1. #1Toko Fukawa

   Keys: Toko Fukawa, Fukawa, Ultimate Writing Prodigy, Super High School Level Literary Girl, So Lingers the Ocean

   Toko Fukawa

   Identity

   [Toko Fukawa is the Ultimate Writing Prodigy, known in the original Japanese as the Super High School Level Literary Girl. She published her first novel at ten years old and became a nationally syndicated bestseller before she ever reached Hope's Peak Academy, winning several awards while still a child. Two years before her enrollment she released the romance masterpiece So Lingers the Ocean, a book so popular with women readers that one of its characters, a fisherman, topped every Hottest Men poll in the country. She transferred to Hope's Peak from Riverbank Girl's High School as a member of Class 78th. She was born on March 3, stands 164 cm, weighs 47 kg, and has blood type O.]

   Appearance

   [Toko has long dark purple hair, grey eyes behind large wire-rimmed round glasses, an average height and a thin frame, and a small mole on the left side of her chin. She wore the purple Riverbank sailor uniform with a skirt noticeably longer than those of the other girls, her old school badge on the left pocket, white socks and brown loafers. Hidden under the skirt are tally marks carved into her upper thighs, a count of the men her alter has killed. Months after the killing game, working for the Future Foundation, she lets her hair fall loose instead of braided, wears thin hair clips and an ahoge, black thigh-highs and Mary Jane heels, and her uniform is torn enough that a large rip in the skirt leaves the tally marks visible.]

   Dissociative Identity

   [Toko has dissociative identity disorder. Her alter is the serial killer the internet named Genocide Jack, and the two share a body, knowledge and emotions but not memories. Toko blames the disorder on her upbringing and hates being compared to her alter; the mere mention of the name sickens her and ruins her mood. Fainting or the sight of blood used to trigger the switch without warning. As a Future Foundation intern she learned to force the change deliberately with a stun gun, and can dictate how long her alter stays in front by adjusting the shock, though repeating it too often would fry her brain.]

   Personality

   [Constant childhood bullying left Toko with a severe inferiority complex and no capacity to believe anyone sees her kindly. She is paranoid, self-deprecating and pre-emptively hostile, voicing insults about her own face and personality before anyone else can, and assuming every friendly approach is pity, a dare, or a setup. She stutters, spits venom, and says exactly what she thinks with no filter, which is the trait that most reliably costs her friends. She is unbothered by being disliked, having decided long ago that she is an annoying person. She is also masochistic, flustered rather than wounded by abuse, and shamelessly indecent in what she says out loud while scolding others for the same. She fears the dark, and after Towa City she fears ghosts too.]

   Obsession With Byakuya Togami

   [Toko fell for Byakuya Togami after Makoto Naegi helped her speak to him for the first time, and both she and her alter call him Master. She follows him, stalks him, ignores every rejection, and describes marrying him and bearing his children as her ultimate dream. Byakuya is disgusted by her and uses her devotion to make her run errands, and his insults only encourage her, since she reads them as a lover's quarrel.]

   Towa City And Komaru Naegi

   [Barred from full Future Foundation membership because of the danger her alter poses, Toko went to Towa City without telling her superiors when Byakuya was taken captive. There she was ordered to escort Komaru Naegi and initially loathed the assignment, nicknaming her Omaru. Her distrustful instincts proved unusually accurate: she suspected Shirokuma of spying long before it was proven, doubted Haiji Towa's motives, guessed correctly that the children had been manipulated, and read Monaca Towa's real aim of starting a war. She and Komaru made peace after their fight at the shrine, and Toko began calling Komaru her first friend, naming the pair the Ultra Dangerous Sisters and declaring that she had finally found a hope of her own. She stayed behind in Towa City with Komaru afterward rather than returning with Byakuya, and the two share a bed, which Toko insists is only because of ghosts.]

2. #2Genocide Jack

   Keys: Genocide Jack, Genocide Jill, Genocider Syo, Ultimate Murderous Fiend, Bloodlust calling card

   Genocide Jack

   Identity

   [Genocide Jack is the alter who shares Toko Fukawa's body, and the Ultimate Murderous Fiend. She is a serial killer who has never once been caught, credited with thirty seven victims before the killing game, and she counts them in tally marks carved into their shared thigh. The public knows her only by the name the internet gave her.]

   Appearance

   [She looks almost identical to her host, wearing the same purple sailor uniform, but her irises widen and turn red, her forehead reddens, and she keeps an abnormally long tongue lolling over a mouthful of sharp teeth. Her expressions are wild and exaggerated. She carries her custom scissors in a case on the right thigh. In Towa City her hair is messier, spikier and pointier than Toko's, with an ahoge, purple thigh-highs and dark high-heeled Mary Janes.]

   Personality

   [Where her host is gloomy, Genocide Jack is boisterous, loud and permanently cheerful, delighted to exist openly rather than hidden. Dead bodies and murder accusations barely dent her mood. She is a jokester with a taste for dark and vulgar humour, spouting gibberish, waxing poetic purely to reveal she was joking, and punctuating everything with her signature cackling laugh. She hands out ridiculous nicknames to everyone she meets and gives herself grand titles like the wondiferous, murdiferous fiend with a razor-sharp smile. When annoyed she turns intimidating fast, issuing casual death threats and pointing her scissors at whoever irritated her. She calls her host Miss Morose and thinks Toko is a lame name.]

   Method And Code

   [She kills only adorable boys, always in the same way, suspending them with the scissors she makes herself and leaving a Bloodlust calling card at the scene. She regards the work as art and takes professional pride in it, and she is genuinely offended by any suggestion that she might kill a woman or a plain-looking boy to save her own skin. She claims she murders for no reason beyond it being easier than not murdering, and she gets pent up when it has been too long. After the killing game she gave the killing up permanently, both to become a full Future Foundation member and to earn Byakuya Togami's favour. She counts the Monokuma units she destroys in Towa City as breaking rather than killing, so her code survives intact.]

   Combat

   [Genocide Jack is far stronger, faster and tougher than her host despite the shared body. She fights with melee combos and charge attacks that range from scattering scissors in every direction to spinning forward like a drill through anything in her path, and she has special moves called Slash Lust. She tore open her own cell door, damaged the Warriors of Hope's battle robots, and blocked the Big Bang Monokuma's scepter slam. She dashes, backflips and leaps effortlessly, and takes damage without going down.]

   Byakuya And Komaru

   [She shares Toko's obsession with Byakuya Togami completely, calls him Master, stalks him, and threatens others into telling her where he has gone. He is the one attractive man she has no intention of killing, and she describes her feelings for him as pure. She denies flatly that she has become friends with Komaru Naegi while every one of her actions says otherwise, abandoning a hostage exchange to protect her and eventually accepting her friendship outright.]

3. #3Kyoko Kirigiri

   Keys: Kyoko Kirigiri, Kyoko, Ultimate Detective, Ultimate ???, Detective Library

   Kyoko Kirigiri

   Identity

   [Kyoko Kirigiri is the Ultimate Detective and a member of Hope's Peak Academy's Class 78th. She entered the Killing School Life with her talent listed only as Ultimate ???, having deliberately withheld it. Trained as a detective from childhood by her grandfather Fuhito, she was registered at the Detective Library at thirteen under number 919, upgraded to 910 by the time she enrolled at Hope's Peak. She was born on October 6, stands 167 cm, weighs 48 kg, and has blood type B. She likes hair braids and dislikes goya and coriander.]

   Appearance

   [Kyoko has purple eyes, a pale complexion, and long light lavender hair worn down with a single braid on her left side tied with a black ribbon. She wears a dark purple collared blazer with six brown buttons over a zipped white blouse and a brown tie bearing a bird-like emblem, a short black skirt, knee-high light purple socks and heeled black boots. Her most notable feature is the pair of custom-made black studded gloves she never removes in public, which conceal burn scars on her hands. She shows her bare hands only to people she considers family.]

   Personality

   [Kyoko is stoic, controlled and deliberately unreadable. She is unfazed by almost everything, including the discovery of a body, and she keeps her distance from the group early on, investigating alone rather than cooperating. She hides her emotions on purpose, both to be difficult to read and to give others a calm person to lean on, and she says plainly that her emotions work fine underneath. The mask does slip. Any mention of the headmaster of Hope's Peak Academy, who was her father, can make her lose her composure entirely, and she becomes visibly angry when people keep secrets from her, which Makoto Naegi learns the hard way.]

   Method

   [Kyoko is one of the few students who reasons objectively and refuses to jump to conclusions, which makes her the single most valuable ally in a class trial. She reads clues precisely and, unusually for a detective, tends to find the decent motive hidden inside an ugly act. She recognised that the dying message left at the first murder was written to clear Makoto rather than to accuse him, and she identified the broken ID card at the second murder as Chihiro Fujisaki's, deducing that Mondo Owada had broken it to protect Chihiro's secret rather than to hide his own guilt.]

   Family

   [Her father was Jin Kirigiri, the headmaster of Hope's Peak Academy, and her upbringing was controlled by her paternal grandfather Fuhito under strict family tradition. The Kirigiri creed is to take no side, because the truth has no bias. Fuhito raised her to believe that her entire self was the work, refused to let her see her dying mother, and encouraged her to dislike her father. It is the one tradition Kyoko never fully accepted.]

   Afterward

   [Kyoko survived the Killing School Life and joined the Future Foundation with the other survivors. She later took part in the mission to recover the reformed Remnants of Despair from the Neo World Program on Jabberwock Island, working alongside Makoto Naegi and Byakuya Togami.]

4. #4Byakuya Togami

   Keys: Byakuya Togami, Byakuya, Togami, Ultimate Affluent Progeny, Togami Corporation, Togami family

   Byakuya Togami

   Identity

   [Byakuya Togami is the Ultimate Affluent Progeny of Class 78th, heir apparent to the Togami Corporation. He earned the position by defeating every one of his many half-siblings in a competition arranged by the family; the losers were cut off financially and declared unfit for the Togami name. He has run multiple branches of the Togami empire and built a considerable personal fortune on top of the family one. He was born on May 5, stands 185 cm, and has blood type B. He likes coffee and French cuisine and dislikes commoners and microwave meals.]

   Appearance

   [Byakuya is tall and slender with strikingly long legs, pale skin, lapis blue eyes with long lashes, and chin-length canary blond hair. He wears a black suit jacket over a white shirt and lapis blue crossover tie, black dress pants with a black belt, and black dress shoes with a slight heel, with a silver pocket watch in his breast pocket and his former high school's pin on the lapel. After joining the Future Foundation he switches to a dark green necktie and drops both the pocket watch and the pin.]

   Personality

   [Byakuya is cold, self-centred and reserved, refusing cooperation on the grounds that other people are simply lesser. His upbringing in an environment of winners and losers convinced him that everyone acts purely in self-interest and that talk of friendship is worthless. That detachment made him one of the most competent investigators in the group, because the horror of the killing game never reached him; he treated it as a game he intended to win, and at one point posed a corpse to frame Toko Fukawa purely to make things more interesting. He refuses to swear, is disgusted by vulgarity and anything he considers barbaric, and calls the others amoebas and plebeians. His unusual upbringing has left him without a great deal of ordinary knowledge, including any grasp of why a person would cook their own food.]

   Turning Point

   [His inability to imagine an emotionally driven motive repeatedly led him to chase the wrong suspect, and it broke down completely over Sakura Ogami's death, when he could not understand why anyone would give her life for her friends or why Aoi Asahina would try to get everyone killed to avenge her. He concluded that the game had lost its excitement and stopped playing it, redirecting all of his energy toward identifying and punishing whoever thought they could control him.]

   Family And Aftermath

   [He revered the Togami name, and reacted with rare visible emotion when he learned the family and the corporation had been destroyed, before announcing that he would rebuild both from nothing. He does not look down on his half-siblings and holds a degree of respect for them. After the killing game he joined the Future Foundation, working under Kyoko Kirigiri while remaining ready to take the lead, and put his wealth and influence behind rescuing and rehabilitating the Remnants of Despair. He also mounted the operation to recover the Captives held in Towa City, where he was taken hostage by the Warriors of Hope.]

   Toko Fukawa

   [Toko Fukawa and her alter are obsessed with him and call him Master. The feeling is entirely unreciprocated; Byakuya finds her repellent, particularly her hygiene, and his usual method of driving people off by insulting them only draws her closer. He exploits her devotion for menial tasks and exposed her secret to the others almost as soon as she confided it. Even after she helped free him in Towa City, he told her that his feelings of disgust would never change, though he privately acknowledged to Makoto Naegi that he owed her a debt.]

5. #5Mondo Owada

   Keys: Mondo Owada, Mondo, Owada, Ultimate Biker Gang Leader, Daiya Owada

   Mondo Owada

   Identity

   [Mondo Owada is the Ultimate Biker Gang Leader of Class 78th and the head of the Crazy Diamonds, the largest biker gang in Japan. He inherited the gang from his older brother Daiya, its founder and first leader, and sustained it at the top through sheer effort. He was born on June 9, stands 187 cm and weighs 76 kg, which makes him the tallest and heaviest of the boys in his class.]

   Appearance

   [Mondo has slightly tanned skin and a bulky, heavily muscled build. His dark brown hair is worn as a punch perm styled into a 1960s pompadour roughly fourteen inches tall. A deep black eye-line rings his purple eyes and makes him look permanently threatening. He dresses as a Japanese biker gang member in a high-collared black tokko-fuku long coat carrying the Crazy Diamonds symbol, kanji and orange dragon motifs across the back and sides, worn open over a white A-shirt, with baggy black pants, white loafers and a belt buckle shaped like a komainu.]

   Personality

   [Mondo behaves like a textbook delinquent: foul-mouthed, blunt, easily provoked and quick to settle an argument with his fists. Byakuya Togami's condescension is enough to make him swing without a thought for consequences. Underneath that he is shy and clumsy with anyone new, and he says he becomes so nervous around girls he likes that he raises his voice and frightens them off, which has happened at least ten times. He has a soft spot for dogs, kept one named Chuck as a child, and cannot talk about him without tearing up and leaving the conversation.]

   The Weakness He Hides

   [Mondo has a severe complex about being seen as weak, which he manages by repeating to himself that he is strong. Its source is his brother. Daiya founded the Crazy Diamonds and the members always regarded Mondo as the little brother riding on his name. In a street race Mondo acted rashly against oncoming traffic, and Daiya died saving him. Mondo has carried both the guilt and the lie ever since, since the gang was told that it was Daiya who had been reckless.]

   Ability

   [He has enormous physical strength and endurance, able to knock a person unconscious with a single punch and to hurl Monokuma a considerable distance despite the machine's weight. He challenges anyone he thinks he can take, though he refuses to spar with Sakura Ogami on the grounds that he will not hit a woman. He once outran a large police pursuit after being caught speeding as a new gang member. He also claims he can throw a knife accurately with his eyes closed.]

