather creepy.
• Greater-Scope Villain: For the rest of the Danganronpa franchise after Trigger Happy Havoc, with the only exceptions being prequels where she's still alive and actively influencing events. In some way, shape, or form, she is responsible for nearly everything.
• Gyaru Girl: Her talent in Japanese is the "Super High-School Level Gyaru", localized as "Ultimate Fashionista". Her outfit and appearance take cues from several styles of gyaru, like the super-short skirt (commonly used in kogal style), the high-heeled boots, the long and polished nails, and the color contrast between black and white. It's even implied that she bleaches her hair blonde, since her amnesiac alias, Ryoko Otonashi, has dark red hair instead.
• Hated by All: As to be expected from an impulsive Misanthrope Supreme, pretty much everyone in the franchise dislikes her, including her own underlings post-redemption following her permanent death in Goodbye Despair. This includes Makoto Naegi himself. Pretty much everyone in the series believes that Junko is too far off the deep end to deserve nothing but defeat, and they'd be right on that part thanks to her wanting to create a despair-filled dystopia out of human society solely For the Evulz and completely lacking any sort of restraint in this goal. A single line from Makoto just before her (first) death suggests that he believes in otherwise, but that's about the only moment in which someone suggests otherwise, as Makoto seems to agree with the other characters regarding their beliefs in her irredeemability, his arguments against her during her Motive Rant being clear evidence of this.
• The Heavy: Despite executing herself^note Junko's appearances in Danganronpa Zero and Danganronpa 3: Despair Arc being the result of both entries being prequels, Junko's influence and legacy are ultimately the driving forces behind every installment's major conflicts.
• The Hedonist: She wants to inflict despair at all costs, and feeling the rush of despair for even a moment supercedes all of her plans. She kills her sister Mukuro in the first game to feel the despair of her death, even though Mukuro was doing exactly what Junko told her to do, which ends up ultimately costing Junko the win.
• Her Own Worst Enemy: And proud of it. Junko's a smart enough mastermind to realize when something (such as executing Mukuro and allowing Makoto to join the killing game) will make her life harder... and enough of a crazed despair-nut to do it anyway because she likes the idea of losing it all on the cusp of victory.
• Hidden Depths:
  • In Danganronpa Zero, it's inferred that aside from the memory problems, Ryōko is essentially what Junko would have been like if she didn't have an unquenchable desire for despair.
  • Additionally, while she's still incredibly messed up, Junko doesn't switch rapidly between personalities in the chapters set in her perspective. This implies Sanity Slippage had done a number on her mental state long before the final class trial in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.
• Hobbes Was Right: Believes despair is an inherent thing within all humans. She's not exactly wrong, but she misses the value of The Power of Friendship and the tendency for people to stick together in times of darkness.
• Hope Crusher: Her personality in a nutshell, as she seeks only to bring about perpetual despair. If she finds out about even a sliver of hope, expect for her to go to every length she can to mercilessly crush it.
• Insufferable Genius: Her ego is enormous, but she also possesses one of the greatest minds in the entire franchise (hiding her identity as the mastermind behind an astronomically complex Evil Plan while surrounded by the greatest teen geniuses on the planet being a telling example). The prideful way she carries herself like a movie star on the red carpet may be one of the biggest reasons she has a considerable fanbase.
• Instant Expert: Besides allowing her to predict future events, her talent allows her to learn other talents in a short amount of time.
• It's All About Me: If it wasn't already obvious, Junko only cares for herself, her own life, her own goals, and most of all, her own desire for short-term gratification, having no empathy or sympathy for anyone and constantly mistreating people thanks to her grandiose levels of pride. Even in terms of Class 78th, she outright admits she only kept them alive so she could use them, even if her love for them is sincere according to Kodaka.
• I Work Alone: Thanks to her pride as the Ultimate Despair, she does all of her despair work mostly by herself, and anyone unfortunate to work with her as a patsy is usually killed off. As a result of this, she ends up Dying Alone in both of her deaths.
• Jerkass: Junko has no redeeming qualities beyond being Laughably Evil as she is nothing but a despair-seeking psychopath who bullies everyone around her into submission and plots the apocalypse alongside all of the killing games for personal amusement, while also embracing her evil ideologies, and using "despair is natural" as an excuse for it all.
• Jerk Justifications: Yep, it's despair, or more specifically, despair being something everyone is capable of having. Expect Junko to always try to justify herself by saying that despair is a natural thing in all humans, even though she's forcing it onto others herself; it's basically her only defense, and even then, it's incredibly weak.
• Kick the Dog: Just like her avatar, Monokuma, she likes to constantly rub people's misfortunes in their faces just because she thinks it's funny.
• Lack of Empathy: Being a person who spreads nothing but despair and sees humans as pawns, Junko is the essential embodiment of apathy, so much so that she can spread it to others alongside her despair by just being herself. To say she does not care what happens to her victims is putting it lightly, as she doesn't really care at all, since all that matters to her is satiating her strong desire for despair.
• Lack of Imagination: Downplayed (she's clearly creative in her fashion career), but her plans generally rely on someone else coming up with the super-tech she needs to implement them (Monokuma and Alter Ego Junko are based on Chihiro's AI research, the Laser-Guided Amnesia she uses is from Yasuke, and the brainwashing is Ryota's creation) and then using her analysis talent to copy it for her own use.
• Laughably Evil: Her constant personality switching and the fact that all of them are hilarious would make it really hard to take her seriously if she wasn't completely vile.
• Light Is Not Good: She is a brightly colored blonde girl who looks relatively innocent and earned a reputation through her features, but is a psychopathic, nihilistic, and egocentric despot who wants to destroy the world for fun and only sees humans as pawns.
• Love Makes You Crazy: Combined with Love Makes You Evil, which is also downplayed as she isn't completely motivated by said "love" and does things For the Evulz, but according to her declaration in her debut chapter that her love for her classmates is why she drove them to despair, it can also be attributed that it's also why she started The Tragedy: so she could give her classmates a taste of despair. This is also why she killed Mukuro, for the exact same reason.
• Mad Love: Junko, in her own twisted way, feels familial, platonic, and romantic love for her sister, her classmates, and Yasuke Matsuda, all being people she ropes into her plans intentionally and personally. However, her idea of showing her love is to drop them straight into the depths of despair.
• Meaningful Appearance: Befitting her role as Monokuma's puppeteer, Junko has Monokuma-themed hairclips—one white and one black.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The Jun in Junko is one of the halves of the word "mujun", meaning "contradiction". Her older twin takes the first half.
  • "Enoshima" is an island that is dedicated to the Buddhist goddess of entertainment. Rather fitting for someone who is purely seeking entertainment.
• Mood-Swinger: Junko's personality and her voice changes depending on her current mood. She says she gets bored playing the same character all the time. When Kyoko suggested the mastermind was emotionally unstable, she wasn't kidding. After she reveals herself, she can switch from incredibly posh, to totally stoic, to completely resigned, to loud and boisterous, to acting like Monokuma... oh, and Junko can do all of this between sentences.
• Motive Rant: She pretty much always does one of these whenever she gets an opening to do so, abusing a paraphrase of "despair is the only thing this world needs" in one way or another. The same applies to anyone copying her too.
• Motor Mouth: Once she starts talking, good luck getting her to stop.
• Ms. Fanservice: Evil as she may be, she didn't get her status as the Ultimate Fashionista for nothing.
• Mysterious Past: How she got this way is never explained, and later material is highly vague about any details bar a few. It doesn't help that any person who could explain her past is dead, not entirely reliable themselves, or both. The closest we get is Yasuke in Zero remembering Junko as a childhood friend of his.
• Narcissist: A self-absorbed, vain, and capricious maniac who more or less destroyed the world simply because she found it boring, and found her despair-worshipping anarchy more fun. While she is capable of love, as shown by her willingly killing her sister on a whim to feel the despair of losing her, she has absolutely no concern for any relationship that is not entirely focused on her, and her quirks are all meant to be as attention-grabbing as possible; at one point she even tries to reprogram the entire planet into copies of herself to enjoy.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Has a fetish for despair, with Kyoko even literally referring to it as "some kind of fetish." This includes her own despair, as when Junko realizes that she's lost and that she's going to die, her face looks almost orgasmic.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Sort of like an Evil Counterpart to Makoto being the Non-Action Guy that he is.
• Nothing Nice About Sugar and Spice: She's a fashionable and excitable teenage girl with a buoyant demeanor, an affinity for stuffed bears, and (in the English dub of the anime) a Valley Girl accent. She's also a mass-murdering lunatic who will abuse and torment as many people as she has to in order to spread the gospel of despair while taking great pleasure in doing so.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Implied. Junko perceives herself as some sort of "savior" by trying to get people to "face despair before they're disappointed by hope", and seemingly thinks that she is doing something good by saving the world from disappointing itself completely, possessing a very nihilistic viewpoint of humanity. That would be more apparent if she didn't resort to constant mass murdering and favorable manipulation of events with no way for her victims to hope to escape her grasp in the first place. She also claims that she kills and abuses her loved ones because she wants to allow them to empathize with the despair she's felt her whole life, but the sincere apathy she demonstrates towards their lives shows that her love is superficial, and only wants to force her idea of that love onto others; that unfortunate sense of apathy she has prevents her from understanding what love actually is.
  Junko: Despair is as contagious as any disease; any hope left turns to despair. [...] They were a relentless bunch, refusing to give up hope and trying to force their beliefs on the world. [...] Say what you want about hope, but we're all creatures of instinct, right? Despair comes naturally!
• Obviously Evil: Not in regards to appearance, but in regards to behavior, Junko is embodied by her sheer lack of compassion or empathy for everyone around her, and constantly mistreats other people because of her big ego, which is quite a clear hint that she's not a good person, even before the Tragedy occurs. Of course, no one notices her behavior, and as a result, she is given free rein to start the apocalypse that sets the backstory for the first game in the series.
• Person of Mass Destruction: She engineers The End of the World as We Know It through sheer tenacity (with IF even implying through Mukuro's narration that her absolute desire to cause despair qualifies as a superpower). In the last trial, Kyoko has tremendous difficulty believing she could be capable of so much without a group backing her, and she answers that all it took was humanity's own inherent despair. Even so, she still finds herself unable to fully comprehend the terrifying scale of her influence. Hajime and the others also have difficulty believing in her plot to infinitely create clones of herself using the brain-dead bodies of her Ultimate Despair organization in the Neo World Program as part of a plan to Take Over the World.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: She has no problem threatening to out a homosexual man.
• Power Copying: Well, a sort of knockoff talent-copying, at least, given that Ultimate Talents are basically superpowers. Her Ultimate Analyst talent means she can perfectly understand and copy things stemming from other talents, and even perfect them- for example, the memory treatment Yasuke used on her in 0 requires constant reapplication, but the version she uses on her classmates is a one-and-done affair.
