Junko Enoshima

Junko Enoshima is the main antagonist in the 2010 video game series Danganronpa and is a villain from Meta-Verse Arcs 1-7.

## Appearance

At The end of the Killing School Life in *Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc*, Junko appears to be a young high school-aged teenager, but due to her causing her classmate's memory loss she is two years older than they all believed her and themselves to be. She has a tall hourglass figure, light blue eyes, and long, thick, bleached strawberry-blonde hair tied in two twin pigtails. Due to her talent, she wears heavy make-up along with (possibly fake) long red nails.

Despite not being identical twins, Junko and her older twin sister Mukuro Ikusaba share several physical characteristics. However, Junko has a considerably larger chest than Mukuro and weighs two pounds more than her. Junko's eyes are more round and larger and are blue with her contacts or naturally red compared to Mukuro's light purple eyes. Junko also lacks freckles.

Junko's usual outfit includes a black cardigan over a white dress shirt, with both left open to the third button to expose the top of her black-and-red bra, a red pleated miniskirt, and mid-sized black boots with platform heels and red laces. Her cardigan is accented with white symbols of her Former High School. She accessories with a long tie that hangs loosely around her neck with a design alternates between pure white (*Danganronpa 3*) and as half black and white with a prohibition sign on it (*Danganronpa 1*) that hangs loosely around her neck, a thin black choker, a red bow above her left breast, and two buttons on her right side.

Her most notable accessory is her signature twin bear hair clips that are based on Monokuma's two sides. The right clip is a completely white bear with dot eyes and a neutral expression, while the left is a black bear with a white muzzle, jagged red eyes, and a wicked smile. During her time at Hope's Peak Academy, she instead wore a set of hair slips of a cute bunny and a large red and white bow. This is the outfit her sister Mukuro wore when masquerading during the Killing School Life.

Due to her constantly-shifting personalities, Junko's appearance shifts slightly with her mood. Her "royal" personality dons a small gold and red crown with encrusted jewels, her "intellectual" personality wears glasses and styles her hair in a ponytail, her "depressed" personality sports a few multicolored mushrooms on top of her head, and her "cute" personality simplifies her entire appearance to appear more cartoonish, including smoother pigtails, large, bright eyes, and a small smile.

In *Danganronpa Zero*, it is stated that she looks much more average without her make-up. It is also shown that her natural hair and eye color is red, considering her she doesn't remember being "Junko Enoshima" while assuming her alternative identity: Ryoko Otonashi.

In (chronologically) earlier installments of the series, such as *Danganronpa Zero* and Monaca Towa's flashbacks in *Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls*, Junko is seen in the third variation of her Hope's Peak Academy outfit. Her cardigan has been removed, and her dress shirt is buttoned up to hide her bra. Her red bow tie is pinned on the left side of her dress shirt, and her right pigtail is held by a black bunny clip with red eyes. She also wears a black miniskirt and a new tie that lacks the circled X and has a different balance of white and black; the collar and knot are white, while the rest is black. Junko's nails are still painted red, but they are much shorter than in her other outfits.

## Personality

As a young fashionista, Junko Enoshima is described as simply "not fake", charismatic and eager to try new things. During her first appearances, she comes across slightly air-headed and hot-tempered. In the official artbook, she is described as a person who "drips with dissatisfaction the moment she opens her mouth" and tends to be in trouble with her classmates. She is also mentioned to be a bit too talkative with an overly carefree attitude.

However, Junko's real personality, revealed at the conclusion of the Killing School Life, is notably different: very apathetic and easily bored to an unhealthy and abnormal degree. Because of this, her behavior and mannerisms tended to be extremely erratic and unstable by her own autonomous design; keeping up one "appearance" for too long bores her, which causes her to often switch between different personas. However, she is capable of maintaining one persona for extended periods of time when necessary, such as when she was overseeing the students through Monokuma. Junko's "moods" included (but were not limited to) her Monokuma persona, sickening cuteness, severe depression, clinical sophistication, boisterous vulgarity, eerie stoicism, and haughty superiority. She switched between "moods" regularly, often imitating other students' expressions, which made for a highly unsettling conversation with the survivors. While entering the Hope's Peak Academy as one of Class 78's students, she often talked as if narrating a story, writing down her thoughts in a notebook.

Above all, Junko was deeply obsessed with despair, having found despair to be the most (and possibly the *only*) enjoyable emotion for her, whether it be inflicting despair unto others, or suffering from despair wholeheartedly. This made her extremely dangerous, as she wished to make *the whole world* feel absolute despair. However, this also often proved to be her biggest weakness, as she gave her opponents a "fair" chance to defeat her in order to make their despair all the greater if they fail, and happily welcomed her own despair if her plans failed.

Both Junko herself and the game's creators have confirmed that she truly has no reason to do the things she does other than despair itself, which makes her all the more dangerous and unable to be reasoned with. In *Danganronpa Zero*, it's revealed that her love for despair developed at quite a young age due to an unknown reason and that her true talent is her near-supernatural analytical skills. It's also shown that under her amnesiac state, Junko doesn't show a thirst for despair or particularly strong hatred of boredom, implying that her constant case of forgetfulness had spared her from embracing despair again. However, the return of her memories reverted her to her former ways. In *Danganronpa 3*, it's finally revealed that her talent is the reason why she is easily bored with the world (similar to Izuru Kamukura); her obsession with despair stems from her belief that it is completely unpredictable and thus exciting.

As the mastermind and leader of Ultimate Despair, Junko was shown to be highly intelligent, cunning, somewhat impulsive, extremely manipulative, and violent and cruel without remorse. She was a highly toxic individual, being both physically and mentally abusive to everyone around her. She manipulated people into falling madly in love with her and used their weaknesses, their *despair*, against them. Things like hope, peace, and happiness disgusted her, but she sometimes gave hope to others, only to turn it into greater despair later. She often manipulated people into doing bad things instead of directly doing them herself and then had a habit of blaming these manipulated people and claiming it wasn't her fault, as a part of proving her point that despair exists in everyone and that hope will naturally lose to that despair. While she is very skilled, Junko can also lie and cheat to further her own goals, even if it's hypocritical and goes against her beliefs. It should be noted that even though she claims despair is the great unknown, in the end, the road of despair went exactly the way she had planned.

Due to her urge to inflict despair, Junko has no qualms killing and sacrificing basically anybody to achieve her goals, including anyone she presumably actually cares or loves about. This includes her twin sister Mukuro Ikusaba or her love interest Yasuke Matsuda, and due to her extraordinary charisma, many of them such as the aforementioned Mukuro turn out to be willing sacrifices for her. Those who oppose her or the ones that she seeks to remove for her goals receive much worse fates and are more often than not killed or manipulated into joining her instantly as soon as they were found out.

## Powers and Abilities

Aside from her ability to put everyone into despair, or sense talent, hope and despair, she can use an invisible shield to protect herself and use Violent Noise, an attack in which she can project a very loud noise to make everyone paralyzed.