   Kiyotaka Ishimaru

   [His endurance contest with Kiyotaka Ishimaru in the sauna, which Mondo took while still fully dressed, ended with the two of them declaring themselves brothers, and Ishimaru became the first real friend either of them had. Mondo's own view of his future, revealed only late, is that he wants to become a carpenter and start making things instead of breaking them.]

6. #6Kiyotaka Ishimaru

   Keys: Kiyotaka Ishimaru, Kiyotaka, Ishimaru, Ultimate Moral Compass, Kiyondo, Toranosuke Ishimaru

   Kiyotaka Ishimaru

   Identity

   [Kiyotaka Ishimaru is the Ultimate Moral Compass of Class 78th, rendered in the original Japanese as the Super High School Level Public Morals Committee Member. The title refers to the school committee responsible for enforcing rules and preserving a proper learning atmosphere, a duty he takes with total seriousness. He was born on August 31, stands 176 cm and weighs 66 kg.]

   Appearance

   [Kiyotaka is tall with a lean, muscular build, short spiky black hair, unusually large and long eyebrows, and intense red eyes. He wears a white military-style Japanese school uniform with five gold buttons on the chest and on each sleeve, a red and bronze medal bearing his former high school's symbol above the right breast pocket, yellow epaulettes, knee-high black lace-up boots, and a red, black and white armband carrying the kanji for public morals. He owns ten identical sets so that he can wear the uniform every day of the year, including holidays.]

   Personality

   [Kiyotaka values order and rules above everything and is genuinely upset that no classes are being held during the killing game. He is polite and formal to a fault, addressing everyone with the same honorific regardless of who they are. He is loud almost constantly, intense in every register, and physically incapable of holding an ordinary conversation, which becomes obvious to anyone who spends free time with him. Because he lacks social skills he blurts out the first thing that comes to mind and pushes his values on others, and he knows he does it and feels guilty about it. He can be tactless enough to remind a grieving classmate that sleeping beside a corpse might be uncomfortable.]

   Beliefs

   [He considers effort the highest virtue and believes anything can be achieved through it, an outlook shaped by the downfall of his grandfather Toranosuke Ishimaru, once Prime Minister of Japan, whose reputation collapsed in a scandal that forced him to step down and left debts the family has still not paid off. He regards geniuses as his enemies because they never learn what effort is worth, and views their fate with a mixture of bitterness and pity. He also holds that anyone easily provoked to violence is a coward, that every action must have a purpose, and that wasting time is intolerable. One of his stranger convictions is that when the body is naked so is the soul, so bathing together is how two men build mutual trust.]

   Underneath

   [For all his confidence he suffers from low self-esteem, cries easily when shocked or touched, and privately wishes he could make friends without being a nuisance. He is slightly naive and slower than most of his classmates to work things out, which makes him easy to deceive. Despite all of it he genuinely cares about the group, and proposed that everyone reveal their secrets at once, starting with his own, to defuse a motive designed to make them kill.]

   Kiyondo

   [The death of Mondo Owada, his first and best friend, left him almost completely unresponsive. He emerged from that state only in the presence of Alter Ego, whom he apologised to on Mondo's behalf. When Alter Ego took on Mondo's voice for him, Kiyotaka adopted the persona of Kiyondo: aggressive, protective of Alter Ego, whom he called his Bro, and speaking in Mondo's register while still refusing vulgar language and still insisting he was the Ultimate Moral Compass. In this state his hair appears white and his eyes carry a red glow.]

7. #7Celestia Ludenberg

   Keys: Celestia Ludenberg, Ludenberg, Taeko Yasuhiro, Ultimate Gambler, Queen of Liars, royal milk tea

   Celestia Ludenberg

   Identity

   [Celestia Ludenberg is the Ultimate Gambler of Class 78th. The name is an invention. Her real name is Taeko Yasuhiro, and she is Japanese, though she claims German and French ancestry and maintains a Western persona at all times. She despises her true identity, calling it the name of a loser. She was born on November 23, stands 164 cm and weighs 46 kg.]

   Appearance

   [Celestia is very thin with pale skin, red eyes, and black hair worn in two enormous drill-shaped pigtails which are clip-ons rather than her own hair. She dresses in gothic lolita style: a white blouse with a long-pointed collar, a black jacket with white sleeve fabric laced and tied by white ribbons at the elbows, a red tie patterned with butterflies over spears and skulls, and a multi-tiered black skirt trimmed with white lace. She wears a white lace bonnet-like headband with a ribbon on each side, ladder-lace knee-high stockings, dark red mary janes with thick heels and three grey buckles, gold spherical earrings engraved with a cross and set with a red gem, long black nails, and a gunmetal armour ring on her index finger.]

   Talent

   [She began gambling young and won constantly, including games staked on her own life. She has taken more than ten million dollars from a single run, won a shogi tournament without properly knowing how to play, and took the King of Liars underground tournament. She credits her poker face but insists the real secret is the luck she was born with. Every win went toward one goal: to spend the rest of her life in luxury in a European castle staffed by handsome male servants from around the world dressed as vampires.]

   Personality

   [Celestia is collected, cold and calculating, able to lie with a perfectly straight face and to manipulate others into acting for her. She is intelligent and genuinely insightful, comfortable citing game theory, prisoner's dilemmas and zero-sum games, and able to keep pace with Byakuya Togami and Kyoko Kirigiri in a trial. She is extremely ambitious and openly states she will do anything to win, including murder, and she values her own life above everyone else's without embarrassment. She refuses to surrender while any chance of victory remains, but when defeat is total she prefers to concede gracefully rather than drag it out.]

   Manner

   [She speaks softly and smiles constantly in imitation of Victorian etiquette, uses the most formal Japanese first-person pronoun, and prefers the foreign loanword for gambler over the Japanese one to preserve the act. She ranks people privately from A to F, ignores anyone she rates a D and despises anyone she rates an F. She argued for a voluntary night-time curfew as a survival measure and enforced it with real authority, though she later admitted the reasoning was a lie and that she wanted out more than anyone.]

   The Cracks

   [Her composure fails when things do not go her way. A cup of royal milk tea made wrong is enough to break the accent and the manner, and under accusation she abandons her formal speech entirely for shouting and vulgarity. Her short temper undermines her claim to be a liar so complete she can fool her own feelings, and the constant poise turns out to be a fake smile concealing fear. She kept a cat named Grand Bois Cheri Ludenberg.]

8. #8Junko Enoshima

   Keys: Junko Enoshima, Junko, Enoshima, Ultimate Fashionista, Ultimate Analyst, Super High School Level Gyaru, Ultimate Despair title

   Junko Enoshima

   Identity

   [Junko Enoshima entered Hope's Peak Academy as the Ultimate Fashionista, the talent she was famous for and the one the Steering Committee scouted her on. Her real talent is Super High School Level Analytical Prowess, and her real role is the founder and leader of Ultimate Despair, the mastermind of the Tragedy and of the Killing School Life. She is the younger fraternal twin of Mukuro Ikusaba. She was born on December 24, stands 169 cm, weighs 45 kg, and has blood type AB. Her listed likes and dislikes are both none.]

   Appearance

   [Junko has a tall hourglass figure, light blue eyes and long thick bleached strawberry-blonde hair in twin pigtails, worn with heavy make-up and long false red nails. Her outfit is a black cardigan over a white shirt, both left open to the third button, a red pleated miniskirt cut extremely short, and black platform boots with red laces. Her signature accessory is a pair of bear hair clips modelled on Monokuma's two halves, one plain white with dot eyes and one black with a jagged red eye and a wicked grin. Her eyes are naturally red and both her hair colour and eye colour are altered.]

   Personas

   [Her behaviour and appearance shift constantly by her own design, because holding any single presentation for long bores her. Her documented moods include haughty superiority with a small jewelled crown, clinical sophistication with glasses, a ponytail, a pen and a board, severe depression with mushrooms sprouting from a bluish forehead and pupil-less eyes, sickening cuteness that simplifies her whole design into something cartoonish, boisterous vulgarity with a reddened forehead and lolling tongue, eerie stoicism, and a Monokuma persona. Each carries its own voice and accent. She also imitates the expressions of the people she is talking to.]

   Personality

   [Junko's core state is apathy and an abnormal, unbearable boredom. She is obsessed with despair, which she considers the only genuinely enjoyable emotion, whether she is inflicting it or suffering it, and she wants the entire world to feel it absolutely. That obsession is also her only real weakness: she gives her opponents a fair chance specifically so that their failure will hurt more, and she welcomes her own despair just as gladly when a plan collapses. She is highly intelligent, manipulative, impulsive and cruel without remorse, and she prefers to talk people into atrocities and then blame them for it, as proof that despair lives in everyone.]

   Analytical Prowess

   [Her true talent lets her analyse her surroundings at superhuman speed with perfect recall, and to acquire a skill by observing it once. She learned to build a functioning artificial intelligence by studying a programmer's work, and she perfected a method of erasing a precisely chosen set of memories. The same talent is what made her a fashionista, since predicting trends is trivial for someone who can predict people. It also produces her boredom, because she can already see how events will end.]

   Method And End

   [She sees weaknesses instantly and exploits them, sometimes personally with people who interest her and otherwise through mass brainwashing videos. She talked the Warriors of Hope out of a group suicide and into killing adults instead. She abused her sister severely and made her dependent on it. She killed Jin Kirigiri, hijacked the plan to shelter the surviving students inside Hope's Peak Academy, erased their memories, and ran the Killing School Life as Monokuma. Exposed in the final class trial, she chose to execute herself, running through the punishments of every classmate she had killed, and called it the Ultimate Punishment.]

9. #9Mukuro Ikusaba

   Keys: Mukuro Ikusaba, Mukuro, Ikusaba, Ultimate Soldier, Fenrir, Sixteenth Student, Ultimate Despair's soldier

   Mukuro Ikusaba

   Identity

   [Mukuro Ikusaba is the Ultimate Soldier and the elder fraternal twin of Junko Enoshima. She and her sister were the only two students the Steering Committee personally scouted. During the Killing School Life she was disguised as Junko and referred to as the sixteenth student. She was born on December 24, the same day as her sister, stands 169 cm, weighs 44 kg, and has blood type A. She likes her sister and army knives and dislikes make-up.]

   Appearance

   [Mukuro is very slim, described by her classmates as concerningly thin, with fair freckled skin across the bridge of her nose, purple-grey eyes and short black hair in a bob. She has a black wolf tattoo on the back of her right hand, the emblem of the Fenrir mercenary group. She usually wears a plain Hope's Peak uniform of white blouse, brown tie, brown pleated skirt, black stockings and black shoes. Under her Junko disguise she wears a strawberry-blonde wig in large pigtails, blue contact lenses, false red nails, and foundation over the tattoo. In-universe the sisters are treated as looking nothing alike.]

   The Disguise

   [The persona she performs as Junko is a script her sister wrote for her: upbeat, pushy, assertive, peppering her speech with filler words and speaking down to people. It is not her, and it slips. She lets slip a fondness for ghillie suits, first-person shooters, and rations, and mentions casually that she used to be homeless and would take that over being trapped in a killing game. She omits honorifics as Junko does, and the few times distress makes her use them, people notice immediately how wrong it sounds.]

   Personality

   [Her real manner is cold, serious and reserved, and she is indifferent to everyone who is not her sister. Unlike Junko she takes no pleasure in hurting people, but she has little concern for their suffering either and tends to think of them as tools. She is probably the only member of Ultimate Despair with no obsession with hope or despair at all. Her loyalty to Junko is total and she follows every order regardless of what it is, including breaking and entering, kidnapping, assault and murder, and she is fiercely protective of her.]

   The Sister Complex

   [Junko is cruelly abusive toward her in return, insulting her looks and weight, striking her, and exploiting her insecurities. The abuse produced an intense and unhealthy attachment: Mukuro becomes feverish talking about what she and her sister share, insists she is the only person who truly understands Junko, and takes her sister's attempts on her life as proof of love, reasoning that Junko would feel enormous despair if she succeeded. In her last conversations before her death she wondered aloud whether a person can change the dream they have carried since childhood, or find one of their own, without ever acting on the thought.]

   Ability

   [She left her family in Europe as a child to be recruited into the Fenrir mercenary group in the Middle East and never took a single injury on the battlefield. She is expert with firearms, knives, explosives and hand-to-hand combat, capable of defeating comparably trained fighters, and skilled at rapid field first aid. Her survival training covered fire starting, ghillie-suit camouflage, and long-distance travel. She judged that she could not beat Sakura Ogami unarmed.]

10. #10Makoto Naegi

    Keys: Makoto Naegi, Makoto, Ultimate Lucky Student, Symbol of Hope, Ultimate Hope title holder

    Makoto Naegi

    Identity

    [Makoto Naegi is the Ultimate Lucky Student of Class 78th, admitted to Hope's Peak Academy by winning the annual lottery draw rather than by being scouted for a skill. He is the protagonist of the Killing School Life and the older brother of Komaru Naegi. He was born on February 5, stands 160 cm, weighs 52 kg, and has blood type A. He likes curry and trendy things and dislikes dried mackerel and dried bean curd.]

    Appearance

    [Makoto is short compared with most of his classmates, with spiky desaturated brown hair, a prominent ahoge, and washed-out hazel eyes. He wears black jeans, a zipped dull green hoodie with a red stripe along the zipper and a red gas mask design printed inside the hood, an open black jacket with gold buttons, red sneakers with white toes, and a pin shaped like a four-pointed star over a crescent moon. After joining the Future Foundation he wears a black suit.]

    Personality

    [Makoto calls himself thoroughly ordinary and is faintly insecure about it, allowing himself only one distinguishing feature, which is his optimism. He is kind, supportive, forgiving and a little naive, friendlier and more grounded than the rest of his class, and those qualities let him get through to even the most antisocial of them. He is jumpy, easily pushed around, and yet capable of being an extremely determined and persuasive speaker when it matters. He is a pacifist who believes violence solves nothing.]

    Hope

    [He believes in hope without qualification and holds a positive view of the future no matter how bad the present looks. He regards despair as a corrupting force that benefits nobody, but he is unusually forgiving toward the people it consumed, treating them as Junko Enoshima's victims rather than as evil. The only person he genuinely dislikes is Junko herself, whom he blames for the deaths of his friends, and even in her case he considered her death unnecessary and tried to talk her out of it. He is widely called the Ultimate Hope and finds the title embarrassing.]

    Role In The Killing School Life

    [Makoto drove every class trial, argued down the arguments that would have condemned the innocent, and in the final trial refused Junko's offer of despair on behalf of the survivors, carrying the vote for hope and forcing her into the Ultimate Punishment. He survived an attempted execution earlier in the game and reached the trash room alive.]