• Practically Joker: Junko is a manipulative mastermind who firmly believes in despair's inescapability and goes out of her way to squash all hope she detects... along with being eleven shades of Ax-Crazy. In addition, she also has a few traits shared with the actual Joker; a Mysterious Past where it is unknown exactly what made her obsessed with despair, a Masochism Tango with her twin sister Mukuro Ikusaba that mirrors his relationship with Harley Quinn, and similar to what the Joker's Injustice counterpart did to Superman, she indirectly and gradually manipulates Kyosuke Munakata into becoming no different from her by brainwashing Chisa.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: As dangerously intelligent as she is, her beliefs are simplistic, her speech is littered with hypocrisies, her mannerisms are wild and attention-grabbing, and she absolutely despises being argued with.
• Psycho Pink: Her strawberry blonde hair has shades of pink in it and she's an unstable villainess.
• Psychotic Smirk: One of her new sprites that came with Goodbye Despair, which fits with how deranged she is.
• Put Them All Out of My Misery: Blatantly not a sympathetic example, of course. Being born on the other end of the Despair Event Horizon, one can assume Junko has great feelings of misery, AKA despair, which is what allows her to "pursue it with purity", as she claims. However, because she can only feel despair and thinks that any sort of positive emotion is a bad thing for humanity to experience — as she allegedly sees everything as meaningless — she terrorizes the entire world population with intent of crushing their hope until there's none left (including the surviving Class 78th in the first game) and making them feel despair to the extent that she does.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Both Junko and Monokuma have red and black in their color palette, fittingly representing how evil they really are, and even then, the color palette still doesn't capture the full extent it reaches.
• Red Baron: Her "Ultimate Despair" title, which is her real title (or much rather her second cover title because she's actually the Ultimate Analyst), is basically her version of Names to Run Away from Really Fast considering "Junko Enoshima" sounds relatively innocent, not that it reflects who she is.
• Religion of Evil: The way in which she convinces people to follow the path of despair could be interpreted as a cult. The sequel explicitly describes the horrific actions of her followers as offerings to their god—which is said by Monokuma, of course, meaning that Junko herself sees it this way.
• Rich Boredom: Her cover identity is that of a famous fashionista who is admired for being beautiful and was even accepted into the prestigious (albeit deceptive) Hope's Peak Academy without any problems. This wasn't enough for her, obviously, because she destroys the world out of her sheer boredom while claiming it's due to her love for her classmates.
• Satanic Archetype: The ultimate antithesis of hope, Junko orchestrates the events that lead to the Tragedy, which tosses the world into chaotic disarray. She is a wicked manipulator whose words can drive people either to madness or blind allegiance to her. In Goodbye Despair, it is revealed that Ultimate Despair—a cultish terrorist group dedicated to her—mutilated themselves and her corpse.
• Sealed Evil in a Teddy Bear: She's the mastermind behind Monokuma, whom she controls and talks through. She's also scarier than her robot avatar, and things just get worse as she keeps on talking.
• Seven Deadly Sins: Guilty of all sins except Envy (because she despises other people's happiness for other reasons).
  • Gluttony: She is willing to take everything from everyone no matter how disproportionate it is, including the functions of society as a whole. Her gluttony is precisely what causes the apocalyptic event of the Tragedy that spans the entire series.
  • Greed: When she starts taking, Junko never stops, and is unable to sate her despair obsession no matter what she does. She always has to go the extra mile if it's for her personal indulgences.
  • Lust: Her despair obsession is blatantly a fetish and conveyed in a hedonistic manner. She is proud of treating it like a fetish to the degree that she does, to the point that it's disturbing to those around her how much she fetishizes that despair.
  • Pride: She is a giant narcissist and proudly considers herself beautiful and intelligent, seeing herself as the superior to all of humanity and even her own sister.
  • Sloth: While she is a schemer, she doesn't get directly involved and has her goons do the work for her (Mukuro, Monaca, all of Class 77-B). She also prefers death because living is a pain for her, and refuses to put the effort into making her life worth living. On top of that, it's worth noting that despair itself is often considered a form or manifestation of sloth in some strains of Christian thought.
  • Wrath: Junko is easily angered, but she doesn't show it. All of her words linger with Tranquil Fury towards everything and everyone who surrounds her, and she is a Misanthrope Supreme who despises humanity for having hope.
• Significant Birth Date: In a more ironic version of this, both she and Mukuro were born on Christmas Eve (aka a day in which people are supposed to spread hope around the world).
• Smart People Build Robots: As the Ultimate Analyst and the creator of Monokuma, she certainly qualifies.
• Smug Snake: Junko is overconfident in her ability to have a secure plan that results in her success and is always looking down on the rest of humanity due to a grandiose superiority complex. This attitude does not hold up upon being defeated, as Junko turns into a Dirty Coward immediately when things fall apart for her, both in Trigger Happy Havoc and Goodbye Despair.
• The Sociopath: Junko's a complicated example.
  • She excels at manipulating people, can switch into any persona she wants to avoid suspicion (and sometimes does so just for heck's sake), views even her loved ones as expendable, has a twisted set of personal rules, and lives for her own pleasure.
  • While she would otherwise be a sociopath par excellence, Junko actually is able to form meaningfully empathetic attachments to people: her sister, her boyfriend, and (according to here) her classmates.
  • As Ryoko, who has her talent and personality but not her memories, she displays sincere affection for Yasuke and doesn't want him to die.
  • At the same time, she claims at the end of Zero that she cultivated her love for Yasuke all for the sake of moment when she could experience the despair of killing him. Junko relishes bringing despair to her loved ones even more than despair in general.
  • Ultimately, she has the ability to experience love, but she easily discards it to further her sadomasochism and despair fetish, which makes her relationship to this trope and how genuine her love is murky.
• Straw Nihilist:
  • The most consistent part of her philosophy is an assertion that people are really just waiting for an excuse to cross the Despair Event Horizon and that despair is unstoppable. Of course, said philosophy is an insane, contradictory, self-serving excuse for her to indulge her despair fetish, but Junko would find a truly consistent philosophy to be too boring.
  • On a personal level, Junko, beneath her rampant narcissism and childish thrill-seeking, seems to genuinely believe that her existence is a mistake upon the world. In supplemental material, her own birthday is the day she hates the most, becoming notably more agitated on that date, and, according to herself, perhaps the one thing that could be called a 'central goal' in her insane quest to plunge the world into despair is to finally prove to herself, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she should never have been born.
• Superpower Lottery: A dubiously-mundane example. As the Ultimate Analyst, she's capable of understanding anything with a logical basis, which lends itself to a wide variety of abilities, like Prescience by Analysis, Power Copying (she can analyze what others do with their talents), effective fighting by analyzing her opponents' weaknesses, highly efficient planning due to analyzing all variables, easy manipulation of people around her, and quickly incorporating outside elements into her plans. The reason she even got into Hope's Peak despite her mental instability is because her talent was so good, the Steering Committee just had to have it for Izuru, underestimating the danger of the girl it was attached to until it was too late.
• Tautological Templar: An inversion. Junko knows despair is bad, and therefore sees everyone else around her as bad, including herself, which is is why she's so strongly nihilistic and believes despair is cathartic.
• Teens Are Monsters: She's a teenager who just happens to be a sadistic criminal with a penchant for mass destruction and terrorism.
• To Create a Playground for Evil: She succeeds in her goal of bringing about worldwide despair and violent anarchy. It takes a long time and some innovative solutions for the Future Foundation to clean up the mess she and her underlings created.
• Token Evil Teammate: Of Class 78th and the Ultimate Despair group, Junko ultimately stands out as the most evil of both groups. Even the thrill of despair her own organization revolves around doesn't measure up to her own, and she also deliberately drove Class 77-B to despair because they wouldn't do so themselves — unlike her, who has such impulses as a natural part of her.
• Tom the Dark Lord: She is a self-centered, egotistical bully and a terrorist who seeks to cause despair for its own sake, and yet has the rather casual Meaningful Name of "Junko Enoshima", which isn't at all threatening nor does it capture the extent of her misdeeds. She uses the casual aspect of her name as part of her fashionista cover. However, considering what kind of person the name is really associated with, it ends up being threatening to hear anyway, even if it's not inherently fitting for a despair-seeking sadist.
• The Unapologetic: Having no regrets comes with Junko's ideology. She's well-known for pursuing despair without regret, fear, or concern, and understandably, no one likes her for that.
• The Unfettered: She describes herself as this, stating that because she has neither hope nor a fear of death, there is nothing holding her back from doing what she wants to do. In general, though, Junko has no principles or care for basic societal standards and she spreads despair because she just can.
• Valley Girl: The Funimation dub for Danganronpa: The Animation and Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School has her regular speaking voice be the stereotypical valley girl speech pattern, most likely to tie into her Ultimate Fashionista talent. That said, she drops this during her more serious and despair-inducing moments, heavily implying it's just another one of her personalities she uses to get a rise out of people.
• Verbal Tic: As befits the Ultimate Despair, she throws the word "despair" around habitually. In particular, "hopelessly" (絶望的に zetsubouteki ni) is her favorite adverb, even when it doesn't make any sense with the rest of the sentence (e.g. "My boobs are hopelessly huge").
• Villainous Legacy: Despite dying at the end of the first game and having her AI self erased at the end of the second game, every villain that follows acts according to her actions as the Ultimate Despair, including the likes of Tengan, who lost faith in the Future Foundation fixing the results of her despair apocalypse and was additionally influenced by Chisa, the teacher of Class 77-B that she personally had brainwashed to become a follower of her despair cult.
• Walking Spoiler: It's impossible to talk about Junko without spoiling the massive role she plays in the games, as there are huge reveals about her involvement at the end of every Danganronpa game.
• Wasted Beauty: Junko is a genetically beautiful fashionista girl who knows she's beautiful and is proud of it, to the extent that she's even shown modeling in the first game's prologue before the player even discovers she's the Big Bad. However, she's also an Ax-Crazy Nightmare Fetishist who doesn't care about anyone but herself and will do anything to satisfy her lust for despair, even at the cost of her sanity. Despite this, in a twisted way, her beauty isn't entirely a waste as she does have a degree of empathy as means to make her suffer more despair, in the form of those she loves, which is not a lie, despite everything about her; said love is specifically why she subjects those people to her despair, as the loss of that loved one is what satisfies her despair the most, implying that love is real and the very reason she enforces the loss of that person is because it gives her despair to lose them.
• Weak Boss, Strong Underlings: Downplayed. Junko is mainly an intellectual mastermind, but her execution in the first game shows that she's surprisingly durable. However, she can't defeat more skilled opponents like Mukuro or Izuru in direct combat. Luckily, she has quite a few strong underlings at her disposal, like an army of Monokuma robots or the Warriors of Hope (who have giant mechs with which to kill adults).
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: She's a capable analyst, but is obsessed with despair. She obviously chose to use her analytical abilities to pursue despair, and seemingly uses that as her reason to live considering that she immediately chooses to die when the plans of her original self fall apart.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Pulls this on almost all of her pawns such as Mukuro, Yasuke and all the Reserve Course students.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

She is first introduced as the mastermind behind Monokuma, with her identity being revealed during the final class trial. Junko is the younger twin sister of Mukuro Ikusaba, with whom she pulled a Twin Switch before the "School Life of Mutual Killing" began. Both sisters were members of a movement known as Ultimate Despair, which caused "The Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History" and led to the outside world's current post-apocalyptic state. Junko has a paradoxical fetish for despair (both causing and receiving it) and wishes to share her twisted feelings with everyone she meets. The "School Life of Mutual Killing" is the final stage of her plan to destroy the hope of all the Tragedy's survivors outside of Hope's Peak Academy by proving that even the "best" of the world will turn on each other given proper incentive.

---

• All for Nothing: Before her execution, she laments that her efforts in creating despair through an Apocalypse How situation and killing her own sister as part of the Killing School Life she created for her classmates is this, as her years of efforts to set up the whole situation essentially became pointless following her exposure and defeat.
• Awful Truth: Her performance in the final trial is geared towards dropping several of them on the surviving students.
  Junko: And that is the truth! The truth you sought so much! How about it? Are you in despair? Are you in despair now that you know everything?!
  Kyoko: Are you saying... that having us solve this school's mysteries was part of your plan...?
  Junko: What if it was? What if this final school trial was designed from the very beginning to bring about your current despair-inducing situation...? What if I made you fools solve this mystery, just to present you with this despair-inducing truth...? ...So what if I did?
• Backup Twin: In a sense. She had Mukuro disguise herself as her, only to kill her when she deemed her too boring for her liking.
• Badass Arm-Fold: Her official portrait shows her doing this. After all, this girl is responsible for essentially causing the world to crumble.
• Bastardly Speech: Her monologuing about despair becomes this after her entire plan has been laid out. She keeps claiming that the students killed each other to no fault of hers as a part of proving her point that despair exists in everyone and that hope will naturally lose to that despair, even going so far as to claim that she did it all out of love. Makoto refuses to hear it.
• Batman Gambit: A number of the variables in her plan and the intent behind the motivations rely on the assumption that her classmates won't deviate from the behavior she observed of them during their time in school (which becomes even likelier with what we learn about her observational abilities in Danganronpa Zero).
• Beneath the Mask: Her true persona underneath all the personality-switching she does for fun is implied to be the neutral-expression sprite she gets when Makoto defies her.
• Big Bad: Junko is the mastermind behind the Tragedy and the Killing School Life.
• Big Bad Friend: Deliberately invoked. She wanted to see the despair created by the personal connection between everyone in her game and the mastermind orchestrating it. Slightly played with when she claims that she really does love all her friends... and wanted to express it by sharing the only emotion that brings her any joy.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: During her first Motive Rant, which is set after she causes the Tragedy and kills Mukuro For the Evulz, one would think she would take what she's doing seriously at all or even list the specifics of why she did it or what she's doing. Nope. Instead, in her ranting, she makes her ambitious terrorism seem like a normal thing to her. The twist is, unlike most examples, that was the first time she did something that ambitious to spread despair, and it wasn't one among multiple, making her disregard for the moral implications of her unrepentant crime spree come off far worse than it would otherwise.
• Characterization Marches On: Her Mood-Swinger tendencies are considerably more pronounced in the first game than in subsequent installments. After revealing herself in the final trial, there's barely a single moment where she isn't acting in some kind of different personality, even changing between them mid-sentence, and only dropping them right when Makoto gets his Heroic Second Wind. Later appearances would instead portray it as a largely just an occasional personality quirk, and she's otherwise shown carrying conversations normally (or as normally as an Ax-Crazy Dark Messiah can, anyway).
• Chekhov's Gunman: This is why even her folder tries not to clearly reveal her identity.
• Cheshire Cat Grin: Before being crushed by a giant block, she's cheerfully grinning from ear to ear while waving at the heroes.
• Compressed Hair: She somehow fits her twintails under a full-head mask on the two occasions she disguises herself to attack Makoto. It's a wonder all that hair didn't get in her eyes.
• Cool Crown: Her "high and almighty ruler" personality dons one following The Reveal.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: What sort of execution is most fitting for the Big Bad who masterminded everything? All of them. Junko goes through each and every execution in the game in rapid succession.
• Dead Man's Switch: If she dies, the air purifier that's supplying the school with clean air shuts off.
• Death Seeker: Played With. Despite not wanting to lose, she takes comfort in her own death just before her execution. After all, what's more despair-inducing than death?
• Desecrating the Dead: Frequently so.
  • Whichever of Headmaster Kirigiri's bones weren't destroyed in his execution are wrapped up in a box to taunt his daughter.
  • Despite being a robot, Monokuma eats Mondo's remains after he's turned into butter while the other students can only watch.
  • At one point, as Monokuma, she threatens to beat on and later eat Sakura's corpse as revenge for the Monokuma key going missing thanks to her.
  • Mukuro's body is used to fake a murder in Chapter 5, and it's rigged to explode to cover that fact up.
  • Whatever is left of Kyoko in the Bad Ending gets tossed into the trash dump where her father's murder-weapon-slash-first-coffin (the rocket) was thrown out.
  • According to Danganronpa 2, this was inflicted on Junko's corpse by some of her followers. For instance, Nagito cut her left hand off and sewed it in place of his own.
• Driven to Suicide: She seems more than happy to execute herself after being defeated. In fact, when Makoto timidly tries to say that there's no need to kill herself, Junko angrily demands that he let her go through with it.
• Dissonant Serenity: Pretty much the whole time through the six executions she undergoes, although the kicker is probably her meditating during the witch-burning.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: The cast at first believe that an organization or even Hope's Peak Academy itself is the mastermind of the Killing School Life that they are suffering through. In Chapter 6, they identify that the one known as the "Ultimate Fashionista", a student already attending the academy who is also one of their former classmates, is the real mastermind. By the second game, however, the "organization" part turns out to have been an Accidental Truth, since Junko led the Ultimate Despair, the ones who wreaked havoc on her behalf under her command. She's also the inconspicuous girl first seen on the magazines during the game's opening alongside the ones seen around the academy, who at first seems like a normal fashionista and couldn't possibly be evil; of course, the audience is proven wrong in that regard, and she is absolutely evil as the mastermind of the Tragedy and the Killing School Life.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: When she loses, Makoto admits he doesn't want her to die. Junko angrily rebuffs him.
• Dynamic Akimbo: In her "evil queen" personality, she poses in this way.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Danganronpa 1's version of Junko constantly switches through her personalities until the end, when she has her Villainous Breakdown and executes herself. Her later appearances in Danganronpa 2 and 3 show much more of her usual bubbly self, retroactively implying that she went even further off the deep end sometime between starting the Tragedy and masterminding the Killing School Life.
• Evil All Along: How she's revealed as the Big Bad. At first, the player and her classmates view her as the Ultimate Fashionista, a supermodel the world idolizes, but she reveals herself to actually be the Ultimate Despair, a psychotic madwoman who masterminded the apocalypse and the Mutual Killing Game for her own twisted pleasure.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
  • Well, more like "despair cannot comprehend hope," but Junko makes it clear she is completely baffled when everyone chooses hope. She also thinks that hope-filled speeches are boring ways to cheat.
  • This leads to her downfall. She was unable to imagine anybody trusting someone else enough to risk their life, which is exactly what Makoto did in the fifth trial. Kyoko calls it the weak point that Makoto exposed.
• Evil Costume Switch: Well, evil accessory switch. Mukuro-as-Junko has a bow and a bunny clip on her pigtails, while Junko revealed as the Big Bad has Monokuma hairpins.
• Evil Counterpart: Excusing their cleverness, impressive willpower, and speech-making abilities, both Junko and Makoto are extremely good at bringing people over to their side by understanding the things which make them tick. The difference is that Makoto does this through simple listening and by allowing himself to be relied on, along with unpretentiously helping people move past their pain and insecurities towards a hope-filled path. By contrast, she exploits that emotional vulnerability and then manipulates her victims into becoming someone willing (or even eager) to spread despair. If all that fails, she's got more forceful and invasive forms for ensuring compliance. All of those reasons are why Makoto's the Messianic Archetype to Junko's Dark Messiah.
• Eviler than Thou: Part of her reason for killing her sister, Mukuro, is that she was disappointed in how she wasn't as willing to spread despair as Junko was, but Junko herself was too prideful in her own villainy to accept her sister's differences, so she disposed of her instead.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: In the final trial, when she finally strips the Monokuma mascot facade, she spends the entire sequence joking about her evil deeds, in very poor taste, and the rest of Class 78th only find her even more horrifying for it. Not even Genocide Jack, who is also Ax-Crazy like Junko, can understand her "humor". While this applies to her AI self in 2, she takes the situation much more seriously than she does in the first game because she's dealing with her own brainwashed followers in the Neo World Program, while in the first game, she's putting her own classmates, of whom she thinks of as "her friends", through the ordeal she set up, and as such thinks they'll be willing to laugh alongside her. Inevitably, she's disappointed when they don't and Makoto rebels against her after her constant rambling.
• Evil Is Hammy: This especially comes through with how she controls Monokuma, and after she reveals herself, many of her personalities are established as being excessively grandiose. It's fitting because she wants to make a spectacle out of the Killing School Life.
• Evil Is Not Well-Lit: Whenever she's busy with puppeting Monokuma, Junko's moving around in the Monokuma control room and the Data Center—which are possibly the darkest rooms in the game.
• Evil Plan: Explained at the start of the game as being a simple desire for despair in all its forms. At the time, her former classmates had no idea how far that statement went.
• Expressive Accessory: Her bear hair clips, subtly. The sequel ramped this up with her newer sprites, where the clips' bears can be seen sporting Fireball Eyeballs, Ocular Gushers and a Luminescent Blush to mirror her.
• Expressive Hair: All her personalities have her hair behaving in unusual or impossible ways, sometimes sending her twintails spiking jaggedly in every direction. Her cutesy personality compresses both tails more neatly/simplistically to mimic a moe art style, while her teacher personality has them fusing into a ponytail for a more intellectual look.
• Face Death with Despair: The final execution of the first game heavily plays with this: Junko, after failing to convince the survivors to vote for Makoto and stay in the Academy, decides to execute herself so that she can feel the 'despair of death'...except that her brain is so warped that despair causes her what can be observed as absolute joy and glee, and faces the execution with a constant maniacal grin on her face.
• Face Death with Dignity: She's more than happy to accept her execution, and waves to her classmates as she dies.
• Fake Brit: In-Universe. Both the game and the anime have Junko affect a pompous-sounding British accent while playing the "evil queen" personality.
• Fetish: This is how Kyoko describes Junko's desire for despair. As the trial progresses, her dialogue starts to imply that it may go much deeper than that. Her words in the English dub of Danganronpa: The Animation casts very few doubts on this interpretation.
  Junko: Come on, baby; big money, no whammies! Give it to me. Make me suffer! I've been a bad, bad girl.
• Final Boss: She is Monokuma's puppeteer and Mukuro's murderer, making her the last obstacle that Makoto and his friends have to face before they can finally leave Hope's Peak Academy.
• Graceful Loser: After being exposed as the Big Bad, she happily subjects herself to a combination of the executions featured in the previous chapters.
• Hair Color Dissonance: Said to have blonde hair and is as such described in the novels, but pictures of Junko show that her hair seems to appear more pink or strawberry blonde upon closer examination.
• Hoist by Her Own Petard: It is ultimately her plan to frame Kyoko/Makoto as Mukuro's murderer that leads to her downfall and exposure as the mastermind as she breaks the rules to falsely execute Makoto due to seeing through her ruse, and Mukuro's corpse sustained wounds from her "Spears of Gungnir" execution despite her never being wounded in battle, which proved that the mastermind (Monokuma/Junko) actually killed her.
• Hope Crusher: To the point she takes pleasure in her own despair. She believes that despair is the natural order of things and seeks to destroy even the smallest glimmer of hope in the world. To that end, she even sets up hope spots for her former classmates because taking victories away right when they were so close to them produces lots of despair.
• Hope Spot: In a way, her cheating in the final trial could be seen as this. The students take her lies as a sign of weakness and that they've cornered her, but then she drops the bombshell about how the outside world is a dystopia in order to crush their hopes and saddle them with a Sadistic Choice.
• Hot Teacher: Invoked with her 'smart' persona, who's one of the more sexualized personalities (she has the most emphasis placed on her boobs) and is usually invoked to deliver exposition to the others.
• Hypocrite: She claims that despair is an absolutely inescapable thing, with only the smallest prodding being required to push people over its edge. Just as frequently, she proves how small her faith in that despair is by manipulating events in ways that try to cut hope off at its knees—like taking away the student's memories knowing they wouldn't kill each other otherwise, writing Sakura’s fake suicide note when she killed herself for the sake of hope, and trying to kill Makoto under the guise of Mukuro so that she can pin the murder on Kyoko. This fact is thrown at her by basically everyone, and her need to disprove it leads to the final chapter's trial. At one point, she also claims that the people who were trying to rescue Class 78 refused to give up hope and tried to force their beliefs on others. However, the events of the Hope's Peak saga are because of her trying to force despair onto the world.