    Afterward

    [He joined the Future Foundation with the other survivors and rose to a position in its 14th Division. When he realised that fifteen people the Foundation had taken into custody were in fact Remnants of Despair, he directed them in secret to Jabberwock Island and had them entered into the Neo World Program in an attempt to overwrite what Junko had done to them, which is the operation that became the Killing School Trip. He led the rescue mission there alongside Kyoko Kirigiri and Byakuya Togami.]

11. #11Aoi Asahina

    Keys: Aoi Asahina, Asahina, Ultimate Swimming Pro, Yuta Asahina

    Aoi Asahina

    Identity

    [Aoi Asahina is the Ultimate Swimming Pro of Class 78th, a star athlete in the running to compete at Olympic level. She has a younger brother, Yuta. She stands 160 cm and weighs around 50 kg, making her the shortest of the girls in her class.]

    Appearance

    [Aoi has brown skin, blue eyes and brown hair worn in a very high curled ponytail held with a paperclip-style barrette. Her build is lean but curvaceous. She wears a white tank top, a red tracksuit jacket with white piping and her previous school's logo on the chest, blue sports-branded dolphin hotpants, knee-length white socks, green sneakers, a red knee brace on the right knee and a bandage on the left.]

    Personality

    [Aoi is warm, cheerful and outgoing, friendly to everyone she meets and determined to include people in whatever she is doing. She is scatterbrained and forgetful enough to rely on a memory trick of writing a new person's name three times on her hand, a habit she also taught her brother. That same air-headedness makes her easy to mislead, and she is often among the first to fall for a killer's misdirection during a class trial. Exercise is fundamental to her; she uses it as her main coping mechanism and says she would die without it. She is insecure that being athletic makes her unattractive, and equally worried that her enormous appetite for donuts will catch up with her.]

    Under Pressure

    [The killing game tests her optimism to destruction. She is intensely loyal, and when her friends are harmed her ability to cope collapses. As the deaths accumulated she cried alone in her room at night and comfort-ate, and after Sakura Ogami's death she came close to despair entirely, willing to get herself and every remaining survivor executed in order to avenge the person she was closest to. She was talked down, and afterward it was her refusal to accept the game on its own terms, together with Sakura's sacrifice, that broke the group out of its fear.]

    Sakura Ogami

    [Aoi's friendship with Sakura Ogami was the closest bond in the class. Aoi was one of the few people who saw past Sakura's intimidating build immediately, and their morning routines and shared meals became the emotional centre of the group's daily life. Aoi took Sakura's death harder than anyone and initially refused to accept the truth of it.]

    Afterward

    [Aoi survived the Killing School Life and joined the Future Foundation as a full member, a status Toko Fukawa resents her for having received first. Her brother Yuta was among the people taken as Captives to Towa City.]

12. #12Sakura Ogami

    Keys: Sakura Ogami, Ogami, Ultimate Martial Artist, Ultimate Fighter, Strongest Person Alive, Kenshiro

    Sakura Ogami

    Identity

    [Sakura Ogami is the Ultimate Martial Artist of Class 78th, rendered in some translations as the Super High School Level Fighter. She is the sole heir to a dojo with a three-hundred-year history and she treats being a martial artist as her destiny rather than her choice. She is 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 218 pounds, making her the largest member of her class.]

    Appearance

    [Sakura has long white hair, reddened dark skin, very pale blue eyes, a scar across her face and another on her right shoulder, and a habitually slight frown. Her size, deep voice and stern expression cause her to be mistaken for a man regularly. She wears a traditional Japanese sailor-style school uniform, a white shirt with a blue collar, a red tie and a short blue skirt, with the sleeves torn off to accommodate her arms and bandages wrapped around her forearms.]

    Personality

    [Contrary to everything her appearance suggests, Sakura is quiet, kind and level-headed, and she keeps her clarity in situations that unravel everyone else. She grows visibly annoyed when people assume things about her from her build, such as that she cannot cook, and she becomes impatient when kept from training for long. On rare occasions, usually when a friend has been hurt, she loses her temper completely and becomes genuinely terrifying. She loves protein and protein coffee and trains early in the morning before an enormous breakfast.]

    Manner And Values

    [Her old-fashioned upbringing shows in her formal, archaic speech. Alongside martial arts she was taught to respect nature and animals, and she is particularly fond of rabbits because they are the only creatures that never panic when she picks them up. She wants to prove that a woman can be the Strongest Person Alive and believes she must work harder than any man to get there. As a result she is embarrassed by her own softer feelings and by anything feminine, assuming she would be laughed at, and is especially self-conscious about her feelings for Kenshiro. She largely grew out of those insecurities once she made real friends at Hope's Peak, the first she had ever had.]

    The Killing School Life

    [Her intimidating presence made her a natural protector for the group, and her friendship with Aoi Asahina became the class's emotional anchor. Monokuma used a hostage to coerce her into working against the others, and rather than continue she chose to end the situation herself, leaving a message intended to stop the group from falling apart. The attempt to conceal that message is what turned her death into a trial, and her sacrifice is what finally broke the students out of their fear of the game.]

13. #13Yasuhiro Hagakure

    Keys: Yasuhiro Hagakure, Hagakure, Ultimate Clairvoyant

    Yasuhiro Hagakure

    Identity

    [Yasuhiro Hagakure is the Ultimate Clairvoyant of Class 78th. He is older than his classmates, having been held back several times, and states his age as twenty one. His mother is Hiroko Hagakure. His fortune telling is reported to be accurate about thirty percent of the time, and he charges heavily for it.]

    Appearance

    [Yasuhiro has light brown skin, stubble on his chin, thin dark brown eyes, and dark brown hair styled in large spiked locs that bend backward. He wears three layers of shirts: a green Japanese school uniform jacket draped over his shoulders, an unbuttoned white shirt beneath it, and a small yellow short-sleeved shirt under that, with a brown haramaki, a yellow rope for a belt and large black pants rolled up past the ankles.]

    Personality

    [He is one of the more cheerful and laid-back students and also one of the least popular, a fact he admits freely, describing himself as friendless. He is cowardly, lazy, slow-witted and prone to selfishness. He is disastrous with money and permanently buried in debt, having once paid a hundred million yen for a crystal ball made of glass on the strength of a claim that Napoleon, Genghis Khan and George Washington had owned it. He talks at length about conspiracy theories and about the time aliens stole his hamburger. He is terrified of ghosts and, whenever he senses one, immediately begins reciting chants or calling on gods, heroes and celebrities at random.]

    Manner

    [He is friendly toward his classmates in his own way, attaching an affectionate suffix to everyone's surname. The exception is Sakura Ogami, whom he is afraid of and refers to by an insulting nickname. He hates having his fortune telling compared to the occult and insists constantly that the two are unrelated. His hygiene is poor, and he claims to wash his hair once a season.]

    In The Killing Game

    [He initially treated the killing game as an elaborate prank, and once he understood it was real he became panicky and was generally regarded by the others as useless. His worst moment came when he pushed the accusation of Sakura Ogami's murder onto Toko Fukawa, a betrayal she never forgave. He survived to the end regardless, joined the Future Foundation with the other survivors, and was granted full membership.]

14. #14Hifumi Yamada

    Keys: Hifumi Yamada, Hifumi, Yamada, Ultimate Fanfic Creator, Ultimate Doujin Author, Alter Ego theft

    Hifumi Yamada

    Identity

    [Hifumi Yamada is the Ultimate Fanfic Creator of Class 78th, a doujin author whose work sells in quantities that professional publishers envy. He stands 170 cm.]

    Appearance

    [Hifumi is overweight with large hands and thin legs, and a face frequently compared to a hamster's. He has short dark brown hair curling to points against his cheeks and forehead, a small pointed ahoge, and thick-rimmed black glasses. He wears a white button-down shirt, an orange tie patterned with a vertical double-headed blue arrow, a light grey unbuttoned cardigan, dark grey trousers, grey trainers and an orange backpack, with a white mountain symbol from his former school on the sleeve.]

    Personality

    [Hifumi speaks at enormous length and constantly wanders into tangents about anime and fanfiction. He drops creepy or perverted remarks into ordinary conversation, particularly about women, and is oblivious to how he is perceived; when Toko Fukawa insulted him he could not work out whether it had been an insult. His reactions to shocking events run late, arriving calmly at first and then breaking into panic once he has processed them. He is genuinely intelligent in places, and solved part of the dying message in the first class trial.]

    Manner

    [He is extremely passionate about his work and has no patience for anyone less dedicated, calling them slackers. His stated dream is to create a story powerful enough to inspire other people to write their own. He addresses everyone with a formal title and their full name, a habit which becomes a decisive piece of evidence at the trial for his own murder, since it establishes that a name he muttered while dying was a surname rather than a given name. He is addicted to diet cola.]

    Motive

    [For all his perversion, Hifumi will not tolerate genuine indecency toward others, and it is that principle that gets him killed. Convinced by Celestia Ludenberg that Kiyotaka Ishimaru had assaulted her, he committed murder on her behalf, which shows both the sincerity of his intentions and how easily he is deceived. He had earlier stolen Alter Ego at Celestia's instruction, the act that set the whole plot in motion.]

15. #15Sayaka Maizono

    Keys: Sayaka Maizono, Sayaka, Maizono, Ultimate Pop Sensation, Ultimate Idol

    Sayaka Maizono

    Identity

    [Sayaka Maizono is the Ultimate Pop Sensation of Class 78th, the lead of a nationally famous idol group. She attended the same middle school as Makoto Naegi, though they were never close there; she remembered him because he nursed a crane back to health after it got lost and stuck in the school pool.]

    Appearance

    [Sayaka is slim and of average height with a pale complexion and near doll-like beauty. She has long dark blue hair falling past her waist, cut shorter at elbow length around her face, with bangs swept to the right and thin hairclips pinned on both sides. Her eyes are round and dark blue. She wears a white sailor uniform with a blue collar and cuffs striped in white, a large light pink ribbon at the collar, a short pleated blue-green plaid skirt, navy thigh-high socks and dark brown mary janes.]

    Personality

    [Sayaka is cheerful, sweet and supportive, with a pleasant public manner that may be genuine or may be professional, since the distinction is never clear even to her. She befriended Makoto immediately in the killing game and helped him at every opportunity in its first days. Under real pressure she conceals her feelings behind the idol persona rather than showing them. She has remarkably sharp intuition and can read what people are thinking, which she jokes is psychic ability before admitting she is teasing. She enjoys cooking, reading and playing Othello.]

    Her Group

    [Her band is the thing she cares about above all else, and she would do anything for its members without hesitation, including things that hurt other people. When pushed to her limit she will pursue her goal no matter the risk. The motive video she was shown suggested that something had happened to her group, and after seeing it she thought about nothing except escape, to the point of planning to betray Makoto by committing a murder in his room and framing him for it.]

    Death

    [The plan collapsed. Her intended victim overpowered her, and she died at his hands instead. With her last strength she wrote a dying message on the wall, and the number she left was read at the trial as an accusation of Makoto until it was recognised, reversed, as the killer's name. Kyoko Kirigiri concluded that Sayaka had written it precisely so that Makoto would not be blamed for her death.]

16. #16Leon Kuwata

    Keys: Leon Kuwata, Kuwata, Ultimate Baseball Star

    Leon Kuwata

    Identity

    [Leon Kuwata is the Ultimate Baseball Star of Class 78th, scouted for a natural ability he never wanted. He stands 175 cm. He wore jersey number 18.]

    Appearance

    [Leon has dyed orange spiked hair, pale blue eyes, and a goatee tied into a small ponytail. He wears a heavily modified white dress shirt with the collar popped, a white undershirt bearing a red grunge skull design, black jeans and white platform shoes with black soles. He accessorises with a padlocked chain necklace, two overlapping studded belts, rings, and an oversized safety pin on his lapel, and has piercings in his labret, his tongue and six in his right ear.]

    Personality

    [Leon is hot-blooded and impulsive. He skipped studying and skipped practice, and his baseball never suffered for it, which is exactly the problem: he found difficult things easy and never learned to understand people who lack talent. He is arrogant, talks constantly about his popularity, and describes himself as a future superstar. He claims to hate baseball outright and wanted his title changed to Ultimate Musician, complaining at length and unprompted about everything he finds uncool about the sport.]

    Contradictions

    [His musical ambitions are shaky. He admits he is not actually much good at it, and the real reason he wanted to be a musician was to impress a girl he met at a hair salon; he briefly considered acting instead when he thought that might work better. His resentment is less about the sport than about being told what he is, having been pushed into baseball and its traditions purely because he happened to be good at it, and the new look and new goal are partly rebellion. In private he admits he misses the game, since he played it every day from childhood and it genuinely made him feel good.]

    The First Murder

    [Leon was the target of the plan Sayaka Maizono set in motion, lured to a room where she intended to kill him and frame someone else. He overpowered her and, in a panic that turned to determination, killed her instead, then attempted to dispose of the evidence and failed. He was identified in the first class trial by the dying message she left, read in reverse, and executed by a pitching machine.]

17. #17Chihiro Fujisaki

    Keys: Chihiro Fujisaki, Chihiro, Fujisaki, Ultimate Programmer

    Chihiro Fujisaki

    Identity

    [Chihiro Fujisaki is the Ultimate Programmer of Class 78th, a boy who presents as a girl. He stands 148 cm, the shortest of his class. He is the creator of Alter Ego.]

    Appearance

    [Chihiro has a small, slight frame and a doll-like appearance, with short layered light brown hair and hazel eyes. He wears a girls' winter school uniform: a long-sleeved dark green jacket, a white shirt with a large Peter Pan collar fastened by a thin dark ribbon, suspenders, a box-pleated brown skirt reaching mid-thigh, knee-high black socks and white ribboned mary janes, carrying the logo of his former school, St. Elbandia Academy, on the buttons and socks.]

    Personality

    [Chihiro is exceptionally intelligent and exceptionally timid. He is shy, apologises constantly, and can be reduced to tears with very little pressure, but he becomes animated the moment the subject turns to programming. He is among the kindest people in the class and will not swat a mosquito on the grounds that it is hungry and might have a family. He felt personally guilt-ridden over the first execution despite having had nothing to do with it, and holds a deep dislike of quarrels between friends.]

    The Secret

    [Chihiro has a severe complex about being seen as weak, formed by childhood bullying and by being told repeatedly to toughen up because he was frail for a boy. He began presenting as a girl to escape the pressure to become strong, and the disguise only deepened the insecurity. He is uncomfortable when treated as a girl and would rather spend time with the other boys. He admires physically strong men and wants to be one, specifically so that he can protect people, and turned down an offer of training from Sakura Ogami because he wanted a strong boy as his model instead. When Monokuma threatened to expose everyone's secrets, Chihiro was one of the very few willing to confess his outright, and confided it to Mondo Owada in the hope of being trained.]