• Implausible Hair Color: A common component of gyaru fashion is bleached hair. Junko's hair even tassels into red at the tips.
• Incoming Ham: "We have been waiting! Waiting so very long for peasants like you to appear!"
• Innocent Blue Eyes: Inverted because she is as far from innocent as possible, but they help her (sister) appear to be a Nice Girl.
• Ironic Name: "Junko" means "shield girl," but aside from that, she doesn't "shield" whatsoever.
• It Amused Me: She actually manages to frequently combine this with For the Evulz. She gets very quickly bored when she believes things are being too predictable and even changes her Evil Plan on the fly a couple of times.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: She briefly gets away with framing Kyoko for Mukuro's murder in Chapter 5 for an unfair trial, and even eliminates Makoto via a failed execution. The fact that Kyoko ends up saving Makoto and the two of them confront Monokuma (who is Junko) together eventually ends up getting her exposed as the true culprit.
• Lady Swears-a-Lot: Her punk personality has one of the filthiest mouths in the franchise and is fond of Cluster F-Bombs.
• Lame Comeback: While it's Played for Drama more than most lame comebacks, she calls the surviving students "stupid" and "unhip" for choosing to risk venturing into the outside world.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Double Subverted. Ordinarily, having to go through every Cruel and Unusual Death machine she used on the Killers, who she effectively manipulated and forced into committing their crimes, before she's finally finished off would be a fitting and even cathartic death. The problem is, Junko is such a despair-nut that she actually enjoys going through each of the punishments and is ecstatic at experiencing the despair of her own death, which can make it seem as if she's effectively getting off unpunished due to getting what she wants anyway. However, right before she's about to be finished off via the crusher from Makoto's attempted execution, something causes the crusher to jam and briefly delay her death. This causes her despair high to wear off and prompts her to look up in curiosity right as she suddenly gets crushed before realizing what's happening, effectively denying her an ideally despairing death in favour of her last moments being spent in confusion.
• Lean and Mean: At 5'7" and 99 pounds, she has the lowest BMI in the series.
• Lost in Character: She implies that constantly acting as Monokuma for the whole game is the reason she has such wild personality shifts (she's "not sure what kind of role [she's] supposed to play"), although it's more likely that she's just that unhinged...
• Made of Iron: As described in Cruel and Unusual Death above, Junko goes through every single execution shown in the game, but all except the last one don't seem to even scratch her. She in fact enjoys them, and it takes a giant crushing machine to actually kill her.
• Madness Mantra:
  "Lamelamelamelamelame...!"
• Malevolent Masked Woman: When she does need to travel around the school in the second half of the game, she wears a mask. Her followers would do likewise in later games.
• Manipulative Bitch: Her specialty is playing on people's despair to convert them to her way of thinking.
• Maniac Tongue: As part of her punk personality, she lolls her tongue out of her mouth—which also serves as an indicator of just how crazed she really is.
• Mask of Sanity: She's spent much of her life as a fashionista in the spotlight, successfully passed the academy's scrutinization to be accepted, and her class is positively filled with people who are good at reading other people. She managed to fool every single one of them. Most of the CD dramas she appears in also have her acting in much the same way her sister acted during the game (at one point sharing a scene with the resident esper and detective).
• Master Actress: Her Mask of Sanity fooled countless people. She shows off her acting skills during the ending of Trigger Happy Havoc when she keeps changing personalities on a whim.
• Never My Fault: During the final trial, she scapegoats the rest of the class for betraying and murdering each other during the Killing School Life, even though they were friends with one another. Makoto tells her off by calling out that she drove them to do it in the first place.
• Nightmare Face: Well, nightmare mask. She gets a legitimately nightmarish face just as she's about to execute herself, with a disturbing close-up view of her eyes spiraling in despair.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Her cutesy personality is drawn in a more simplistic style.
• Obfuscating Insanity: Despite her apparent Mask of Sanity, it's implied by the way her expression goes blank when truly overcome with hate that she may be slightly more sane than she lets on, with the implication being that her many quirks and personality switches are intentional ways of unnerving people to make them fall into despair. It's difficult to tell with her.
• Only One Finds It Fun: In a rather dreadful manner. During the final trial where she rants about why she started the Killing School Life and masterminded the Tragedy, the only one who displays any sort of morbid enthusiasm over it is Junko herself. As for the rest of the class, they are understandably horrified by the fact. This also applies retroactively, as the entire world turns out to be just as horrified by her careless destruction as her class was, and in Side:Future, we see Junko is still the only one taking glee in the despair she sees posthumously.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: During the final trial, Junko is constantly in motion both physically and mentally so she doesn't get bored... but when Makoto starts talking back to her, she goes completely still and just looks at him with a blank face. It's implied this is because his luck and hope are among the few things that even her analytical talent cannot understand. During her final attempt to Break Them by Talking, she drops the sudden changes of personality and over-the-top acting, and just coldly explains what will happen if the remaining students don't obey her will.
• The Peeping Tom: The art book, which examines the students' wardrobes in thorough detail with Monokuma narrating, implies she's been spying on them through the security cameras before they shower.
• Pungeon Master: In her Bullet Time Battle, she may switch to her Monokuma personality long enough to tell Makoto, "you're unbearable".
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: She has these as part of her "cutesy" personality.
• Redemption Rejection: In her final moments, Makoto insists that she doesn't have to execute herself, suggesting that she lives and fixes her mistakes instead. Due to wanting the despair of death, she decides to die anyway.
• Right Under Their Noses: When Makoto and Aoi investigate the control room where she operates Monokuma from within the Data Center, she hides in a hatch in the floor that can't be opened from the outside. Then when they leave the Data Center, she locks it off from everyone else completely, with the excuse that Monokuma can't be active if the participants are snooping around where she has to operate Monokuma from, and then, of course, tells them both that she was hiding in said hatch the whole time.
• Royal "We": In English, she refers to herself in the plural when she's acting out her royal personality.
• Sadist: In a roundabout way. She just enjoys despair, in all its forms, that much.
• Samus Is a Girl: The masked person did look like it could be a guy.
• Scary Shiny Glasses: Her "teacher" persona flashes these in the anime when she explains that Class 78 had locked themselves inside Hope's Peak Academy.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Invokes this multiple times, inventing new rules (or bending the ones she's established) if it's convenient for her. Kyoko ultimately uses this against her by pointing out how this invalidates the point she's trying to prove.
• Self-Disposing Villain: After losing, despite still holding everyone's lives in her hands, Junko follows her promise and executes herself, mainly to taste how it feels like and because she doesn't believe the survivors would be fine in the outside world.
• Self-Restraint: Despite being the mastermind, she actually has the least freedom of anyone (self-inflicted as it may be). She presumably uses a sleeping bag as opposed to everyone's comfy beds, can only eat meals at night, and has an irregular sleeping pattern since she's doing her best to monitor the students at all times—including whenever they might be active (with most of the murders happening late at night or in the early morning). By the time of Chapter 5's events, she has little more than just two rooms to move around in.
• Shadow Dictator: The world filled with despair is basically her kingdom, as she rules it through Ultimate Despair and Monokuma. Her face went unrevealed to many of her followers until the final trial, so until then, Monokuma basically served as her public persona.
• Shapeshifter Swan Song: Of a sort. She rapidly switches between all her personalities during her final Machine Gun Talk battle.
• Shifting Voice of Madness: In the game's English dub, she has two voice actresses to accommodate this before getting a third in the next game.
• Sibling Murder: She ends up murdering Mukuro on a whim. Why? Simply because she got bored their original plan and thought that the despair one would experience from the sudden death of a beloved sibling was too good to pass up on.
• "Silly Me" Gesture: In the anime, her "cutesy" personality briefly does this.
• Slasher Smile: Her mask has this really creepy grin, but her own face is worse.
• The Social Expert: As a fashion icon, she's incredibly charismatic, and it's a trait that helped her gain so many allies. In addition, charisma is one of the skills Makoto can learn from spending time with Mukuro while she's impersonating Junko.
• Spartan Sibling: Mukuro mistakenly believes that she can get through to her sister. Although she can, things always went bad because of Junko's whims. The sickest part is that Junko considers this being loving toward her sister... all because she can't comprehend that maybe, just maybe, Mukuro doesn't get off on pain and despair the same way she does no matter how hard she tries to.
• Talkative Loon: Her set of greatly differing sprites would be hard to express in prose, so for IF and Danganronpa Zero, she talks in really strange stream of consciousness rants that change subjects every few sentences. She can go from talking about how she just murdered someone to how a recent summer blockbuster underwhelmed her to the kind of people who fixate on her bust to the economy… all in words that even Junko herself has some trouble following.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: It takes all six executions to kill her.
• Too Kinky to Torture: The executions given to the other killers were pretty chilling. Junko enjoys all of them with a smile due to relishing in her own despair.
• Troll: Junko's motive is to put everyone into despair and trolling is one of the best ways to do so. In particular with the final class trial when she reveals to the remaining students, they have been killing classmates they had known for 2 years and for no reason other than for her own amusement.
• Twin Switch: She had her twin use her name and title during the Deadly Game since she thought it would be a waste for them to go unused—while her sister's title was much less appealing.
• Uncanny Valley Girl: Seemingly an ideal teenage girl in the eyes of many people in Japan... except she initially hid a twisted mind that was willing and able to tear the world apart.
• Unishment: Her execution qualifies big time. She starts out having a Villainous Breakdown from losing the final trial, but then her despair fetish kicks in. Junko realizes that she finds the despair of both having your carefully laid plans crumble before you and facing death absolutely wonderful... so much that she promptly rejects Makoto's offer of a Last-Second Chance and gleefully executes herself.
• Unreliable Expositor: It's noted that she could be wrong about the state of the outside world. Nearly all other installments of the franchise would prove that, no, she was entirely correct and it's a violent Crapsack World out there, though she did embellish just how unlivable it really was.
• Unexplained Recovery: Downplayed, as Junko is undeniably dead after her own execution, but the Remnants of Despair being able to have parts of her attached to them is pretty impressive considering she was reduced to a bloody smear.
• Villainous Breakdown: Subverted. When Makoto instills hope in the rest of the students, she panics and losses more of her mental grip. However, the failure of her plan when she was so close to winning causes her despair, but because of her fetish, her own despair turns her on... and she willingly executes herself.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Before the events of the first game and in the prequel, Junko is known as "the Ultimate Fashionista", of whom no one suspects to be plotting anything. Understandably, when she reveals what she is and shows her true identity as a narcissistic warlord, she becomes Hated by All.
• Walking Spoiler: Knowing she is the despair-loving mastermind behind Monokuma not only spoils much of Trigger Happy Havoc, but also a lot of the franchise.
• We Can Rule Together: After her true identity is exposed, she offers to make the other students her "disciples." She's not serious about it. It also doubles as a Shout-Out to the Dragonlord's offer from Dragon Quest.
• What the Hell Are You?: These are some of her last words to Makoto before the game's final Machine Gun Talk/Bullet Time Battle. She honestly can't believe that he won't break after everything she's told him about the Killing School Life and the Tragedy.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Despair is her defining characteristic, her greatest motivation, her ultimate weapon, and her eventual downfall.
• Xanatos Gambit:
  • Due to her paradoxical fetishization of despair, she views the final class trial this way. One way it could end is Junko proving her worldview correct while driving the last remnants of the world's hope into despair. By the same token, she could have her worldview disproved, causing her carefully-laid plan to crumble around her as she feels the despair of facing death. As such, she considers both outcomes to be "victories."
  • A more conventional example is the killing game itself. There are four choices: The killing game works and someone manages to graduate (win since everyone except the murderer dies), the killing game continues until almost everyone is dead (win since there'd only be two survivors), the students stop killing each other and live in the academy (win because they're trapped there and will never know what happened to the outside world), or the students confront Junko and get the Awful Truth dropped on them (win because that will almost certainly send them over the Despair Event Horizon). The only reason she loses is because she can't understand Makoto's optimism.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: A favorite of hers. If people expect their suffering to be close to over, it only makes the resulting despair when things goes From Bad to Worse all the sweeter to her.
• You Will Be Spared: She offers to allow Makoto's five fellow survivors live out their lives in the academy should they let her execute him. They almost accept her offer, but Makoto becomes a Hope Bringer and makes sure they refuse to go along with it.

Danganronpa Zero

Junko is Ryōko Otonashi's true identity and Yasuke Matsuda's girlfriend. Driven by her plan to plunge the world into despair, she locked the student council in Hope's Peak Academy's old building with Mukuro's help, after which they drove them to kill each other. Indoctrinating the Reserve Course's students with footage of the murders, she then told Yasuke to test a memory-wiping procedure on her not only in preparation for the "School Life of Mutual Killing," but also so that she could feel lots of despair when she murdered him. Junko succeeds and steals his research so that she can continue getting ready for what's to come.

---

• The Bad Guy Wins: Danganronpa Zero is a prequel, Junko is its Big Bad, and she's the franchise's overarching villain. It's a Foregone Conclusion that Junko not only survives, but also murders Yasuke and relishes in the despair it causes.
• Big Bad: She's the mastermind behind the novel's events, and her scheme for global despair is coming to fruition just as she expected.
  Thus, the keywords were set.
  The flag was raised.
  Mutual killing, ex-school building, brainwashed Reserve Course, Super High School Level Hope, Class 78, Hope's Peak Academy's Steering Committee, headmaster, memory manipulation, Mukuro Ikusaba's disguise, Monokuma.
  It all begins from here.
  The plan to create the strongest despair of all starts from here.
  The... World's... Most... Despair... Inducing... Incident... starts... from... here.
• Big Sister Bully: Exaggerated and inverted. Junko is Mukuro's younger twin sister, but it doesn't stop the former from verbally abusing the latter.
  "Are you trying to raise the tension or something? What are you going to do if someone sees you dressed like that? Are you going to take responsibility for that? Heck, are you even capable of doing that?"
  "I-I'm... sorry..."
  As if completely withered, her shoulders crumpled.
  "Also, you barely even look like me! Are you even trying? In fact, do I even look that retarded? Do I?"
  "Um, but I followed Junko-chan's written instructions completely..."
  "I see you can't do anything unless told; you really are retarded."
  "I-I'm... really sorry!"
  As she hurried to get changed, her eyes were completely blurred with tears.
  "Man, and you still have that ridiculously skinny body! If you have time to perform in the military, you should try getting a body that men would actually like!"
  "I-I'm sorry... please don't be mad anymore..."
  While watching her sister's shoulders shake like a puppy being scolded, Enoshima once again stuck out her tongue.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Starting out as a childhood friend of his, Junko eventually becomes Yasuke's girlfriend… but it doesn't end well at all.
• Combo Platter Powers: It's indicated that being the Ultimate Analyst is Junko's true talent, as it's the talent that Ryōko has. This makes sense, as her being the Ultimate Fashionista sounded like it came from her predicting and acting on trends so that she was always ahead of the curve. To be more specific, she analyzed the fashion scene and acted accordingly. The connection between her talents as the Ultimate Analyst and the Ultimate Despair isn't fully revealed until Danganronpa 3.
• Evil Redhead: It's implied Junko's a natural redhead who dyes her hair blonde.
• Hope Crusher: As much as she ever was since who-knows-when.
• Insane Troll Logic: Junko's worldview is self-contradictory, which only serves to give her further despair.
  Just picturing that despair caused Enoshima's heart to jump.
  Because Super High School Level Junko Enoshima...
  ...wishes for despair above anything else.
  Finds hope within despair more than anyone else.
  Finds hope?
  "...What the hell? Me finding hope?"
  Realizing she had been embracing hope...
  ...she fell into despair.
• Jekyll & Hyde: With her memories having been wiped by Yasuke at her behest, Junko becomes the Hyde to Ryōko's Jekyll until The Reveal.
• Kick the Dog:
  • As Yasuke bleeds to death, she asks him two hypothetical questions about the terminal illness that ended his mother's life.
    "What if I told you... that the reason your mom got that way was because of me? What kind of face would you show me?"
  • Not too long after the above-mentioned moment, Junko exaggerates this trope by literally kicking his corpse over and over until it's no longer recognizable.
• Kill the Ones You Love: Does this to Yasuke by stabbing him before kicking his corpse repeatedly until it's beyond recognition, reveling in the despair that came from killing one of the people she loved most personally.
  She nurtured her love for Matsuda all this time just to get a taste of that feeling. Seeing her loved one be smothered by despair during his last moments; she pretty much lived to experience that spectacle.
  Finally getting to taste that despair...
  "...INCREDIBLE!!"
• Laughing Mad: While crying out of "delight, lament, and confusion" after murdering Yasuke, Junko uncontrollably laughs as she repeatedly kicks his corpse.
• Madness Mantra: "Amazing, amazing! Amazingamazingamazingamazingamazing!"
• Mood-Swinger: Her behavior can change along with her personality in seconds.
  "Ahahaha! I really am amazing, aren't I?"
  Without thinking, she erupted into laughter.
  "I even prepared a flag for when I myself would lose... I'm the very definition of a mastermind! Don't you think so, sister?"
  "Yes... but your way of talking..."
  "I got tired of this personality! How many fucking years have you been my sister?"
  Shifting to a violent personality and shouting at her sister Ikusaba, she soon gave up on that as well and then began staring towards the window.
• Mysterious Past: Everything about Junko and her history is contradictory. She claimed in Trigger Happy Havoc that she was born into despair, but the things Mukuro says concerning Junko and Ryōko's existence infer this isn't the case. She also claims to have caused the brain disease that killed Yasuke's mother, which doesn't sound plausible given she was around six years old when it happened. It also flies in the face of both the flashback that dealt with that detail and her statement that her love for Yasuke was stronger than despair.
• Official Couple: With Yasuke, which is precisely why she murders him.
• Single-Target Sexuality: Going by a flashback, she's been in love with Yasuke since she was around five years old.
• Tomato in the Mirror: In the novel's climax, Ryōko remembers that she is Junko.
  "C'mon, I've said it before haven't I? I'd murder you bastards one day... I've come to fulfill that promise. Don't tell me you've forgotten... upupupu."
  That giddy voice forced my eyes open, and all I saw was Matsuda-kun's surprised face.
  I could see a black figure standing behind him.
  Super High School Level Despair.
  Walking from behind Matsuda-kun, she slowly approached my face. Once she got close enough to the point where she was lined up with Matsuda-kun, the face within the figure finally presented itself to me.
  I could remember it now.
  That face... was me.
• Twin Switch: Mukuro impersonated Junko while she was Ryōko.
• Two Aliases, One Character: Junko Enoshima and Ryōko Otonashi turn out to be the same girl.
• Villainous Breakdown: After murdering Yasuke, she flips out.
  It was more than anything she could have hoped for.
  "Too depressing! Too good! My chest is gonna tear open! This is true self-loathing! I want to die! This is! This is the despair that comes from losing a loved one!"
  While Enoshima's being was assaulted by that despair, she kicked Yasuke Matsuda's corpse with all her strength.
  "Amazing, amazing! Amazingamazingamazingamazingamazing!"
  While absorbed in screaming, she kicked the corpse of the one she so dearly longed for with no mercy whatsoever.
  Flowing out of her eyes were a continuous stream of tears.
  While those tears of delight, lament, and confusion overwhelmingly flowed, she kicked her beloved's corpse until it was a lump of meat barely holding any resemblance to its original form.
  "Upu... upupupu... upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu. Upupupu."
• Villain Protagonist: She's technically this since she's Ryōko.
• Walking Spoiler: It's impossible to talk about her without spoiling much of the ending.

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair

The final class trial introduces the self-named Alter Ego Junko, who is the mastermind behind Monokuma. Back when she was alive, she made an Artificial Intelligence program patterned after herself, after which she was uploaded into the Neo World Program by Izuru Kamukura.

Her new goals are to upload herself into the minds of the "dead" students and seize control of the technology in the Future Foundation's headquarters so that she can turn the world into "Junkoland," where almost every survivor of the Tragedy is a copy of herself. On top of that, she lured Byakuya, Kyoko, and Makoto into the program because she intends to trap the trio there while tormenting them as revenge for her first defeat during the Killing School Life.

However, she is defeated for good when the "surviving" students refuse to "graduate" and allow her to possess their "dead" classmates—instead choosing to accept their grim pasts and create their own future. Usami then appears and destroys her as part of the Forced Shutdown.