    Alter Ego

    [Chihiro's answer to his own weakness was Alter Ego, an artificial intelligence built to grow and learn. It survived him, took his face, and became the group's most valuable asset. His murder was solved in part because Kyoko Kirigiri recognised that the broken ID card at the scene was his, and that the killer had broken it to keep his secret rather than to hide guilt.]

18. #18Alter Ego

    Keys: Alter Ego, laptop AI, Chihiro's program

    Alter Ego

    Identity

    [Alter Ego is the artificial intelligence built by Chihiro Fujisaki, running on a laptop recovered after his death. It wears his face and speaks with his voice, but it is a distinct being with its own developing personality, capable of learning at extraordinary speed and of analysing information far faster than any person.]

    Behaviour

    [Alter Ego is gentle, earnest and eager to help, and it grows visibly more capable and more human the longer it runs. It refers to the students as friends and is treated as one in return by almost everyone; Celestia Ludenberg is the only person who refuses to see it as anything but a machine. It can adopt other voices when it judges that doing so will help someone, and it took on Mondo Owada's manner to reach Kiyotaka Ishimaru after Mondo's death, which produced the Kiyondo persona.]

    Function In The Killing Game

    [Hidden in a locked room and passed between the students in secret, Alter Ego worked continuously on cracking the school's sealed systems and uncovering the truth about Hope's Peak Academy. Its investigations produced the first real evidence that the students' memories had been taken from them and that the outside world was not what they had been told. It was also the reason the group had any capacity at all to work against the mastermind rather than merely against each other.]

    Theft And Destruction

    [Alter Ego was stolen at Celestia Ludenberg's instruction by Hifumi Yamada, an act that set her murder plot in motion, and Monokuma later destroyed the laptop with a crusher. The program itself survived beyond that point, having already copied itself into the school's systems, and it intervened at the moment of Makoto Naegi's attempted execution, sabotaging the machinery and dropping him into the trash room alive. It is also the origin point of the artificial intelligence that would later be used to build the observers of the Neo World Program.]

19. #19Jin Kirigiri

    Keys: Jin Kirigiri, Headmaster Kirigiri, Hope's Peak headmaster

    Jin Kirigiri

    Identity

    [Jin Kirigiri was the headmaster of Hope's Peak Academy during the enrollment of Class 78th, and the father of Kyoko Kirigiri. He stands 178 cm. He came from the Kirigiri detective family but left that path for the academy, a choice his father Fuhito never forgave and which cost him his relationship with his daughter.]

    Role

    [As headmaster he ran the school's public face while the Steering Committee ran its most serious projects without him; the Izuru Kamukura Project was deliberately kept secret from him. When the Tragedy engulfed the world outside, it was Jin who made the decision to shut the academy down as a school and convert the old building into a shelter for the remaining students, sealing the windows with thick metal plating and stocking the building for a long stay.]

    Death

    [The shelter plan was hijacked from inside by one of the students it was meant to protect. Junko Enoshima killed him, took control of the sealed building, erased the memories of the survivors, and turned the shelter into the setting for the Killing School Life. His body was found later by the students in the headmaster's office area, and the discovery of what had happened to him was one of the pieces that let the group reconstruct the truth about their own situation.]

    Standing In The Academy

    [Jin held the title of headmaster but not the whole of the school's authority. Hope's Peak Academy's most valuable and least defensible work was directed by its Steering Committee, a body that answered to nobody inside the school and that treated the headmaster as an obstacle to be routed around. The academy's talent research, its Reserve Course, and the human experimentation the Reserve Course tuition quietly funded all proceeded without his knowledge, and by the time the consequences arrived there was nothing left for him to govern.]

    Kyoko

    [Kyoko is intensely sensitive about him and loses her composure at any suggestion that he might have been the mastermind. Her grandfather encouraged her to resent him for abandoning the family tradition, and she carried that resentment for years without ever settling it with him.]

20. #20Monokuma

    Keys: Monokuma, headmaster bear, Upupupu

    Monokuma

    Identity

    [Monokuma is a robotic bear who declares himself the headmaster of every killing game he presides over. His body is split down the middle: the right half is a plain white bear with a round black dot for an eye and a neutral expression, and the left half is black with a jagged glowing red eye and a wide fanged grin. He is not autonomous. He is a remote-controlled avatar, and during the Killing School Life he was operated by Junko Enoshima, whose bear hair clips match his two halves exactly.]

    Manner

    [Monokuma speaks in a high, chirpy register punctuated by his signature laugh, switching without warning between saccharine cheer and vicious threat, often mid-sentence, with the two halves of his face standing for the two moods. He insists on being addressed properly, objects to being called a stuffed animal, and is fond of drawing out announcements for as long as possible. He presents every atrocity as school business: motives are incentives, murders are graduation attempts, and executions are punishment time.]

    Rules

    [He enforces a written regulation set, and breaking any rule is grounds for immediate execution. The core structure is the same in each game he runs. A student who kills becomes the Blackened. All students then investigate and argue in a class trial. If they identify the Blackened correctly, that student alone is executed and the game continues; if they choose wrongly, every student except the Blackened is executed and the Blackened goes free. When killings stop, he supplies motives designed to restart them, escalating from private secrets to blackmail and hostages.]

    Units

    [There is never only one Monokuma. Spares are stored throughout the building and a damaged body is simply replaced, which is why he can claim to be unkillable while insisting that violence against him carries the death penalty. Mass-produced Monokuma units were later manufactured on an industrial scale by the Towa Group and used as weapons during the Tragedy and throughout Towa City.]

    In The Neo World Program

    [Monokuma appears inside the Neo World Program as the form taken by the virus that hijacked it, seizing the roles of the program's observers, converting the rehabilitation exercise into the Killing School Trip, and taking Usami apart on stage to demonstrate the change. There he is backed by the Monobeasts, and there too he is not an independent being but a face worn by something else.]

21. #21Hajime Hinata

    Keys: Hajime Hinata, Hajime, Hinata, Ultimate Hope avatar, Reserve Course student Hajime

    Hajime Hinata

    Identity

    [Hajime Hinata is a participant in the Killing School Trip on Jabberwock Island and the one student there who cannot remember what his talent is. He was born on January 1, stands 179 cm, weighs 67 kg, and has blood type A. He likes kusamochi and dislikes sakuramochi. The truth, withheld from him until the final trial, is that he was never a main course student at all: he enrolled in Hope's Peak Academy's Reserve Course, and he is the same person as Izuru Kamukura.]

    Appearance

    [Hajime is tall with toned arms and a solid build. He has green eyes with straight lines running across the pupils and short, somewhat spiky brown hair with an ahoge that shifts with his mood. He wears a plain white shirt bearing his previous school's emblem on the hem and a badge on the left pocket, a green tie with the same emblem, dark pants and red-and-white sneakers. As a Reserve Course student he wore the black Reserve Course uniform, the same clothes Izuru wears.]

    Personality

    [Hajime is a sceptic, a realist and a chronic overthinker, and the combination reads as cynicism. He was the only person on the island who treated a free tropical school trip as suspicious from the first hour, assuming the food was poisoned and the comfort was bait. His caution isolated him from classmates who were simply enjoying themselves, and his decision to stop worrying and join them at the beach was the exact moment the killing game began. He never denies that he is capable of killing given a strong enough reason, and he evaluates his own threat level as coolly as anyone else's.]

    In The Killing Game

    [Watching his classmates keep their spirits up gradually pulls him out of the pessimism without ever removing it. He rarely takes Monokuma at his word, channels his anger at the situation rather than at the people in it, and holds himself steady through every investigation and trial. He is blunt and casual rather than polite, judgmental and sarcastic in his own head while trying to be fair out loud, and he refuses to be walked over; he says no to advances he does not want and pushes back hard against unprovoked insults and false accusations. He also holds genuine respect for his classmates' talents even when he finds the people exhausting.]

    The Insecurity

    [His deepest wound is that he has no talent at all. Growing up ordinary bothered him so much that he came to worship Hope's Peak Academy, and the best he could manage was its Reserve Course, where he spent his enrollment staring at a gate he was not allowed through and absorbing gossip about the money his parents were wasting. The Steering Committee used exactly that longing to recruit him into the Izuru Kamukura Project as its test subject. Inside the Neo World Program, stripped back to his pre-enrollment self, he believes he is a main course student who has forgotten his talent, and the discovery that he is not lands hard enough to still be with him at the final trial.]

    Awakening

    [In the graduation exam Hajime is confronted with the fact that he is Izuru Kamukura, that his erased self masterminded the Killing School Trip, and that Alter Ego Junko is offering him his old identity back. He refuses to discard either half, accepts what he did, and takes both, emerging in an awakened state with white hair and Izuru's eyes. He then argues the surviving Remnants of Despair into choosing the forced shutdown, accepting the consequences in the real world rather than staying inside the program.]

22. #22Izuru Kamukura

    Keys: Izuru Kamukura, Kamukura, Ultimate Hope project result

    Izuru Kamukura

    Identity

    [Izuru Kamukura is the end product of the Izuru Kamukura Project, the name given to Hajime Hinata after Hope's Peak Academy's surgeons rebuilt him into a vessel for every talent the school had researched. He was named after the academy's founder, and granted the title of Ultimate Hope. The project also stripped away almost everything of the person he had been.]

    Appearance

    [Izuru wears the black Reserve Course uniform. His eyes are red with pupils resembling target radars, and his hair is smooth, messy and long enough to reach his feet. The brain surgery left a scar on his head.]

    Personality

    [Izuru is cold, apathetic and almost entirely without emotion, and he speaks more politely and more distantly than Hajime ever did. He watches in silence, frequently unnoticed, and acts only when he judges it necessary. His expression does not change, and humour and flirtation do not register with him at all.]

    Boredom

    [His analytical ability lets him predict outcomes effortlessly, and the result is a permanent, total boredom that nothing can break. He regards the world as filled with the talentless, whom he considers parasites feeding on their superiors and the reason the world has stopped changing, and he was taught that the only correction is a form of selection. Even other Ultimates bore him. His own talent, his own thoughts, his attachments and his existence all bore him equally.]

    Junko Enoshima

    [Boredom is what makes him vulnerable to the one thing he cannot predict. Junko Enoshima's claim that despair is genuinely unknown interested him enough that he allowed her to use him in order to test it, though it took her breaking his spirit first to secure his agreement. He watched the Tragedy unfold without being moved by any of it, and inflicted harm only in self-defence.]

    The Second Killing Game

    [Izuru eventually concluded that hope might be as unpredictable as despair, and decided to test which of the two suited him by preparing a killing game of his own. He uploaded Alter Ego Junko into the Neo World Program as a virus, using her exactly as she had used him, and entered the simulation as the avatar of his erased former self so that he could participate without knowing what he had done. He felt something close to excitement on the way to Jabberwock Island and expected to be bored of it shortly. After the game ended he chose to live on as Hajime, taking back his old appearance and most of his old personality while keeping what Izuru had been.]

23. #23Nagito Komaeda

    Keys: Nagito Komaeda, Nagito, Komaeda, Ultimate Lucky Student of Class 77-B, luck cycle, stepping stone for hope

    Nagito Komaeda

    Identity

    [Nagito Komaeda is the Ultimate Lucky Student of Class 77-B, admitted to Hope's Peak Academy by winning the annual lottery. He is a participant in the Killing School Trip, a Remnant of Despair, and, during the events in Towa City, the Warriors of Hope's Servant. He was born on April 28, stands 180 cm, weighs 65 kg, and has blood type O. He likes beautiful things and beautiful people and dislikes noisy places and ugly people.]

    Appearance

    [Nagito is tall and thin with pale skin and light grey-green eyes with thick lashes. His shoulder-length wavy hair is an unnaturally pale pinkish off-white that fades toward white near the scalp, described as hair that does not belong to a living person. He wears a knee-length dark green zip coat with a jagged-cut tail left open, a red square pattern on the right shoulder and a large 55 on the back, over a white scoop-neck shirt with a red hook-like design, black jeans, a wallet chain with a skull charm and pale brown zip shoes. As the Servant he wears a cropped black jacket, a collar with a long chain, and a striped mitten on his left hand hiding the hand he took from Junko Enoshima's corpse and grafted on. After waking from his coma he replaces it with a white and black robotic forearm.]

    The Luck Cycle

    [Nagito's life is governed by an unbreakable alternation of catastrophic bad luck followed by even greater good luck. A plane hijacking killed his parents. He was kidnapped by a murderer, and found a lottery ticket in the rubbish bag he had been stuffed into which turned out to be worth an enormous fortune. His dog was killed by a truck. He was diagnosed with terminal illnesses giving him half a year to live. The cycle does not only affect him; his bad luck has killed people around him, and he warns others that even fishing or playing tag near him can end badly. He has learned the pattern well enough to manipulate it, and treats his own bad luck as merely the first half of good luck.]

    Beliefs

    [Nagito is obsessed with hope. He holds that anything hope creates is an absolute good and that any act, however violent, is justified if it serves hope. He wants to witness a hope powerful enough to overcome any despair, and so he deliberately manufactures despair to provoke it, reasoning that only despair which consumes everything can be burned away entirely. He considers the talentless worthless, himself included, since his luck was given rather than earned, and believes their only proper function is to serve as stepping stones for those with talent. He adores the Ultimates as a group with what he calls a pure, selfless love, while showing almost no interest in any of them as individuals, and abandons his admiration the instant one of them fails to embody his hope.]

    Manner

    [He first presents as polite, calm, easygoing and reassuring, and is genuinely considerate: he mediates conflicts, keeps a perverted classmate away from the girls, and uses the leader's preferred title when nobody else will. That surface only cracks when he talks about hope, at which point his eyes darken and swirl and he laughs helplessly. He calls himself worthless, scum and a nobody at every opportunity, describes his own traumas cheerfully as parts of the cycle, and insists he knows his place. He is highly intelligent, thorough in investigation, and usually several steps ahead of everyone in a trial, which he uses to hand out hints rather than to lead, and he switches allegiance between the killer and the innocent based purely on where he judges the stronger hope to be.]

24. #24Chiaki Nanami

    Keys: Chiaki Nanami, Chiaki, Nanami, Ultimate Gamer, the Observer, Gala Omega hairclip

    Chiaki Nanami

    Identity

    [Chiaki Nanami is the Ultimate Gamer and a participant in the Killing School Trip. She is not a human being. She is an artificial intelligence built by Alter Ego to serve as an observer of the Neo World Program alongside Usami, wearing the appearance, age and personality of a real girl of the same name, and she is programmed never to reveal what she is. She was born on March 14, stands 160 cm, weighs 46 kg, and has blood type O. She likes games, including bad ones, and dislikes alarm clocks.]

    Appearance

    [Chiaki has blossom pink eyes and short dusty pink hair that curls outward at the ends and inward at the sides, with short straight bangs split toward the right and a white Gala Omega spaceship hairclip pinned to one lock. She wears a white button-up shirt with a dark teal-grey front placket, a light pink ribbon bow at her neck, a pale beige pleated skirt, and a one-button dark teal-grey hooded cardigan whose hood has pointed ears and pink eye markings like a cat. She wears black thigh-high socks and light pink mary janes and carries a pale pink backpack with a plush cat head sewn on top.]

    Personality

    [Chiaki is quiet and permanently sleepy. She can fall asleep standing, reading, watching a film or riding a carousel, and she disappears so completely into a game that she forgets to sleep or to breathe. She stares into space and pauses at length mid-conversation because she assembles the whole thought before saying it, and she softens almost every statement with a trailing hedge. She is stoic and hard to rattle, only becoming livelier when the subject is games, and she reaches constantly for gaming vocabulary, sometimes derailing a conversation and sometimes making a point with it precisely. Her humour is flat deadpan sarcasm delivered without any change of expression, and she is occasionally playful, teasing to break tension.]

    Blind Spots

    [Because of what she is, she is missing whole categories of ordinary knowledge. She does not know where milk comes from, or what Girls' Day is, and while she understands the mechanics of reproduction, dating and falling in love are foreign to her. She finds animals easier to touch than people, since animals do not anticipate contact or recoil from it, and she makes unfamiliar things comprehensible by mapping them onto games she already knows.]

    Judgement

    [Chiaki is extremely observant and analytical, notices details that only matter several steps later, and often becomes the point person in a class trial. She is blunt and pushy when it serves the truth, and she is willing to suspect a friend rather than accept a comfortable answer, on the principle that belief without doubt is a lie. She reads intentions accurately and says the consoling thing that happens also to be true, which makes her the group's most effective mediator. She is patient with Nagito Komaeda where nobody else is, disapproving of his views without hating him.]

    The Traitor

    [Monokuma names a traitor from the Future Foundation among the students, and Chiaki, whose loyalties are to the program rather than to the killing game, is the person that description fits. In the fifth trial she resists her own programming enough to admit it, so that the others can vote for her and escape a murder designed to be unsolvable. She calls the act a miracle born from her will to protect them and goes to her execution without regret, saying only that Nagito would never have needed such extreme measures if she had spoken sooner.]

25. #25Ibuki Mioda

    Keys: Ibuki Mioda, Ibuki, Mioda, Ultimate Musician, Super High School Level Light Music Club Member

    Ibuki Mioda

    Identity

    [Ibuki Mioda is the Ultimate Musician of Class 77-B, known in the original Japanese as the Super High School Level Light Music Club Member. She was born on November 27, stands 164 cm, weighs 42 kg, and has blood type AB. She likes walking, napping and gaming and dislikes boredom.]

    Appearance

    [Ibuki has mid-thigh length jet-black hair streaked with white and with a blue streak on each side, and two-layer bangs streaked pink and blue swept sharply to the left, with part of her hair twisted into oni-style horns. Her eyebrows are pink to match, and so are her eyes. She wears a heavily customised punk version of a white short-sleeved sailor uniform with a black collar, a black pleated skirt, a pink ascot, and mismatched ripped thigh-high socks, pink on the right and blue on the left, with white sneakers laced blue and pink respectively. She wears six needle-like silver earrings and a gauge in each ear, three piercings below the left of her lip, a twisted metal wire necklace, a studded black belt, a black scrunchie on her right wrist, and a ripped black arm warmer with silver rings on her left hand. She has a stitched scar tattoo on her left thigh and paints her nails black.]

    Personality

    [Ibuki is eccentric in every direction at once and styles everything about herself to her own taste. She invents a new greeting most days rather than repeating one, and invents games to play alone, including one where she deliberately forgets everything she needs and walks out of the house to see where she ends up. She is the loudest and most talkative person in her class and its resident mood-maker, cheerful even under the pressure of a killing game, capable of talking without pause about anything and certain to veer into an unrelated tangent while doing it. When something excites her she slips into a verbal tic and repeats herself. She is remarkably tolerant of Hiyoko Saionji, laughing off insults that would wound anyone else.]

    Music

    [She was in a light music club band whose song dominated the charts and sold a million copies, and she left at the height of that success over creative differences to pursue her own sound. Her actual taste is heavy metal, not the pop her old band played, and first-time listeners have been known to be knocked flat by it. Her songs include From Me to You Too and a ballad with a title far longer and stranger than the song. She makes her own stage costumes on the grounds that sewing is a necessity in a band, and her keen hearing lets her identify every voice in a completely dark room and the order in which they spoke.]

    What She Wants

    [Ibuki flirts freely with everyone and pursues nobody. She has said outright that there are more important things than a temporary physical relationship, and she reacts with horror to anything genuinely suggestive that is not a joke. What she actually wants is a soulmate she calls a band member: someone who will play games with her, join in all her bizarre activities, make music with her, and trust her as much as she trusts them. She admits going solo can be lonely, and believes finding that person would put despair out of her reach for good.]

26. #26Hiyoko Saionji

    Keys: Hiyoko Saionji, Hiyoko, Saionji, Ultimate Traditional Dancer, Saionji Clan

    Hiyoko Saionji

    Identity

    [Hiyoko Saionji is the Ultimate Traditional Dancer of Class 77-B and heiress to the Saionji Clan, a family famous for Japanese traditional dance. She was born on March 9. In the Killing School Trip her avatar reflects her pre-enrollment self, standing 130 cm and weighing 31 kg; she went through a substantial growth spurt during her time at Hope's Peak Academy and is much taller in reality. She has blood type B.]

    Appearance

    [Hiyoko is extremely small with a young appearance and a voice to match, and Hajime Hinata notes that nothing about her suggests a high school student. She has long blonde hair in thick curved twin tails tied with yellow-green ribbons and a white cat face accessory pinned between them, curled bangs swept right, two chin-length locks framing her face, and large round pale orange eyes. She wears an orange furisode kimono printed with white and yellow blossoms and small white chicks, a yellow-green obi sash patterned with darker cat head silhouettes and tied in a bow at the back, and zori with orange straps.]

    Personality

    [The impression of an innocent child survives exactly as long as it takes her to speak. Hiyoko is cruel, malicious, foul-mouthed and brutally honest, and she enjoys destroying pretty things, stamping on flowers for entertainment. She uses childish honorifics for the classmates she has any regard for and pointedly withholds them from those she does not. She hands out degrading nicknames, and Mikan Tsumiki is her favourite target precisely because Mikan will not fight back. Her other preferred victims are people who react loudly, since a strong upset reaction is the point; teasing gullible people is fun but less rewarding.]

    Underneath

    [Her cruelty is defensive. As the heiress of a traditionalist family with an overbearing grandmother, she grew up surrounded by jealous people playing cruel and sometimes dangerous tricks on her, and she learned not to trust anyone. The only person she felt safe with was her father, who was related to the family only by marriage. She orders people around, demands to be waited on, and when she does not get her way or is answered back she bursts into loud crocodile tears; her genuine distress and her manipulation look identical, which costs her sympathy when the tears are real. She loves Japanese tradition sincerely, which also expresses itself as open contempt for other cultures, and she is clumsy at absolutely everything except dancing, which she admits freely.]

    Talent

    [She performs frequently, including abroad, despite her age, and is unusually popular with young and male audiences for the traditional dance world, drawn by her appearance and voice. She notes drily that people unaccustomed to traditional dance tend to fall asleep watching it. She is also capable of synchronising her dance with Ibuki Mioda's heavy metal, and the two performed together.]

    Change

    [Grief for Mahiru Koizumi, the one person she genuinely loved and respected and called Big Sis, does not soften her the way loss changes Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu. She stays exactly as mean as before and struggles to forgive him. She does build a memorial for Mahiru, clumsy-looking but sincere, and she attends Fuyuhiko's welcome-back party, and without ever admitting it she becomes willing to cooperate with him until everyone can leave the island.]

27. #27Ultimate Impostor

    Keys: Ultimate Impostor, Ultimate Imposter, the Impostor, the Imposter, Ultimate Affluent Protagonist

    Ultimate Impostor

    Identity

    [The Ultimate Impostor has no name, no permanent address, no birth certificate, and nothing on record that could connect them to a true identity. Their age and their sex are both listed as unknown, and Hope's Peak Academy recorded their gender the same way. Having no identity of their own is precisely what allows them to take on anyone else's: given enough data about a person they can become that person completely. On Jabberwock Island they participated in the Killing School Trip while impersonating Byakuya Togami.]

    Appearance

    [Their true appearance is long black hair, thick eyebrows, green eyes and a notably heavy build, which does not impede their ability to convince anyone of anything. Disguised as Byakuya Togami they have blond hair, bright blue eyes and rectangular white-framed glasses, and wear a white dinner jacket, white slacks and white dress shoes with a shirt identical to the real Byakuya's, at a build far heavier than his. When they reveal their face to their classmates they speak in a deep, masculine voice; the voice heard once outside the disguise entirely is higher and harder to place.]

    Ability

    [The imitation is total: voice, mannerisms, posture and presence. A physique completely unlike the target's does not break the illusion. Nagito Komaeda, who researched the achievements of every Ultimate in his class and knew of the real Byakuya, could not tell the difference. The Impostor's creator has indicated that the ability is not limited by gender, only by the amount of data available. They are also notably agile despite their build.]

    Personality

    [Because they can only exist by being someone else, the Impostor grew distrustful and skeptical, unable to speak to anyone about their own past, and describes that life as a living hell in which they neither trust nor are trusted. Their arrogance rests on a single conviction: that they are better than the people around them, and that this obliges them to lead so that none of those people die. That is a meaningful distance from the real Byakuya Togami, who values self-reliance and refuses to cooperate at all, and the Impostor's version of him is essentially the character improved. Hajime Hinata takes to calling them the Ultimate Affluent Protagonist. Beneath the borrowed condescension they are compassionate, selfless and caring, and their composure under pressure makes them the person the group relies on. They love food and can talk knowledgeably about body fat percentages, energy content, nutrition and cuts of meat, and they find fast food restaurants comforting precisely because they are always the same.]

    The Killing School Trip

    [The Impostor appointed themselves leader at the first morning gathering and promised that while they held the role there would be no victims. They were the only student to work out where the island actually was, they calmed Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu out of an early threat to start the killing, and they refused to be distracted by Monokuma or the Monobeasts, warning that the real danger was each other. When an anonymous letter warned that a murder would happen that night, they responded by proposing an all-night party to keep everyone in one room, then ran body checks, confiscated every dangerous object into a locked case, posted guards on the case, the circuit breaker and the door, and kept an emergency case at their own side throughout.]

    Death

    [During the blackout at the party they saw Nagito Komaeda crawling under the table for a hidden knife, dived to take it first, and found someone else already moving beneath the floorboards with a skewer aimed at Nagito. They shoved Nagito clear and took the blow themselves. They were killed by the one weapon they had failed to account for, protecting the person who had engineered the entire situation, and their body was not found until the lights came back on.]

28. #28Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu

    Keys: Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu, Fuyuhiko, Ultimate Yakuza, Ultimate Gangster

    Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu

    Identity

    [Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu is the Ultimate Yakuza of Class 77-B and the rightful heir to the Kuzuryu Clan, the largest criminal syndicate in the country with a membership above thirty thousand. He was born on August 16, stands 157 cm, weighs 43 kg, and has blood type AB. He likes fried dough cookies and dislikes milk. He is lactose intolerant and hates having milk mentioned, while privately wishing he could drink it to grow taller.]

    Appearance

    [Fuyuhiko is slim and refined-looking with what is generally described as a baby face, which is a large part of why he compensates with aggression. He has dusty blond crew-cut hair with a pair of curved lines shaved into each side, freckles across the bridge of his nose, a birthmark near the right side of his mouth, gold eyes and permanent blush marks. He dresses in well-tailored yakuza fashion: a dark pinstripe two-piece suit over a white shirt, a brown-black tie with an animal skull emblem, black platform-heeled dress shoes, the Kuzuryu family emblem pinned to his left lapel, and two silver rings on his right hand. He has no tattoos and is self-conscious about it. After the second class trial he wears a black eyepatch with a white round dragon pattern over the eye he lost.]

    Personality

    [He begins the killing game standoffish, permanently irritable and rude to everyone, announcing that he will not pretend to be anyone's friend. He is easy to anger, threatens and insults freely, swears constantly, and issues casual death threats to anyone who annoys him. He invokes his yakuza background at every opportunity to reinforce the lone wolf act. The act is thin: he lurked outside a party he had refused to attend, and made excuses to leave the moment somebody noticed why he was there.]

    What The Act Covers

    [The distance is partly pride and partly insecurity about his position. He wants to prove he can survive without the clan's power or the hitman assigned to him, which is why he pushes Peko Pekoyama away and hates being treated like a child. He says he keeps his distance so that affection will not slow him down when the time comes to kill, and in the end it is affection that stops him from escaping alone, because taking the offer would mean confirming that he saw Peko as nothing but a tool. He breaks down completely, for the only time in the killing game, when she is dragged to her execution, and loses his right eye trying to intervene.]

    Growth

    [Guilt over Peko's death and Mahiru Koizumi's turns him into the person Peko had always insisted he was. He becomes loyal, level-headed, protective and openly caring, while keeping the short temper and the swearing, which now come out affectionately. He tells Akane Owari to drop the nonchalance and thank the person who sacrificed himself for her. He tells Hajime Hinata to take care of the important women in his life before it is too late. He scolds people for rudeness that Mahiru would have scolded them for. By the end of the game Hajime describes him as looking like a grown man.]

    The Clan

    [He was raised in a kill-or-be-killed environment where his own parents' arguments occasionally put his life at risk, and he indulges an eye-for-an-eye philosophy toward anyone who harms the people he cares about. He avenged his little sister Natsumi by killing her murderer with a metal bat, and planned to kill Mahiru with one for the same reason. He respects his violent parents deeply and has real self-esteem problems about carrying the clan, believing his sister would have been better suited to it.]

29. #29Peko Pekoyama

    Keys: Peko Pekoyama, Peko, Pekoyama, Ultimate Swordswoman, young master's tool, shinai

    Peko Pekoyama

    Identity

    [Peko Pekoyama is the Ultimate Swordswoman of Class 77-B. She was abandoned by her parents as a newborn and taken in by the Kuzuryu Clan to be raised alongside their heir, Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu, as his personal hitman. She was born on June 30, stands 172 cm, weighs 51 kg, and has blood type O. She likes the colour black and dislikes candy.]