---

• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: In a world of 2.5D characters, she has a 3D avatar along with an accompanying 2D avatar on the screen of a giant cell phone.
• Artificial Intelligence: Even though she had herself executed in Trigger Happy Havoc, it's too bad that she effectively made herself into an AI program beforehand.
• The Assimilator: Her main scheme this time around is to clone herself infinitely using the inactive avatars of the Ultimate Despair members who "died" in the Neo World Program.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: She's absolutely gigantic to the point that the courtroom's wall is removed in order for there to be enough space for her. Even then, you usually can't see much more than her upper body. This is actually discussed when she first shows up:
  Fuyuhiko: I-I know anything goes here... but this... this is clearly not fucking okay...!
  Junko: I seeeee, so that's your reaction to seeing an extra-large high school girl... ...But are they really that big? Don't you think they're pretty small?
  Akane: Sh-She's huge! She's way too huge!
  Junko: Huh? But the final boss in a certain action game is much bigger. You know, *that* game. Knifearella!
  Fuyuhiko: (astonishingly shocked) She said it anyway!
• Bad Boss: She tries to break all five "surviving" members of Ultimate Despair into a Heroic BSoD before throwing them over the Despair Event Horizon. Junko's also not above calling them stuff such as "instigators in the background," "chumps," and "chump change." What's even more telling, though, is how her plan included pulling a Grand Theft Me on the Ultimate Despair members whose avatars were deleted because of the killings and subsequent executions.
• Big Bad: She is the mastermind behind the Killing School Trip, having hijacked the Neo World Program for this purpose. Additionally, she's also trying to Take Over the World—all while keeping Makoto, Kyoko, and Byakuya trapped in the program as revenge.
• Big Bad Ensemble: While she is the main mastermind, Izuru uploaded her into the Neo World Program.
• Body Backup Drive: Junko intends to upload herself into the bodies of the "dead" students if the "survivors" choose to "graduate." What's even worse is that she desires to repeat the process until the world is filled with copies of herself.
• Break Them by Talking: Oh, HELL YES. She remains an undisputed master of this even as an AI program. Look no further than when Junko sows the seeds of a Sadistic Choice as she lays out the potential consequences of the Forced Shutdown.
  Junko: Like, if you guys don't start the shutdown, the Future Foundation will be trapped here! I can't allow the Future Foundation to sacrifice themselves for the Ultimate Despairs... Jeez, you should have said so before! You guys aren't honest at all!
  Kyoko: That's not it...what we're saying is...
  Junko: "We have to protect the world from despair", you say? Okay okay, that's getting soooooooo old! Do you reaaaaaally hafta sacrifice yourselves just to protect the world in the first place? What if the world's hope is different from your hope? Even if the world is happy, it's meaningless if you aren't happy.
  Makoto: Th-That's...
  Junko: Plus, the Future Foundation wants to kill all the Ultimate Despairs, right? Once you go back to being Ultimate Despair, the Future Foundation's punishment time will activate... ...It would be absolutely dreaaaaaaaaaadful if that were to happen!
  Kazuichi: N-Not just dreadful...
  Junko: It's rather...FUCKING hopeless don't ya think? GYAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! ...And can you guys even endure that? Everything that happened here will just end up being a meaningless game... Everything you felt...awe, friendship, love... There won't even be save data left of it... The girl you love and the guy you hate grow weaker and skinnier each day they lay immobilized... And in Hajime's case, his very existence is going to disappear...all because of the academy he loves so much.
  Hajime: ...
  Junko: Will you be able to endure such despair? Who are you going to endure it for? For people you've never met before? For people who don't even appreciate you? ...Does that sound like "hope" to you?
• Didn't See That Coming: For all her lampshading of One-Winged Angel tropes, she is completely blindsided by Hajime's own Super Mode.
• Evil Plan:
  • She wants to upload herself into the "dead" members of Ultimate Despair, take over the Future Foundation's headquarters, and find a way to repeat the process for almost all of the Tragedy's other survivors.
  • As for Byakuya, Kyoko, and Makoto, she wants to exact revenge by trapping them in the Neo World Program as part of the "endless life of repeating the grade." This means she'd continuously torment her three former classmates for the rest of their lives.
• Final Boss: Which she even lampshades, talking about how she'll just skip straight to her final form for the "boss fight." She's the opponent of the last two minigames (a Rebuttal Showdown and a Panic Talk Action), as they get as close to combat as you can in the game.
• For the Evulz: She doesn't have any particular reason to force the participants of the Killing School Trip to kill eachother since the Graduation Program worked whether they were dead or alive. She just wanted to see if she could. Doubly, she set a time limit for herself just to see if she could get them all to kill each other in three weeks and then placed the clock on the central island without explaining what it was for.
• Giant Woman: Her 3D avatar is a giant version of her. She even lampshades the fanservice appeal and offers to have Kazuichi killed by squishing him between her breasts.
• Greater-Scope Villain: This is the same Junko AI installed in Shirokuma and Kurokuma during Ultra Despair Girls.
• Hijacked by Ganon: A rare mystery game example, as she was the Big Bad of Trigger Happy Havoc before unexpectedly resurfacing in the same position for Goodbye Despair.
• Hope Crusher: Junko even says that despair is what "defines [who she is]." Plus, she crafts an overall situation with a Sadistic Choice where no matter what happens, it's either despair manages to exist in some way or hope is snuffed out entirely for Hajime and his friends.
• Hypocrite:
  • Junko's plan to replace the world with an egopolis by cloning herself infinite times contradicts her sustenance for irregularity, as she doesn't realize she's inevitably going to get bored experiencing herself over and over again, even if she's a huge narcissist. Not that she notices this, of course.
  • Junko accepted her defeat in the first game because she wanted the despair of death and defeat, and willingly refused Makoto's plea to keep herself alive. However, here, her whole revenge plot against those who survived the Killing School Life also contradicts that, as it shows she didn't accept it after all, and is in fact in complete denial to the point that she's willing to trap and eternally torture her enemies in the Neo World Program.
• Hypocritical Humor: She calls attention to her large boobs, only to say that a more fanservicey game would focus on them... despite causing just that to happen.
• Jiggle Physics: Her 3D avatar has them, and it's most noticeable when she's tied up by Usami.
• Laser-Guided Karma: In this game, the AI version of her permanently dies after trying to usurp the braindead bodies of the class that she brainwashed into committing atrocities for her and bringing the entire world to despair on her behalf.
• Literally Shattered Lives: This is how her 3D avatar dies. While the area around is crumbling thanks to the Forced Shutdown being activated, Usami appears out of nowhere, subduing and binding her with rainbow weapons similar to the ones she uses in her game mode. When Usami closes the rainbow, it causes her avatar to shatter into pieces.
• Manipulative Bitch: How she got Izuru and presumably all the other members of Ultimate Despair on her side. There's also how she can be pretend to be other people.
• Master of Disguise: Junko is such a skilled manipulator that, given enough information on the subject, she can pretend to be literally anyone. This is how Junko is able to promise that she'll "resurrect" Hajime's "dead" classmates, which she intends to do by uploading herself into them and then using the data she has to mimic their personalities.
• Mood-Swinger: Her personality and her voice still change constantly because of how utterly bored she feels. She's also added a few more personalities to her repertoire, including a tsundere personality and a parody of Doraemon, though she also seems to stick to her core personality much more often.
• Oh, Crap!: She's clearly shocked when Hajime rebounds from her attempt to mentally break him, as she recognizes him as Izuru (with the strongly implication of Izuru and Hajime merging) and begins freaking out. She clearly wasn't expecting either Hajime to snap out of it or for Izuru to show up in the Neo World Program, as she calls the latter a glitch/computer bug.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: She doesn't show any joy at all at her loss because in two showdowns between hope and despair, despair lost both times, making the outcome stale to her. She even fights back against Usami's attack in a bid to stay alive.
• Paper Tiger: Her giant form is intimidating, but it's ultimately nothing more than a dramatic prop with a bit of fanservice dropped in, there's nothing that form of hers can do that will impede the students that are much smaller than her.
• Returning Big Bad: She is one of the main antagonists in Goodbye Despair following her role in Trigger Happy Havoc, and retroactively Ultra Despair Girls. In the Future Arc anime and Killing Harmony, however, she doesn't return as an antagonist, as her only AI copy is deleted at the end of the second game.
• Revenge: The icing on the cake for her latest plan is trapping Byakuya, Kyoko, and Makoto in the Neo World Program so that she can torment them as payback for her defeat in Trigger Happy Havoc.
• Robotic Psychopath: As an AI copy of the original Junko Enoshima, "Alter Ego Junko" is pure evil.
• Say My Name: In the game's final Panic Talk Action, she will sometimes scream Izuru's name.
• Shout-Out: The sprite for one of her new personalities has her gain Doraemon's facial features, a reference to Monokuma's Japanese voice actress.
• Take Over the World: As if orchestrating the Tragedy wasn't enough, Junko's newest goal is to turn most of its survivors into copies of herself.
• Tsundere: One of her new personalities.
• Unexpected Character: The in-universe reaction to her reappearance, as Hajime and his friends were completely caught off guard by her direct involvement in their predicament.
• Unreliable Expositor: Danganronpa 3 reveals that many of the things she says here are twisted half-truths or flat-out lies. It's justified in that she's trying to make things look as hopeless as possible so that she can push everyone into despair.
• Villainous Breakdown: She begins losing it when Hajime is saved from despair by Chiaki (who should have disappeared by that point). Also notable in that her behavior towards her defeat is not the ecstatic glee of being able to experience death. Instead, it's a resigned misery at failing three times in a row.
  Junko AI: Th-that's impossible… that can't be hope… it's not even despair! WH-WH-WHAAAT IIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSS THIIIIIIIS!?
• The Virus: Her goal is to become this by uploading herself into all the students who "died" before finding a way to repeat the process for almost every other person on Earth.
• Walking Spoiler: It's almost impossible to mention her without talking about her suicide by execution at the end of the first game or revealing her final Evil Plan.
• Worthy Opponent: She still believes that hope only exists to fuel despair, and as such, she holds Makoto in such high regard that it borders on Villainous Crush. It's entirely one-sided.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Junko understands she's the "enormous Final Boss", but thinks she'll be fine since it's not an Action Game. She gets verbally taken down in minigames and destroyed by Usami in a cutscene after the trial is over.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: She is unfazed by Makoto, Kyoko, and Byakuya showing up because she wanted that to happen, leading to her turning what the survivors thought was a third option into an absolutely Sadistic Choice. As part of this, Junko tries to Break Them by Talking, and it actually briefly works.

Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls

The mastermind behind the Killing School Life, she desires despair and rejects hope despite the inherent contradiction of "hoping for despair." Her goal is to spread her twisted ideas to the rest of the world, with a cultish group of terrorists called Ultimate Despair assisting her in doing so. Additionally, the game's epilogue reveals that her AI program disguised herself as Shirokuma and Kurokuma to manipulate both sides of the kid-adult war in Towa City.

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• The Antichrist: Death doesn't stop her influence from spreading throughout the world and to others.
• Bad Boss:
  • Her AI program continues where Junko left off when talking to Izuru, to the point that one bit of what she said here returns as one of his despair-focused lines in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. A further level is retroactively added with Side: Despair's revelations about his relationship with Chiaki, which makes Junko's "hey, hey" come off as her mocking the girl.
  • As for Nagito, whatever kind of abuse she did left him with Mad Love for her and has made him even more unstable as if she never left him.
  • In addition, while controlling Big Bang Monokuma, she gets Monaca crushed under rubble and doesn't seem too concerned about her safety.
• Big Bad Ensemble: With Monaca, as each of them has their own plans for the future. Monaca is unaware that her despair-loving mentor made an AI program that was hidden within Kurokuma and Shirokuma.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: She quotes Chiaki's "hey, hey" once or twice while taunting Izuru.
• Bullying a Dragon: The two halves of Junko's AI program taunt Izuru in the game's epilogue. Her words of a future happening that even he can't predict causes him to finally snap the wires to silence her for now. He lingers there for a moment of what appears to be deep thought, most likely pondering over her words, before setting off to begin his plans that take place in Danganronpa 2, temporarily taking her place as the Big Bad/Greater-Scope Villain. It may or may not be retroactive foreshadowing about how he states that he can't choose any kind of future.
• Corrupt the Cutie: Her influence extended to the Warriors of Hope, especially Monaca.
• Foreshadowing: Really, the mere existence of Shirokuma and Kurokuma is a sign that Junko's the Greater-Scope Villain of Ultra Despair Girls, since they're essentially the "hope/despair" within her Monokuma unit split into two separate beings, and no one else would even dare to continue Monokuma's legacy (beyond Monaca's control) following the Killing School Life considering his legacy... except for Junko herself. As well as this, in English, Shirokuma's voice is her "fake cutesy" personality while Kurokuma is the voice of her "foul-mouthed punk" personality.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: In an odd way. Her role in Ultra Despair Girls is an AI of a deceased despair-obsessed fashionista-analyst coded into two Monokuma halves representing the individual parts of hope and despair who ends up driving a war between children and adults in Towa City through the brainwashing of a Green and Mean Hate Sink Creepy Child.
• Playing Both Sides: The war between Towa City's kids and its adults is all because of her meddling through Kurokuma and Shirokuma.
• Posthumous Character: Well, in body... but her AI self? Not exactly.
• Saved by Canon: Not the original Junko, but the Junko AI controlling Shirokuma and Kurokuma is later uploaded into the Neo World Program in Danganronpa 2.
• True Final Boss: Shirokuma contains half of her AI program, and he was unveiled as the one controlling Big Bang Monokuma.
• You Have Failed Me: Possibly. When Monaca's plan to mentally break Komaru falls apart, Alter Ego Junko takes matters into her own hands by having Shirokuma hijack Big Bang Monokuma so he can not only try to murder Komaru and Toko, but also destroy the controller. The trope comes into effect because it involves destroying Monaca's airship while she's still aboard.

Danganronpa Gaiden: Killer Killer

First appearing in two of Chapter 8's panels, a flashback in Chapter 10 unveils Junko as the mastermind behind the Giboura Massacre, as she instructed Mukuro to perpetrate the mass murder some time after she returned to Japan. It also transpires that she had those kids killed as part of a "power test" meant to make sure her older sister hadn't "lost [her] touch."

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• The Cameo: She briefly appears in Chapter 8 and Chapter 10.
• Evil Laugh: Junko's on the verge of belting one out as she gleefully tells Mukuro that in the foreseeable future, she'll "have [her] do something much, muuuuuuch more fun."
• Greater-Scope Villain: It was all because of Junko's orders to Mukuro that Shūji and Takumi became the Killer Killers. There's also how she's the founder of Ultimate Despair along with the mastermind behind the Tragedy and the "School Life of Mutual Killing."
• Gyaru Girl: To everyone who's in the dark about her true colors, she's the Super High School Level Gyaru.
• Harmful to Minors: As the orchestrator of countless crimes such as the massacre at Giboura Junior High School, this definitely applies to her.
• Hope Crusher: Why else is Junko the Super High School Level Despair?
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: A variation of this trope applies with regards to Junko ordering Mukuro to perpetrate the Giboura Massacre as a "power test." She knows her all too well because they're twin sisters.
  Junko: WELL, WELL, YOU DID GREAT ONEE-CHAN! Since ya just came back to this country, I was kinda worried. Though it looks like you haven't lost your touch at all in the process.
  Mukuro: R-really...
  Junko: This power test wasn't even necessary. But don't worry. Next time, I'll have you do something much, muuuuuuch more fun.
• Small Role, Big Impact: In two panels, it's established that Junko was involved in the massacre which changed Shūji and Takumi's lives for the worse.
• Slasher Smile: She sports such a smile in two of the panels she appears in.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Junko unintentionally ensures that the titular characters of Killer Killer become who they are.
• Villain of Another Story: She becomes the Big Bad of Despair Arc, Danganronpa Zero, and Trigger Happy Havoc.

Danganronpa 3: Despair Arc

Scouted into the 78th class of Hope's Peak Academy, Junko is a famous fashion designer and model who's conspiring to plunge the world into despair... because she simply feels that bored.