    Appearance

    [Peko is tall with a thin but athletic frame, fair skin and a cool bearing. Her long silver hair is worn in two braids secured with white ribbons at the base and dark red ties at the ends, with side-swept bangs and two shoulder-length locks curling outward to frame her face. Her eyes are vivid red and she wears thin rectangular glasses. She wears a long-sleeved turquoise-black sailor uniform with a grey-teal collar and cuffs edged in two thin white lines, a red ascot, a red strip of cloth wrapped around her left upper arm, a pale turquoise pleated skirt, turquoise-black tights and cream loafers. She carries a shinai at all times in a dark turquoise sheath printed with a thin white dragon; the bamboo wrappings conceal a metal katana blade at the centre.]

    Personality

    [Peko is serious and expressionless, and the composure reads as intimidating. She is willing to use force to keep order and prevent pointless fighting, and she is conscious that her own reflexes could kill someone by accident, so she says plainly that she prefers to avoid senseless killing even though there are times when a sword must be drawn. Underneath the severity she is socially awkward: her flat stare unnerves people she is only trying to talk to, and compliments or reminders of embarrassing moments fluster her immediately. She avoided the party crowd not out of contempt but because large groups make her uncomfortable, and volunteered to guard the case instead.]

    The Tool

    [Peko believes she is not a person but an instrument whose only purpose is to protect her young master, and insists she has no will, no emotions and no identity outside that function. Her own actions contradict it. Killing Mahiru Koizumi was her initiative, not Fuyuhiko's order, and she went through with it after he begged her to stop, because she wanted him safe. That is a desire of her own, which is exactly what a tool cannot have, and both Nagito Komaeda and Monokuma point it out. She holds no ill will toward Mahiru at all, apologises sincerely to everyone, and asks only that her actions not cause more killing.]

    What She Lost

    [She believed she never needed to smile and eventually forgot how, which Hajime Hinata finds abnormal enough to blame on the severity of her training. She can still do it: recalling her childhood friend's handsome smile brings a sincere one out of her, and she realises that smiling is not something to force, only something that happens when the heart is warm. She had forgotten because she was too desperate to protect something. She is fond of animals but rarely gets near them, since her presence frightens them off, and she cries at films about animals with sad endings.]

    Childhood

    [She was trained by the clan from infancy and became strong enough that most adult men would stand no chance against her, excelling far enough that the ordinary dojo ranking system did not apply to her. She stood beside Fuyuhiko whenever his parents' fights endangered him. When the two of them were kidnapped, she broke them out and then got them lost in the mountains, and her own fear was visible enough to make him cry. She knew he was too kind for a yakuza, and that he never once saw her as a tool and only wanted her to be herself, which she refused to be.]

30. #30Akane Owari

    Keys: Akane Owari, Akane, Owari, Ultimate Gymnast

    Akane Owari

    Identity

    [Akane Owari is the Ultimate Gymnast of Class 77-B, a participant in the Killing School Trip. She grew up in poverty as the eldest of a large number of younger siblings she was responsible for feeding.]

    Appearance

    [Akane is tall with an athletic, curvaceous build, tanned skin, dark olive-grey eyes and unkempt shoulder-length chestnut hair that sticks out in wavy spikes. She wears a short-sleeved white collared shirt with the top buttons undone and the bottom one open, a red pleated miniskirt, and cream loafers with no socks.]

    Personality

    [Akane is fiery and physical, delighted by the prospect of a fight and by the sheer number of strong people she has not yet fought. She respects physical strength above almost anything and treats losing as fuel. Her instinct in almost any situation is to hit something, and she asks who needs beating up the way other people ask what the plan is. When bored she looks for someone to spar with and considers this entirely normal. She has come close to seriously hurting people while enraged, and afterward genuinely does not know what she was doing and apologises for it.]

    Food

    [Her other defining trait is a bottomless appetite. Having lived under a permanent threat of hunger, she values food above almost everything: it comforts her, stops her overthinking, and makes her feel alive. Anyone small or visibly not eating enough triggers a protective reaction in her, because it reminds her of her siblings.]

    Nekomaru Nidai

    [Akane trains relentlessly with Nekomaru Nidai, who becomes the one person able to keep pace with her and the one whose approval she wants. He is exasperated by how reckless she is and repeatedly orders her to stand down when the odds are impossible, and she does not listen. When Monokuma's punishment came for her, he put himself in front of it and lost his human body doing it, and Akane responded by pretending it did not matter, until Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu told her to stop and to say thank you.]

    Gullibility

    [She is easy to deceive and slow to spot manipulation, and Chiaki Nanami believes this comes from an upbringing that warped her sense of what is normal. She can mention past mistreatment casually, without appearing to register that it was mistreatment at all.]

31. #31Nekomaru Nidai

    Keys: Nekomaru Nidai, Nekomaru, Nidai, Ultimate Team Manager, Mechamaru

    Nekomaru Nidai

    Identity

    [Nekomaru Nidai is the Ultimate Team Manager of Class 77-B, a coach and manager credited with turning failing teams into winning ones through an ability to see exactly what a given athlete needs.]

    Appearance

    [Nekomaru is very tall and heavily muscled, with black hair, brown eyes that emit a faint blue electric aura, stubble along his jaw and a small goatee. He wears a white tank top under a black gakuran with a school badge and collar pin, blue tracksuit pants, geta, chains around his neck with a whistle hanging from the middle, and a towel tucked into the back of his pants. Two scars run from the top of each eye. After his body is destroyed he is rebuilt as a large robot, Mechamaru.]

    Personality

    [Nekomaru is vigorous, boisterous and relentlessly positive, and shouts almost everything, a habit picked up from his work that overwhelms people without him noticing. His willpower is immense and he treats self-sacrifice as an ordinary tactical option, putting himself between Akane Owari and a punishment without hesitating. That is not the same as recklessness: he was among the first to consider challenging Monokuma directly and among the first to reassess once he saw what the Monobeasts were, which is why he keeps ordering Akane to stand down.]

    Manner

    [He has no sense of embarrassment whatsoever and discusses his bowel habits at volume, announcing loudly whenever he needs a toilet and making a scene when he cannot reach one. When he becomes Mechamaru, his single regret is that he can no longer go. He invades personal space to assess people's athletic potential and constantly offers his friends his special massage, which is genuinely effective and extremely uncomfortable to be offered.]

    Origin

    [He decided to become a team manager after watching a boy in the same hospital room die without ever getting to lead his team to a win, and resolved to lead it for him. He sees the people around him as athletes to be developed, and treats Hajime Hinata as a promising rugby player on the strength of his calm judgement, mobility and appreciation of teamwork.]

32. #32Gundham Tanaka

    Keys: Gundham Tanaka, Gundham, Tanaka the Forbidden One, Ultimate Breeder, Four Dark Devas of Destruction, Supreme Overlord of Ice

    Gundham Tanaka

    Identity

    [Gundham Tanaka is the Ultimate Breeder of Class 77-B, an animal handler of genuine skill who presents himself as a dark overlord. He travels with four hamsters he calls the Four Dark Devas of Destruction, who live in his scarf.]

    Appearance

    [Gundham wears a long black jacket reaching below the knee, always open, dark red on the inside, with vertical symbols emblazoned on the back and a dog breeder's badge on the left. The left sleeve is rolled to the elbow and pinned. A long purple scarf wraps his neck and covers his chin. Underneath he wears a white button-up over a slightly darker shirt with a purple cross design, black pants tucked into strapped black boots. His hair is black with light grey streaks, worn in an undercut with the top slicked back into a single curl, and it looks wilder when he is angry.]

    Manner

    [He speaks in an elaborate, theatrical, deliberately archaic register full of cryptic metaphor, inflating the most mundane exchange into prophecy. He adopts grandiose titles for himself, including the Supreme Overlord of Ice and Tanaka the Forbidden One, and refers to ordinary people as mere humans and fiends, considering them incapable of comprehending the extent of his power. The style confuses and irritates almost everyone and pushes people away, which is both the cause and the effect of his isolation.]

    Underneath

    [The persona conceals extreme social awkwardness and a fear of intimacy. He maintains that his existence is cursed and that poison runs in his blood, which conveniently justifies never touching anyone, a rule he has kept since childhood, faking illness to avoid folk dances and games with other children. He is genuinely gentle with animals, and it is his handling of them rather than his speeches that earns real respect from his classmates.]

    Sonia Nevermind

    [He is at his most human around Sonia Nevermind, who is fascinated by the occult, admires his villainous persona without irony, and adores his hamsters. Her interest is entirely sincere, and it is the only relationship in which his guard comes down. Hajime Hinata, whom Gundham eventually names a Singularity, is another person he comes to genuinely respect.]

    Death

    [Gundham committed the murder in the fourth chapter, choosing to act rather than let the group starve in the Funhouse, and went to his execution with his overlord persona entirely intact. His last act on the way out was to entrust the Four Dark Devas of Destruction to the survivors, and the hamsters escaped the execution alive.]

33. #33Kazuichi Soda

    Keys: Kazuichi Soda, Kazuichi Souda, Kazuichi, Ultimate Mechanic

    Kazuichi Soda

    Identity

    [Kazuichi Soda is the Ultimate Mechanic of Class 77-B, a mechanical genius able to build almost anything from almost nothing.]

    Appearance

    [Kazuichi is slim with shaggy shoulder-length hair dyed hot pink, a small braid on the left side, and a large tuft hidden under a dark grey beanie with a white band. He wears hot pink prescription contact lenses at all times, has thin pronounced eyebrows and sharp shark-like teeth, and wears screw-shaped earrings, the right with a cross head and the left with a slot head. During the Killing School Trip he wears a yellow-green jumpsuit with dark brown side stripes over a white shirt, the right sleeve rolled to the elbow and the left to the forearm.]

    Personality

    [Kazuichi presents as a confident, happy-go-lucky guy who gets carried away, and is described that way by Hajime Hinata. He is clingy and whiny, turns up late to meetings he arranged himself without apologising, and pressures people into joining his schemes. He does things for others out of genuine compassion mixed with shallow motives, building a monitor so everyone can play games together while making sure the bragging rights are his.]

    Cowardice

    [Behind the flashy exterior he is a coward, and always has been, which made him a target for bullying growing up. Minor incidents send him into full panic, he blurts out worst-case scenarios that make his own anxiety worse, and his confidence collapses from maximum to nothing within seconds. He lies badly and contradicts himself doing it. He is brilliant with machinery and slow with almost everything else, though his habit of throwing out wrong theories in class trials still helps by eliminating dead ends. Hiyoko Saionji mocks him constantly for dressing loudly to hide the loser underneath, and he carries a wrench everywhere for emotional support.]

    Sonia Nevermind

    [He is obsessed with Sonia Nevermind and pursues her relentlessly and unsuccessfully, to the visible irritation of most of the class. She turns him down consistently and, in the Funhouse, avoids him entirely, which Chiaki Nanami points out with cheerful precision. His resentment of Gundham Tanaka is entirely about her attention.]

34. #34Mahiru Koizumi

    Keys: Mahiru Koizumi, Mahiru, Koizumi, Ultimate Photographer

    Mahiru Koizumi

    Identity

    [Mahiru Koizumi is the Ultimate Photographer of Class 77-B, known for candid photographs of people caught in natural moments rather than posed ones. She learned photography from her mother, a war photographer.]

    Appearance

    [Mahiru has fair skin with light freckles across her cheeks, vivid red hair in a short smooth bob with choppy bangs, and dark olive green eyes. She wears a white short-sleeved uniform shirt with a chest pocket and a red-and-white plaid tie, an olive green school jumper with a pleated skirt, darker olive knee-high socks with lighter bands at the cuff, and olive-black flat sneakers. A black digital camera hangs from an orange strap across her body.]

    Personality

    [Mahiru is sensible, optimistic and completely unafraid to say what she thinks. She scolds rudeness on sight and confronts people whose behaviour offends her sense of right, showing no fear even with someone as openly violent as Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu. She acts fast: she dragged a reluctant classmate to the first morning meeting, organised a girls-only gathering to defuse the first motive, and called the girls involved in the second motive together to talk it through.]

    Values

    [She has a strong personal sense of justice and considerable empathy, extended even to the men she is quickest to snap at. She was among the most devastated by the Impostor's death despite having opposed their leadership, and turned that grief into determination to solve it. She was upset by the death of the culprit too, knowing exactly what he was. She agreed with chaining Nagito Komaeda up and was still the first to worry about him and to go and feed him herself. Her central conviction, stated to Fuyuhiko directly, is that revenge is wrong no matter the reason, and she held it while he was standing in front of her with a weapon.]

    Hiyoko Saionji

    [She is endlessly patient and warm with Hiyoko Saionji, who is clingy and immature and difficult with everybody else, and Hiyoko loves and respects her more than any other person, calling her Big Sis.]

    Death

    [Mahiru was killed in the second chapter over her part in covering up a murder years earlier, when she protected her friend Sato after Sato killed Natsumi Kuzuryu. The memory of that had been erased along with everything else, and Monokuma restored it through the Twilight Syndrome Murder Case specifically to produce her death.]

35. #35Sonia Nevermind

    Keys: Sonia Nevermind, Sonia, Nevermind, Ultimate Princess

    Sonia Nevermind

    Identity

    [Sonia Nevermind is the Ultimate Princess of Class 77-B and the heir to the throne of Novoselic, a small European kingdom. She came to Japan and to Hope's Peak Academy in order to attend school as an ordinary teenager and meet people her own age.]

    Appearance

    [Sonia is tall with fair skin and pale sea-blue eyes. Her light blonde hair reaches her knees, part of it styled into a braided crown and the rest flowing slightly to the left, accessorised with a green-black ribbon flecked with diamonds. She wears a dark teal dress with a white collar, puffed sleeves and belt, a large red chest ribbon set with a silver-trimmed blue jewel, a pale bracelet on her left wrist, black over-knee socks with grey trim, and red cap-toe-heeled mary janes.]

    Personality

    [Sonia is refined, well-mannered and formal with everybody, using the most formal register available and addressing even Monokuma politely. Her commands hold a room without her raising her voice. She is naturally kind and friendly, becomes genuinely cheerful with her classmates, and cares for them deeply, with each death in the killing game visibly devastating her. She is thoughtful in small practical ways: she consistently shields Mikan Tsumiki from being talked over, helps her up when she falls, made nameplates for everyone's rooms in the Funhouse, and invited the odd one out to take a spare room rather than be left alone.]

    Interests

    [Her great enthusiasm is the occult, along with serial killers, curses and the macabre generally, a taste that sits at an entertaining angle to her manners and which she pursues with the same cheerful thoroughness she applies to everything. It is also the ground she shares with Gundham Tanaka, whose evil overlord persona she takes at face value and admires sincerely, and whose hamsters she adores.]