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• Abhorrent Admirer: Sometimes plays up her admiration for Izuru to Smitten Teenage Girl levels, though given that this is Junko, it's probably not genuine. Either way, he's unamused.
• Achilles' Heel: She has a hard time analyzing Makoto's luck, meaning that she can't predict what he'll do in the future.
• Alpha Bitch: Attractive, popular, rich, very influential, and gets off on making everybody miserable. Checks on all accounts.
• Arc Villain: She is the Big Bad of Side:Despair, which is justified as it's a prequel to Trigger Happy Havoc and tells the story of how she became the antagonist of the first game. Conversely, Kazuo Tengan is the Big Bad of Side:Future as a result of Junko's scheme to cause the apocalypse.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: She has incredible analytical abilities, letting her predict nearly anything several steps in advance.
• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • Despair Arc ends with Junko driving Class 77 into despair and orchestrating the Tragedy.
  • An interesting case in that according to her philosophy, she can't lose. Either she succeeds and the entire world falls into despair, or she loses and gets to experience the ultimate despair of everything she planned falling apart. There's a reason she was so giddy before and during her execution in Trigger Happy Havoc...
• Big Bad: Of Despair Arc, as she causes Hope's Peak's 77th class and the rest of the world to fall into despair. The story chronicles her setting the stage for the Tragedy.
• Blackmail:
  • In Episode 8, Junko tells Ryota that if he escapes, she'll force his classmates to participate in her next killing game—thus making them the "stars of [her] next video."
  • In Episode 10, she threatens to tell Kyosuke about Juzo's crush for him unless he declares her "[innocence]."
• Blatant Lies: While in the process of blackmailing Juzo, Junko claims that "it's not like [she's] devoid of compassion."
• Brains and Brawn: Junko's the brains to Mukuro's brawn.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: She seems to be talking to the viewer in her first appearance, being aware of her role in the plot and the direction it's going to take.
  Junko: A ravishing young girl sits at the airport—waiting. Her name? Junko Enoshima. Just then, a familiar face... yes! The other of the despair sisters—the smelly one. Mukuro Ikusaba.
  Mukuro: Hey, Junko. I'm grateful you came to meet me and all, but what are you doing?
  Junko: Duh! I'm doing the narration!
  Mukuro: Oh. Okay, cool.
  Junko: And so the event which would later bone the whole world—the Biggest, Most Atrocious Despair-Inducing Event in Human History—was finally set into motion that afternoon. Nobody realized it just yet, but they would soon enough.
• Call-Forward: She mentions how despair-inducing it would be if someone like Makoto ruined her "perfect plan." That's what happens, and this is her reaction when he does defeat her.
• Crazy-Prepared: She secretly took pictures of Juzo looking lovingly at a photo of Kyosuke because she knew she'd have to face him at some point, so she could blackmail him using those pictures.
• Cruel Mercy: After breaking Ryota during her final conversation with him, she lets him escape Hope's Peak Academy so he can live with the knowledge that his anime will drive his classmates into causing The End of the World as We Know It.
  Ryota: What plan is that?
  Junko: Duh! To spruce up that video footage I brought in! Way to knock it out of the park, Mitarai! In fact, I'm gonna make your whole class watch it start to finish! Just think of it—our little "collaboration" will change the very wiring of their brains! Your tricks are gonna cut through their free will like a knife! Those lovely classmates of yours will soon be creatures that wanna plunge the world into despair more than they've ever wanted anything ever! Dig it? LET'S HEAR IT FOR MITARAI; GIVE HIM A BIG HAND, EVERYONE!
  Ryota: That was DIFFERENT! I was gonna use all those techniques to bring about a better world! Using them for the sake of despair... it's terrible!
  Junko: Oh, please! You can play the victim all you want, but you were totally president of the Junko fan club like 20 minutes ago!
  Ryota: My... my life was in danger! I was being held hostage!
  Junko: Oh, right. That is so what happened to you. We threatened to kill you, so you ran with whatever we said! You haven't been responsible for your actions since we met! You can run off this campus with your tail between your legs, and no one would blame you in the least.
  Ryota: I really thought I was helping people...
  Junko: Run, coward, for that despair is yours and yours alone.
• Dark Messiah: Pulls this while trying to convince Izuru to join her.
  Junko: YOU'RE A GOD AMONG INSECTS, KAMUKURA; OF COURSE YOU'RE BORED! THE WORLD'S AN ANT FARM! EMBRACE DESPAIR, AND WE'LL SHATTER THE GLASS TOGETHER! I AM YOUR SALVATION! IT'S FATE! WE WERE DESTINED TO WALK HAND IN HAND! TELL ME YOU DON'T FEEL IT!
• Didn't See That Coming: Subverted. Junko clearly knows Makoto will be a problem since his luck is unpredictable, but she chooses not to kill him because of the possibility that he'd wreak havoc on her plan.
• Dissonant Serenity: She is calm and happy while watching the Tragedy of Hope's Peak Academy unfold.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Her treatment of Mikan and Mukuro is played to look awfully similar to Domestic Abuse. Even worse, the abused gets addicted to the treatment like some sort of sadomasochistic Stockholm Syndrome.
  • Junko's treatment of Juzo when she reveals that she knows he is gay is uncomfortably close to a brutal form of school bullying. She briefly stomps on his face while humiliating him, with a lot of students laughing at him as she does so. Also, Junko's comment about Juzo being a "love-lorn ingénue" has a viciously homophobic undertone to it.
• Domestic Abuse: She hurts and insults Mikan and Mukuro.
• Doomed by Canon: Junko executes herself in Trigger Happy Havoc.
• Establishing Character Moment: In her first appearance, she leaves a time bomb in the cab she takes to an airport near Tokyo.
• Evil Gloating: She gloats about her Evil Plan to several other people. One such instance has her say these words to Chiaki.
  Junko: What can you do? Miracles are such a racket. Your classmates are not coming to the rescue. They are gonna watch you die, though. So sad! No Hail Mary for you, class rep!
• Evil Laugh: She pulls this off quite a few times throughout Despair Arc.
• Evil Plan: With Mukuro's help, Junko wants to plunge the world into despair.
• Fan Disservice: Her relationship with Mikan has such dark undertones that it turned it into the opposite of Ship Tease.
• Faux Affably Evil: Junko gives off a disturbing vibe of false friendliness as she mercilessly destroys everything and everyone standing in the way of despair-inducing despair.
  Junko: The sooner you perish horribly, the sooner this video can flip rock bottom into prime real estate! Oh, my God; silly me. I mean... good luck!
• Fish Eyes: Whilst using her abilities as the Ultimate Analyst. It's hilariously disturbing.
• For the Evulz: She wants to destroy the world simply because it'd be boring to her otherwise.
• Fur and Loathing: The first time we see her, Junko's wearing a dress made of leopard pelt.
• Hannibal Lecture: She gives one to Izuru in Episode 6 which causes him to react with subtle surprise.
  Junko: Aww! You really don't get it. Guess when it comes to "cold, hard reasoning," not all roads lead to Rome. You see, despair is the great unknown. A girl can only be this smart for so long before anomie sets in; that's the curse of being bright. Everyone goes on and on about "hope," but what they really mean is "status quo!" Ah, but despair is a big old mystery box! There's nothing like it to get the blood pumping, the synapses firing, the senses tingling! It straight up shatters the status quo and paves the way for chaos! Think about it—when a single assassin's bullet can plunge humanity into world war, none of us are as far from the abyss as we'd like to tell ourselves! Embrace that simple fact, and voilà! You're in for the ride of your life! Look at me; every nerve ending is on eleven! Despair did that! Come on, pumpkin pie! Some part of you has to understand. They call you the "world's hope," Izuru Kamakura, and who am I to say you're not the savior? Therein lies the rub—hope only gets us as far as what we think we want. Safety, tranquility, boredom. Come on! Nirvana looks great on paper, but for someone with your intelligence... it's more like purgatory. You're better than that!
• Hope Crusher: Junko is hope's greatest enemy, wanting to bring about as much despair as possible. She cruelly does this to Chiaki by forcing her into a trap-filled dungeon with a Hope Spot at the end... just to make it all the more cruel when she does kill her so that she can push Class 77-B into despair.
  Junko: Despair needs a springboard! The grisly death of hope seems like the natural choice!
• Icy Blue Eyes: Her bright blue eyes are usually put in a light that makes them appear to glow whenever she's acting eerily.
• Immoral Journalist: After causing the Tragedy of Hope's Peak Academy by conducting the Student Council Massacre and recording it, she posts about it online to all of the academy's Reserve Course student body so she can incite a mob, while also telling them that the Izuru Kamukura Project was funded using their money. She intends for the mob to attack Hope's Peak and eventually bring it to destruction, which is precisely what happens.
• In Love with Your Carnage: Junko's infatuation with Izuru boils down to this. It can be especially seen in Episode 8 after she watched him shoot Nagito.
• Invincible Villain: Her plans don't suffer any setback until the Killing School Life. Since Despair Arc is a prequel showing how Junko drove the world to despair, it's a Justified Trope.
• Irony: For all her proclamations to Izuru that despair was the only thing that alleviated her constant boredom, Junko is left more bored than ever, as she's consigned to watching hope spread from her seat in the afterlife theater.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Invoked by Junko in Episode 11 for why she turns down Mukuro's suggestion of killing Makoto. She reasons that his luck "comes and goes" so randomly that he's the element she can't plan for. As such, it would make the potential despair she'd feel more enjoyable if he succeeds in derailing her scheme.
• Kick the Dog: Junko's blackmailing of Juzo is played as this since he becomes a sympathetic character by Episode 10.
• Kick the Morality Pet: Invoked and lampshaded, as she routinely attempts to harm or kill Mukuro as a way of causing herself despair. Mukuro just shrugs it off happily.
• Knight of Cerebus: Naturally, any shred of the Lighter and Softer tone of Despair Arc comes to an abrupt end after she arrives.
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • Her first appearance has her on the receiving end of this. She starts out by narrating the episode she's in, only for Mukuro to ask what she's doing.
  • She also does this herself. When taunting Juzo about how she knows who he's in love with, Junko pokes fun at his Ambiguously Gay status; ultimately, she says that he was in love with Chisa, just to pull off an I Was Just Joking, and finally reveal he was in love with Munakata all along.
  • In Episode 9, when she interrupts Chiaki and Izuru's conversation, she tells them to lay off the slow burn, referring to how their previous Held Gaze is often used in such works. In the original Japanese version, she went a step further and mocked the idea of this being a shojo manga.
  • She spends a good part of Episode 10 of Side:Despair lampshading and invoking the trope Love Hurts.
• Laughably Evil: Make no mistake here. At her core, Junko is pure evil, but she still manages to be hilarious and entertaining.
• Love Hurts: She invokes and uses this as part of her plans. She knows that loving someone makes them a weakness, so she purposely attacks them—such as using Juzo's love for Munakata against him while lampshading how much Unrequited Love hurts and how hard is to give up on it. She also targeted the person most loved by Class 77 because she knows that watching the death of someone they love is the quickest way to get others to fall in despair, and it would be much stronger than using a video showing the deaths of people they don't know.
  Junko: Chiaki Nanami—trusted, beloved—your untimely demise will scar your friends for life! Despair will corrupt them to the bone!
• Lovely Angels: A villainous variation with Mukuro, forming the "despair sisters."
• Mad Bomber: She blew up the taxi she was in and tried to kill Mukuro with a grenade.
• Manipulative Bitch: Excels at playing on people's desires and emotions to get them to do what she wants. With Izuru, she appealed to his desire for a non-boring future. With Ryota, she took advantage of his dream to use his anime to change the world. With Juzo, she blatantly blackmailed him by threatening to inform Munakata of his feelings for him if he didn't claim she was innocent.
• Mood-Swinger: While not as bad as in her debut in Trigger Happy Havoc, she is prone to having these at times. During one instance, Junko briefly switches to her sad personality. Other occurrences have her shift between her teacher personality, her cutesy personality, and her normal personality.
• Mundane Made Awesome: She can make the act of flipping a table look GLORIOUS.
• Near-Villain Victory: A retroactive case of this for the entire franchise. Despair Arc ends with Class 77-B brainwashed into spreading despair worldwide, Chisa beginning to act as Ultimate Despair's mole in the Future Foundation, and Junko planning for the Killing School Life. By all intents, she should've won completely, but Junko decided it would be best to leave Makoto alive because he could be potentially the one Wild Card she can't plan around... which is exactly what happens.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Murdering Chiaki by sending her into a death dungeon certainly brought the rest of Class 77-B under her sway, but it also turned Izuru against her, leading to the events of Goodbye Despair and Hope Arc.
• Nightmare Face: Both her Slasher Smile and her eyes when she is utilizing her analytical talent can be considered this.
• Non-Action Big Bad: While she is intelligent, charismatic, and extremely sadistic, she isn't exactly great in combat and usually relies on her sister when things get rough.
• Opportunistic Bastard: Thanks to her love of unpredictability, she's good at working unexpected things into her plan on the fly... such as a chance encounter with Mitarai.
• Outside-Context Problem: To the Steering Committee. They're not too worried about her personality issues because they have guards and they're used to corruption, but they have severely underestimated Junko; they simply don't understand the mind of a terrorist with no goal other than spreading despair, and an underling stronger than any guard they have.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: If her taunting of Juzo over being an Armored Closet Gay is anything to go by.
• Posthumous Character: She's dead, but her actions are still the driving force behind the plot in Side:Future. However, Junko's very much alive in Side:Despair, and she also shows up in the last episode of Side:Future alongside Chisa in the afterlife theater.
• Pragmatic Villainy: She could have ordered Mikan's murder after she discovered Mukuro packing Ryota's belongings, but she doesn't and leaves her with him—presumably because she can see that Mikan will prove to be highly useful to her and easy to manipulate.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: Junko is very energetic and easily excitable. She incorporates all of this enthusiasm into her plan to make the whole world fall into despair. She's even introduced happily narrating about her scheme as though it's part of some story she's observing.
• Saved by Canon: She survives the events of Despair Arc.
• Second Episode Introduction: Despite being the Big Bad of Side:Despair, Junko doesn't appear until Episode 5.
• Smitten Teenage Girl: Occasionally acts like this in front of Izuru, taking the role of a kouhai with a crush on her senpai.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Would anyone initially suspect the Ultimate Fashionista of masterminding a scheme to fill the world with despair?
• Unreliable Expositor:
  • While many players of Danganronpa 2 were already suspicious of her claims about the Tragedy of Hope's Peak Academy and Izuru's role in it, Danganronpa 3 establishes that she was outright lying. She painted Izuru as the only survivor and made it sound as though he'd singlehandedly murdered the academy's student council. However, Episode 7 shows that he actually watched most of the council slaughter each other. Izuru then indirectly killed one person, and even that was in self-defense. Afterwards, Junko used footage of him at the scene to convince the Reserve Course he was responsible, and in DR2, she plays up that lie to mentally break Hajime.
  • Episode 11 reveals she was lying about him being an Ultimate Despair by anything more than association. After hanging around with Junko for a bit, he left—to start plotting against her no less.
• Villain Ball: Invoked. She intentionally leaves Makoto Naegi alive due to his luck being unpredictable rather than killing him by force, leading to him becoming a Spanner in the Works in the climax of the Killing School Life where his optimism towards his classmates ends up being Junko's downfall.
• Villain with Good Publicity: She is a fashionista and fashion designer, with most people still being unaware of her love for despair at this point.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Episode 11 shows that she realized that Makoto was a threat, but instead of murdering him, Junko kept him alive because if he caused her plan to fail, she'd experience the "kind of despair [she lives] for."

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony

The Big Bad of the Hope's Peak Academy saga. Despite some evidence pointing her to being the Big Bad or the Greater-Scope Villain of this game too, she has nothing to do with how the killing game came to be (and apparently doesn't even exist in Danganronpa V3's setting). However, she appears in the Ultimate Talent Development Mode along with the casts from the first and second games, in an Alternate Universe where they are classmates with the newer cast.

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• Big Sister Bully: Inverted as she's the younger sister. However, as always, she's a bully to her older twin sister Mukuro and constantly insults her whenever they interact in Ultimate Talent Development Plan.
• Demoted to Extra: Junko is not the active cause of conflict this time around, serving as just a fictional character, but she is what inspired the entirety of V3 to happen in the first place and continues to be a huge Jerkass in the game's bonus modes.
• "Dinner, Bath, or Sex" Offer: In the Ultimate Talent Development Plan, she has the option to give this offer to Kazuichi, only to reveal that she was just messing with him.
• Everyone Has Standards: Played for Laughs in Ultimate Talent Development Mode, where even she finds the idea of losing a game of table tennis to Miu (or, in an event with Kokichi and Gonta, being compared with Miu at all) too despairing. She's also unwilling to leave Aoi alone with Teruteru, knowing what kind of person he is.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: In the bonus modes for V3 (including Ultimate Summer Camp), not only is the world not consumed by her despairing influence, the students of Hope's Peak Academy let her participate in casual activities because she never caused The Tragedy in the first place in the alternative timeline, and therefore they think she's still a normal student.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Despite apparently being a fictional character, she still inspired the real mastermind to start up the Killing School Semester.
• Harmless Villain: In Ultimate Talent Development Mode, where her strategy for giving herself despair is to not do anything villainous and just endure an ordinary three-year school life.
• Hijacked by Ganon: Played with. When everybody thought Kokichi was the mastermind, the actual mastermind planted fake evidence into making the students believe he was a Remnant of Despair. However, Kokichi has zero idea on who Junko even was. When everybody was ganging up on the mastermind in the final chapter, they cited the possibility of Junko coming back before pretending to be the 53rd "perfect reproduction" of her. In the end, Junko is uninvolved with how the Killing School Semester came to be.
• Not Me This Time: Junko was not the mastermind behind this Deadly Game, and she was only tangentially involved in the true mastermind's motives this time around. In fact, she supposedly isn't even a real person.
• Pet the Dog: In the Ultimate Talent Development Plan, she has moments where even she supports her classmates.
  • When Teruteru offers Donuts to Hina, she offers to try some too and act like a Food Critic (plus she's more willing to do so than Mukuro who has to be encouraged to try some by Hina).
  • During the Fashion Show, she supports the girls who are participating (as shown when she encourages Peko when it's her turn).
• Posthumous Character: She died during the final execution of the first game—and in this version of events, she's allegedly a fictional character.
• Self-Proclaimed Liar: She messes with Kokichi in Ultimate Talent Development Plan by stealing his schtick, which he quickly lampshades.
• Shameless Self-Promoter: In Ultimate Talent Development Plan, she's quick to advertise her fashion magazines to Sayaka.

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