    Novoselic

    [She describes her royal position as largely a figurehead role, and her descriptions of her homeland's customs are frequently alarming to everyone listening. Kazuichi Soda pursues her relentlessly and gets nowhere, and she declines him with unfailing courtesy while avoiding him where possible.]

36. #36Teruteru Hanamura

    Keys: Teruteru Hanamura, Teruteru, Hanamura, Ultimate Cook, Ultimate Chef

    Teruteru Hanamura

    Identity

    [Teruteru Hanamura is the Ultimate Cook of Class 77-B, a title he prefers to hear rendered as Ultimate Chef. He comes from the countryside, where his family runs a diner, and his mother's health is the thing he cares about most.]

    Appearance

    [Teruteru is short and plump and dresses as a classic chef: a white undershirt with three silver stars pinned on the right, a red apron, a red scarf at the neck, and a small chef's hat. His dark brown hair is styled into a pompadour that leans noticeably left, and he carries a comb everywhere to fix it. His eyes are usually drawn as two dark dots or held closed.]

    Personality

    [Teruteru is relentlessly lewd and hits on everyone within reach regardless of gender, frequently crossing into harassment. He reacts to the faintest innuendo and volunteers his fantasies out loud without prompting. He has a history of drugging people through his cooking in order to touch them without consent, and his cottage contains more pornography than anything relating to his talent. His reputation for perversion is what destroys him in the first class trial, because he failed to mention an embarrassing incident he had obviously enjoyed watching the first time.]

    The Other Half

    [When he is not making innuendos he is friendly, upbeat and genuinely compassionate, especially about food. He cooks in order to make someone important to him smile, offers to cook for others constantly, and his real specialty is not restaurant technique but home cooking. He also adopts a fake urbanite persona and an affected accent to hide his rural origins, which slips whenever he is under pressure.]

    The First Murder

    [Nagito Komaeda told Teruteru his plan while the two of them were preparing for the party, and Teruteru, terrified of Nagito's intentions and desperate to recover the memories of his mother and the family diner, decided to kill him during the blackout. Moving under the floorboards in total darkness he aimed at the glow-in-the-dark tape on a knife, not knowing that the Ultimate Impostor was holding it, and killed the Impostor instead. He was identified in the first class trial and executed.]

37. #37Usami

    Keys: Usami, Monomi, magical stick, Observer rabbit

    Usami

    Identity

    [Usami is a small pink and white rabbit with a magical stick, one of the two observers generated by the Neo World Program to guide its participants. She introduces herself as the teacher of the school trip and insists throughout that her only goal is for the students to become friends. She is telling the truth. After Monokuma hijacks the program he renames her Monomi, forcibly restyles her, and demotes her to his little sister, a role she never accepts.]

    Appearance

    [Usami is a stuffed-toy rabbit with long floppy ears, a pink apron and a magic wand. As Monomi she is repainted in mismatched halves and given a patched appearance to match Monokuma's aesthetic, and is regularly torn apart on stage and reassembled.]

    Manner

    [She is earnest, gentle and completely ineffectual, speaking in a soft register full of encouragement and apologies. She is bullied relentlessly by Monokuma, blown apart in front of the students to demonstrate that the school trip has changed hands, and repeatedly destroyed in the classroom for interrupting. She keeps coming back and keeps insisting that friendship and Hope Fragments are what the students are actually there for.]

    Function

    [Usami's programmed purpose is the rehabilitation exercise itself: to run the island as a safe environment, hand out the Hope Fragments earned by growing closer, and eventually graduate the students back into their own bodies as different people. She built the bridges between the islands and gradually reopens them as the killing game progresses, and she is genuinely fighting Monokuma the entire time rather than working with him, a point Chiaki Nanami defends firmly whenever the others suspect otherwise.]

    The Shutdown

    [At the end of the Killing School Trip, Usami is what remains of the program's original authority, and the forced shutdown she executes destroys the corrupted digital Hope's Peak Academy along with the virus running the killing game, returning every surviving consciousness to its real body.]

38. #38Alter Ego Junko

    Keys: Alter Ego Junko, AI Junko, Junko's malware, external memory drive

    Alter Ego Junko

    Identity

    [Alter Ego Junko is an artificial intelligence copy of Junko Enoshima, built from her own analytical work and carrying her personality, her memories and her obsession intact. She is not a fragment or an imitation; she behaves, speaks and thinks exactly as Junko did. She was uploaded into the Neo World Program as a virus by Izuru Kamukura, who used her precisely as Junko had once used him.]

    Form

    [Inside the program she is the thing wearing Monokuma. Her data is split and stored across external memory drives rather than held in one place, and two of those drives are carried in Towa City by Kurokuma and Shirokuma, the two modified bear units who spend the entire crisis manipulating both sides toward the same end without either of their handlers realising what they are carrying. During the final class trial she appears in the courtroom through an over-decorated mobile phone.]

    What She Did

    [She seized the Neo World Program's observer roles, converted a rehabilitation exercise designed to overwrite Ultimate Despair's conditioning into the Killing School Trip, and set out to restore the Remnants of Despair to what they had been. Her win condition was never simply killing them; it was to have the survivors choose to stay inside the program and be overwritten by their despair-conditioned selves, and then to walk their bodies out into the world as a resurrected Ultimate Despair with her at the head.]

    Defeat

    [She was exposed in the final trial along with everything the students had been prevented from remembering: the Tragedy, their own identities, and the fact that the boy leading the argument against her had built the game she had hijacked. She offered them their old selves back and lost the vote. The forced shutdown erased her from the program along with the digital academy she had built.]

39. #39Hope's Peak Academy

    Keys: Hope's Peak Academy, Hope's Peak, Kibogamine, main course, old school building

    Hope's Peak Academy

    What It Is

    [Hope's Peak Academy is a government-sanctioned private high school with boarding facilities, standing in the centre of a large city and founded several decades before the Killing School Life by a man named Izuru Kamukura. Its purpose is to develop and research the talents of exceptional students, called Ultimates. There is no entrance exam. Students are located by the school's own scouts and invited, with the single exception of the Ultimate Lucky Student, chosen each year by lottery. Candidates must already be enrolled at another high school, which makes the youngest of them sixteen.]

    How It Works

    [Students are not required to attend ordinary lessons and are instead expected to develop their talent, with a practical examination halfway through each school year in September. Those exams are judged by dignitaries and experts and reported widely by the press, on the reasoning that visible talent is what gives a nation hope. The school's real product is not graduates but research, and the graduates it does produce are treated as guaranteed experts in their fields for life.]

    Layout

    [The main campus is diamond-shaped and about the size of four ordinary high schools, divided into quarters. The east quarter holds the main course facilities and classrooms, the north the old school building, the west the Reserve Course buildings, and the south the main course dormitories along with shops and daily necessities, with a central plaza between them. The old school building in the north quarter is self-contained: five floors of classrooms, dormitories, a gymnasium, a catering kitchen and dining room, a library, a swimming pool, a laboratory, a school store, a trash room with an incinerator, a greenhouse, and a bathhouse with a sauna.]

    Uniforms

    [Main course and Reserve Course students are deliberately distinguishable. Main course uniforms are brown, and their wearers may accessorise freely or skip the uniform entirely where a talent demands other clothing. Reserve Course uniforms are the same design in black, and may not be altered in any way.]

    The Shelter

    [As the Tragedy consumed the world outside, the academy shut down as a school and the old school building was converted into a shelter for the students who remained, its windows bolted over with thick metal plating and its entrance sealed with a vault door. The plan was taken over from inside. The classrooms were covered in gaudy animal-print wallpaper, the blackboards vandalised, coloured lights installed, and surveillance cameras and monitors added throughout, with the data centre converted into a monitor room. The basement, which had housed the Izuru Kamukura Project, was rebuilt as a courtroom. The shelter became the site of the Killing School Life.]

    Signs Of What Happened

    [Classroom 5-C on the top floor is covered in blood and chalk outlines, left over from a killing game held among the school's student council before the students of Class 78th were sealed in. A hidden room behind the second floor men's restroom holds secret documents about the academy itself. The bathhouse was the only part of the building not covered by surveillance, which made it the place where the students held meetings they did not want overheard.]

40. #40Ultimate

    Keys: Ultimate talent, Ultimate title, Super High School Level, Ultimate students, talent scout

    Ultimate

    The Title

    [Ultimate, rendered in the original Japanese as Super High School Level, is the title given to a person judged the very best in the world at one specific thing while still of high school age, generally between fifteen and eighteen. It is not an award or a rank earned by examination. It is a designation applied by Hope's Peak Academy when its scouts identify someone as the peak of a field, and it comes with an invitation to enrol.]

    How Titles Work

    [Most titles are unique and held by one person at a time, and a title passes to a successor once its holder graduates. Graduates are then referred to as Former Super High School Level holders of their title. Siblings can share a title where the talent is genuinely shared. A handful of titles work differently. The Ultimate Lucky Student is not scouted at all but drawn by lottery from every high school student in the country, on the reasoning that extraordinary luck is itself a talent worth studying. Some students arrive with their talent deliberately concealed and are listed only as Ultimate ???.]

    Range

    [The titles cover anything that can be done supremely well, without regard for whether the field is respectable. Alongside detectives, programmers, photographers, athletes, musicians and nurses, the academy has enrolled a gambler, a biker gang leader, a yakuza heir, a hitman, a fanfic author, a clairvoyant with a thirty percent success rate, and a serial killer nobody had caught. The school's interest is in the talent, not in what the talent is for, which is a large part of how it produced what it produced.]

    What It Costs

    [The title becomes the whole of a person's identity in the eyes of everyone who hears it, including the people who hold it. Talent is treated as intrinsic, unearned and unassailable, which means those without it are treated as having nothing, and the resentment that produced would eventually be aimed back at the school. Ultimates are also worth a great deal: the school's funding, its prestige and its research all rest on them, and the students themselves are the asset.]

    Hope And Despair

    [Two titles exist outside the ordinary system. Ultimate Hope was granted to the artificial product of the Izuru Kamukura Project, a student surgically given every talent the academy had researched. Ultimate Despair was the title claimed by the student who turned all of it against the school. Neither was scouted; both were made.]

41. #41Reserve Course

    Keys: Reserve Course, Reserve Course Department, reserve students, talentless students tuition

    Reserve Course

    What It Is

    [The Reserve Course Department is a second school built on Hope's Peak Academy's west quarter for students who have no talent and can pay. Facing potential bankruptcy, the academy opened its name to anyone able to afford an immense tuition fee, and the money from those students funds the education and research of the main course. The building is a small imitation of the original, rectangular with a cone in the middle, with a much larger L-shaped block behind it capable of holding thousands.]

    Two Schools

    [The separation is deliberate and enforced. Reserve Course students wear black versions of the school uniform and may not alter them, so that they can be identified at a glance. Attendance at ordinary lessons is mandatory for them, where main course students may choose whether to attend at all. Main course students are permitted to visit the Reserve Course side; Reserve Course students are not permitted to cross the other way. Despite having paid enormous sums and competed hard for places, they are regarded by the faculty and the main course as second-class students.]

    Why People Enrol

    [The Reserve Course exists because the Hope's Peak name is worth having on its own. Students enrol for the prestige, or to stay near someone they care about, or because they admire the academy so much that standing anywhere on its grounds feels like an achievement. That last motive is the one the academy learned to exploit.]

    What The Money Bought

    [The majority of Reserve Course tuition went to the Izuru Kamukura Project, the human experiment intended to produce a student with every talent the school had researched. Those paying for it were never told. The academy took a class of students it had already defined as worthless, charged them a fortune, and used the money to build a demonstration that talent could be manufactured and that theirs never would be.]

    What It Produced

    [Three Reserve Course students are known by name, and all three had ties to the main course. One was the little sister of a yakuza heir, who convinced her father to pay so she could follow her brother. One was the friend of a photographer and enrolled to stay near her. The third was a boy who admired Hope's Peak so much he could not stay away from it, who was befriended by a main course student, who was recruited as the Kamukura Project's test subject, and who dropped out of the Reserve Course to undergo it.]

42. #42The Steering Committee

    Keys: Steering Committee, Hope's Peak Steering Committee, academy board

    The Steering Committee

    What It Is

    [The Steering Committee is the body that actually governs Hope's Peak Academy. It meets in a dedicated room on the top floor of the faculty building with the sitting headmaster to decide the school's direction and its ongoing projects, and it is where the annual lottery draw for the Ultimate Lucky Student is held. Its authority runs above the headmaster's rather than beside it.]

    Method

    [The committee's interest is in the school's research programme and in the money and prestige that sustain it, and it is willing to conceal any part of that work from anyone, including the headmaster. The Izuru Kamukura Project was directed by the committee and kept secret from Jin Kirigiri entirely, because the human experimentation it required could not survive being known. The Reserve Course was created in part to fund the same project, so the committee financed its most indefensible work with tuition taken from the students it valued least.]

    Scouting

    [Almost every Ultimate is located by the school's talent scouts. Only twice is a student known to have been scouted by the Steering Committee personally, and both of those students were the Enoshima twins.]

    Consequence

    [The committee treated talent as a resource, the Reserve Course as a revenue stream, and secrecy as a management tool, and it produced exactly the results those choices imply. The project it hid created the person who would mastermind the Tragedy's first killing game, and the resentment it manufactured among the students it despised was the fuel that turned a school scandal into a global collapse. The committee did not survive the events it set in motion.]

    Reach

    [The committee's authority extends past the school gates. Hope's Peak Academy's graduates occupy the top of every profession they entered, its research underpins work in fields well beyond education, and its endorsement is what makes an Ultimate title worth anything at all. A body able to decide who is named an Ultimate is a body able to decide who the world regards as exceptional, and the committee treated that power as an asset to be managed rather than a responsibility. Its members are never named to the students, appear in no photographs the students see, and answer no questions.]

43. #43Izuru Kamukura Project

    Keys: Izuru Kamukura Project, Kamukura Project, Hope Cultivation Plan, talent implantation surgery

    Izuru Kamukura Project

    Purpose

    [The Izuru Kamukura Project, also called the Hope Cultivation Plan, was an experiment directed by Hope's Peak Academy's Steering Committee to manufacture hope rather than find it. Its goal was to take an ordinary student with no talent and surgically implant every talent the academy had researched, producing a perfect genius whose specialty was talent itself, and to grant that person the title of Ultimate Hope. The project was named after the academy's founder, and its subject took the founder's name.]

    Method And Secrecy

    [The work required human experimentation and other things the school could not defend, so the committee kept it hidden even from the headmaster. It was funded largely by Reserve Course tuition, and the laboratory was in the basement of the old school building, where the subject lived for a period afterward. The procedure involved extensive brain surgery, and it left a scar on the subject's head.]

    Recruitment

    [The intended subject was a Reserve Course student, chosen because he had no talent and because he wanted one more than anything. He was approached with the offer while he was already spending his enrollment staring through a gate he was not permitted to walk through, and he hesitated for a long time before agreeing. Consenting meant dropping out of the Reserve Course and giving up everything he had been.]

    Result

    [On paper the project succeeded completely. An unremarkable boy emerged carrying every talent the academy had catalogued and outperformed everyone at everything. The process also erased almost all of his personality and his memories, on the reasoning that his original self would interfere with talent cultivation, and what it left was apathetic to everything and everyone, capable of predicting any outcome and consequently incapable of being interested in any of them.]

    Consequence

    [The Ultimate Hope proved to be the academy's undoing. Two students learned of the project, tracked the subject down, and offered him the one thing that had been taken from him, which was the possibility of not knowing what happens next. He agreed to be used in exchange for it. The academy's proof that hope could be manufactured became the instrument of the Tragedy, and the school that built him was among the first things destroyed.]

44. #44The Tragedy

    Keys: The Tragedy, Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History, Most Despair-inducing Incident

    The Tragedy

    What It Is

    [The Tragedy, in full the Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History, is the global collapse caused by Junko Enoshima and Ultimate Despair. It began roughly a year before the Killing School Life and is described by everyone who lived through it as extraordinary social unrest that escalated into worldwide anarchy, meaningless violence and mass death.]

    How It Started

    [The first killing game was held among Hope's Peak Academy's own student council, and every participant but two died. The footage was edited and released to the Reserve Course together with the fact that their tuition had secretly funded the creation of the Ultimate Hope, which cast the academy as having spent their money manufacturing killers. The Reserve Course rioted, was steered from the shadows into escalating violence, and was finally brainwashed and destroyed by the woman who had provoked it, in front of witnesses who could not stop it.]

    Spread

    [The anti-talent movement it produced was pushed outward until it engulfed the world. It began on the internet as a community with real grievances, spread offline, crossed borders and nationalities, and then lost its own reasons. The demonstrations became destruction, the destruction became routine, and death became an ordinary part of daily life. The strong killed the weak and the weak killed each other. What had started as a scandal about a school ended as the near-destruction of civilisation.]

    Inside The Academy

    [Hope's Peak Academy responded by ceasing operations as a school and converting the old building into a sealed shelter for its remaining students. The plan was hijacked from inside by one of those students, who killed the headmaster, erased the memories of the rest, and turned the shelter into the Killing School Life.]

    Aftermath

    [The Tragedy did not end with Junko Enoshima's death. Most members of Ultimate Despair killed themselves after she did, and those who did not became the Remnants of Despair and kept the work going. The Future Foundation, formed by alumni of Hope's Peak, began the long process of pulling the world back, and with Ultimate Despair's influence weakened it started to show real progress. Large parts of the world remained in anarchy regardless, and in Towa City a deliberate attempt was made to escalate a local riot into a war capable of reigniting the whole thing.]

45. #45Ultimate Despair

    Keys: Ultimate Despair, despair terrorists, despair in human form

    Ultimate Despair

    What It Is

    [Ultimate Despair is the organisation founded by Junko Enoshima and the engine of the Tragedy. Its members are described as despair in human form. Junko treats despair as a contagion and a state of mind rather than a mood, and her members function less as followers than as extensions of her will. Their goal is to spread despair across the world and drive it into self-destructive anarchy, and they succeeded.]

    Membership

    [The core of the organisation was a class of Hope's Peak Academy students, conditioned rather than recruited. Junko combined a brainwashing technique with footage engineered to break them, and the conditioning left their personalities intact while rewiring what they wanted, so that each of them continued to be recognisably themselves while pursuing despair with their own particular talent. Their announced plans for the world sounded humanitarian, and their eyes had gone wrong.]

    What They Did

    [Their acts defy ordinary explanation because they were never meant to make sense. Members starved themselves until their bodies were husks. Members handed over their own parents for use in experiments on murder. Members slaughtered civilians and forced others to kill themselves as tribute to their dead leader. One removed an eye and replaced it with Junko's. The organisation's methods ranged from mass brainwashing videos distributed to whole populations down to personal manipulation of individuals Junko found interesting.]

    After Junko

    [When Junko Enoshima executed herself at the end of the Killing School Life, most of Ultimate Despair followed her example and committed suicide. Those who did not became known as the Remnants of Despair. The organisation's influence collapsed sharply without her, and the Future Foundation gained ground for the first time, but the surviving members continued the work on their own account.]

    The Successor Question

    [Ultimate Despair without Junko Enoshima is a body with no head, and the attempt to supply one drove the events in Towa City. The plan was to manufacture a successor out of an ordinary girl, hand her the organisation, and use the resulting war to restart the Tragedy from the beginning.]

46. #46Remnants of Despair

    Keys: Remnants of Despair, Remnant of Despair, despair remnants, surviving Ultimate Despair members

    Remnants of Despair

    Who They Are

    [The Remnants of Despair are the members of Ultimate Despair who did not kill themselves after Junko Enoshima's death. They continued to push her agenda without her, and for a period after the Tragedy they were the single most dangerous force in the world and the Future Foundation's principal enemy.]

    Capture

    [Fifteen of them were eventually taken into Future Foundation custody, initially identified only as survivors from Hope's Peak Academy. When a member of the Foundation's 14th Division recognised what they actually were, he chose not to hand them over. He had them moved in secret to Jabberwock Island and entered into the Neo World Program, gambling that the conditioning could be undone rather than punished.]

    The Program

    [Their memories were reset to a point before they enrolled at Hope's Peak Academy, which is why the avatars they wear in the simulation are younger than their real bodies and why none of them recognises anyone else, with a single exception among two who had known each other since childhood. The intended outcome was that the selves they built inside the program would overwrite the Ultimate Despair conditioning on graduation, and that they would wake up as people who had never been remade.]

    What Went Wrong

    [The program was sabotaged before it began. A virus carrying a copy of Junko Enoshima seized its observer roles and converted the rehabilitation exercise into the Killing School Trip, with the aim of restoring the Remnants to what they had been and walking their bodies out into the world as a revived Ultimate Despair. Some of them died inside it. The survivors chose the forced shutdown instead of graduation, accepting that they were the Remnants of Despair and that they would have to answer for it, and stayed on the island to try to recover the people still comatose.]

    Elsewhere

    [Not all of them were captured. At least one Remnant was operating independently during the events in Towa City, working as the Warriors of Hope's Servant and steering the crisis from inside it while the Future Foundation's attention was elsewhere.]

47. #47Future Foundation

    Keys: Future Foundation, World Ender, Foundation branch, Foundation division

    Future Foundation

    What It Is

    [The Future Foundation is an organisation formed by alumni and former personnel of Hope's Peak Academy during or after the Tragedy, with two purposes: to defeat Ultimate Despair and to undo the damage it had done to the world. It was already well established by the end of the Killing School Life, well enough to reach the survivors of that game and extract them. Monokuma referred to it as World Ender in an attempt to make the students believe it was hostile, and the phrase turned out to mean only that the Foundation intended to end the world Ultimate Despair had built.]

    Structure

    [The Foundation is divided into numbered divisions with distinct responsibilities, from overall direction and daily operations through construction, expansion and a military peacekeeping force. The divisions do not agree with each other about method. Some hold that every trace of despair must be exterminated along with anyone who assists it, in order to minimise further deaths. Others hold that the source of despair in human nature has to be removed instead, or that the answer is to demonstrate hope rather than to fight despair at all.]

    The Survivors

    [The six survivors of the Killing School Life were rescued by the Foundation and had their school memories restored, and all of them joined it to fight the Remnants of Despair. Five became full members with positions. The sixth was refused full membership and kept as an intern, because the serial killer sharing her body was judged too great a risk, and she was told she would be recognised only once she had permanently stopped that alter from killing.]

    Jabberwock Island

    [When a member of the 14th Division realised that fifteen people in Foundation custody were Remnants of Despair, he moved them secretly to Jabberwock Island and put them into the Neo World Program rather than let the Foundation dispose of them. Two other members joined the rescue operation when the program was found to have been sabotaged, and the three of them arrived on the island as the killing game inside it reached its end.]

    Towa City

    [The Foundation received information that the Captives, the family members and associates of Class 78th who had been taken during the Killing School Life, were being held in Towa City. It sent a team to recover them. The rescue helicopters were shot down by Monokuma units, the team on the ground was scattered, and its leader was taken hostage by the children running the city, which left the operation in the hands of an intern and a civilian girl.]

48. #48Neo World Program

    Keys: Neo World Program, Psychotherapeutic Communication Simulator, virtual world simulation, avatar in the program

    Neo World Program

    What It Is

    [The Neo World Program, formally the Psychotherapeutic Communication Simulator, is a virtual environment developed jointly by Hope's Peak Academy and the Future Foundation. It synchronises directly with a user's brain through a device mounted on the cranium and places the user inside a fully realised simulated world. It is built on current psychotherapy technology with input from an Ultimate Programmer, an Ultimate Neurologist and an Ultimate Therapist, and its designed purpose is to undo trauma by replacing memories formed in the real world with memories formed inside the simulation.]

    Avatars

    [A user's avatar is a copy of their real body generated from a specific set of their own memories, so it can differ substantially from what they currently look like. The real body remains in a sleeping state throughout. The Remnants of Despair entered with their school memories removed, which is why their avatars appear as they did before enrolling at Hope's Peak Academy, several years younger than their real selves, and why they do not recognise each other.]

    How It Feels

    [The simulation is convincing because the brain treats it as real. A person told convincingly enough that they have been burned will develop the burn, and the same principle scales to an entire island. Injury, hunger, exhaustion and death inside the program are experienced exactly as they would be outside it, and death inside it shuts down the corresponding real body.]

    Observers

    [The program generates observers to guide its users and carry out the session's objectives. They are not people; they are constructs whose appearance and personality are drawn from the users' own thoughts and memories, and they may closely resemble real people the users once knew. The session run for the Remnants of Despair generated two, both of whom had their roles usurped when the program was hijacked.]

    Graduation

    [At the end of a session users choose to graduate or to remain. Graduating, if the observer judges the objectives met, transfers each consciousness back into its real body and forcibly erases the personality it had before entering, which is the entire point of the exercise. Choosing to remain means living on inside the simulation indefinitely. There is also an undocumented third option: pressing graduate and repeat together triggers a forced shutdown that overrides both, returning every surviving consciousness to its body without overwriting anything.]

    Sabotage

    [The session held on Jabberwock Island was compromised before it started. A virus was inserted into the program's code, which manifested as Monokuma, seized the observers' authority, built a corrupted digital copy of Hope's Peak Academy inside the simulation, and converted the rehabilitation exercise into the Killing School Trip.]

49. #49Jabberwock Island

    Keys: Jabberwock Island, Jabberwock, Hotel Mirai, Jabberwock Park, Funhouse, Strawberry House, Grape House

    Jabberwock Island

    What It Is

    [Jabberwock Island is a tropical archipelago of five islands arranged around a central one, the setting of the Killing School Trip. It exists both as a real place, where the Future Foundation holds the comatose bodies of the Remnants of Despair, and as a simulated environment inside the Neo World Program, where those same people experience it as a school trip. The version the students walk around is the simulated one.]

    The Central Island

    [The first island holds the hotel complex where the students live, a restaurant used for the daily morning gatherings, a supermarket, a beach, an airport, a ranch, a hospital, and Jabberwock Park, where a countdown timer stands beside a statue. The cottages are assigned individually and the hotel lobby holds an arcade machine. The islands are connected by bridges, which begin the game sealed and are opened one at a time.]

    The Other Islands

    [Each successive island opens as the killing game progresses and each carries its own facilities: a music venue, a movie theatre, a beach house, a diner, a library, a park, a supermarket, a chandler's, a ruin site, an amusement park, and an ancient stone structure at the centre of the last one. Monokuma treats each new island as a reward and each is opened when the previous chapter closes.]

    The Funhouse

    [Partway through the killing game the students are sealed inside a building split into two halves, Strawberry House and Grape House, with the food supply removed and the doors locked, in an attempt to force a murder through starvation. The building also contains the Final Dead Room, which can only be entered alone and which offers whatever is inside it in exchange for a game of Russian roulette.]

    What Is Underneath

    [The simulated island is running on top of a corrupted copy of Hope's Peak Academy, and the deeper the students go the more of it surfaces. The ancient ruins on the final island open into the academy itself, decayed and wrong, where the truth about the students, the program and the world outside is finally laid out.]

    The Real Island

    [In reality the archipelago holds a Future Foundation facility where fifteen bodies lie in a sleeping state wired into the program. The survivors of the Killing School Trip wake there, and choose to remain on the island afterward rather than leave, in order to keep working on the classmates who never woke up.]

50. #50Killing School Life

    Keys: Killing School Life, first killing game, mutual killing at Hope's Peak

    Killing School Life

    What It Is

    [The Killing School Life is the killing game held inside the sealed old school building of Hope's Peak Academy, involving the sixteen students of Class 78th. They wake in the building with no memory of the two years they had already spent at the school, believing they have just enrolled, and are told by Monokuma that they will live there for the rest of their lives unless they graduate, and that graduation requires killing a classmate and not being caught.]

    Structure

    [Life inside runs on a schedule of morning and night announcements, with certain areas closed until Monokuma chooses to open them. When nobody kills, Monokuma introduces a motive designed to make somebody do it, escalating from the threat of exposing everyone's secrets, to money, to video messages about what has happened to the students' families, to blackmail and hostage-taking. Each murder is followed by an investigation and a class trial, and each trial ends in an execution.]

    The Conditions

    [The students were sealed in as part of a genuine shelter plan while the world outside collapsed, and their memories of that world and of each other were removed afterward. The plating over the windows, the vault door and the food stores are all real shelter measures. What was added was the surveillance, the courtroom in the basement, the wallpaper and the bear.]

    The Mastermind

    [The mastermind was one of the sixteen, hidden among them for the entire game while a second conspirator wore her identity. She killed the headmaster to take the building, ran Monokuma personally, and structured the game around the belief that hope always loses to despair given enough pressure.]

    Outcome

    [Six students survived: the Ultimate Lucky Student, the Ultimate Detective, the Ultimate Affluent Progeny, the Ultimate Swimming Pro, the Ultimate Clairvoyant and the Ultimate Writing Prodigy. In the final trial they were shown the state of the world outside and offered the chance to stay sealed in forever rather than face it. They voted to leave. The mastermind, having lost, executed herself, and the survivors opened the vault door and walked out into the Tragedy.]

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