Danganronpa masterminds

Izuru has very long, flowing black hair (though it may appear to be dark brown in some light). His hair is usually smooth, though it's also been portrayed as messy. He has red eyes with symbols resembling target radars running across his pupils, unlike Hajime. His skin is pale, and sometimes appears grey or cadaverous. He wears a black suit with three white buttons, a black tie and a white dress shirt inside. He also has a black belt and black loafers.

Junko appears to be a young high school-aged teenager, but due to her causing her classmates memory loss, she is two years older than they all believed her and themselves to be. She has a tall, dramatic hourglass figure, light blue eyes, and long, thick, bleached strawberry-blonde hair tied in two twin pigtails. Due to her fake talent, she wears heavy make-up along with fake long red nails. Due to being related, Junko and her older twin sister Mukuro Ikusaba share several physical characteristics. However, Junko has a considerably larger chest than Mukuro and weighs two pounds more than her. Junko's eyes are more round and larger and are blue with her contacts or naturally red compared to Mukuro's light purple eyes. Junko also lacks freckles. Junko's usual outfit includes a black cardigan over a white dress shirt, with both left open to the third button to expose the top of her black-and-red bra, a red pleated miniskirt that is cut extremely short, and mid-sized black boots with platform heels and red laces. Her cardigan is accented with white symbols of her Former High School. She accessories with a long tie that hangs loosely around her neck with a design alternates between pure white (Danganronpa 3) and as half black and white with a prohibition sign on it (Danganronpa 1) that hangs loosely around her neck, a thin black choker, a red bow above her left breast, and two buttons on her right side. Her most notable accessory is her signature twin bear hair clips that are based on Monokuma's two sides. The right clip is a completely white bear with dot eyes and a neutral expression, while the left is a black bear with a white muzzle, jagged red eyes, and a wicked smile. During her time at Hope's Peak Academy, she instead wore a set of hair clips of a cute bunny and a large red and white bow. This is the outfit her sister Mukuro wore when masquerading during the Killing School Life, though without the choker and bow on her chest, and with a different tie palette. Due to her constantly-shifting personalities, Junko's appearance shifts slightly with her mood. Her "royal" personality dons a small gold and red crown with encrusted jewels. Her "intellectual" personality wears glasses and styles her hair in a ponytail. Her “depressed" personality sports a few multicolored mushrooms on top of her head with a blueish forehead with no pupils. Her "cute" personality simplifies her entire appearance to appear more cartoonish, including smoother pigtails, large, bright eyes, and a small smile. Her "rockstar" personality is similar to Genocide Jack, as her eyes are insane-looking, she has a reddish forehead, and she talks with her tongue out, along with having messier pigtails and doing the hand-horn gesture. Her "stoicism" personality (possibly) involves her having a serious-like face with her doing a pose that covers part of her face. Lastly, her Monokuma personality involves her having Monokuma in front of her.

Monaca is an elementary school-aged girl. She has short green hair tied with a red ribbon and matching eyes with a distinct manji pattern as the iris. She wears a knee-length dress with a decal of a pelvis and spine on its back. Monaca wears the silver Warriors of Hope badge on the collar of her dress. Her legs are incapacitated, so she uses an electric wheelchair - though, it is later revealed that she was only faking it and she can actually walk. The footrest bears the emblem of the "Mage" class. She also wears black knee highs and white shoes. In Danganronpa 3 - Future Arc, she is slightly older and dressed just like Junko. She is seen using a wheelchair and it's possible that her legs were incapacitated for real, due to the damage sustained at the end of Danganronpa Another Episode. This is further implied in Future Arc #07, as she is never seen standing, not even while having a seemingly important speech - she is only seen sitting and lying down.

Tsumugi is a self-described plain-looking girl of a rather tall height and fair complexion. She has knee-length teal-blue hair parted in the center, straight and smooth at the base and gradually splitting into waves near the tips. Her eyes are large, round, and a soft teal-green color. She wears round, rimless glasses with white temples. Her uniform consists of a white blouse with an orange bow tied at her collar underneath a two-button, pocketed, teal-black school blazer adorned with two silver buttons on each lapel and a single button on each gorge. She has been shown without her blazer in her promotional artwork, which shows the insignia of her former high school in black on her left breast. She wears a knee-length pleated skirt the same color as her blazer with two dark teal stripes lining the hem held by dark gray suspenders. Her legwear consists of dark navy knee-length socks and teal-gray loafers. In the prologue, Tsumugi's uniform consisted of a white, long sleeved, sailor-style seifuku, the collar, breast pocket, and sleeve cuffs all blue and lined with a single white stripe, a black ascot tied at her neck. She wore a knee-length blue pleated skirt, black knee-high socks, and dark gray loafers. Upon being discovered as the Mastermind of the Killing School Semester and revealing her talent in its true form as the Ultimate Cosplayer, Tsumugi's normal, plain appearance undergoes a couple minor yet noticeable alterations. Her hair assumes a wavier, lighter state, and her eyes glow an eerie bright blue, which may be a characteristic sign of her insanity, similar to Nagito Komaeda's state when he speaks of his warped desire for hope. When she is cosplaying, a faint V appears in her right eye and a 3 in her left eye, referring to the 53rd season of Danganronpa. Another slight difference is that dark bags appear under her eyes. The exact reasoning behind this is unclear, though the likely explanation is that it is meant to be symbolic with how the Danganronpa franchise has continued for 53 installments and that even she may be getting tired of the absurd repetition.

Due to the drastic changes that the operations made to turn Hajime into Izuru, his original personality was suppressed so as to not interfere with his talent cultivation. Izuru appears as a cold and emotionless person who finds everything and everyone boring, though he does talk and express in a more polite way than his alternate identity in the Japanese version. He expresses a disgust for talentless people, because his "teachers" taught him that they are just parasites who oppose and leech off of those with talent instead of acknowledging their "true superiors". He believes that such people brought the world to a deadlock and created a world that has stopped evolving, and that the only way to improve this is a certain form of "selection". Because of his constant boredom, Izuru is highly resellient to unpleasant events happening around him, as he watched The Tragedy of Hope's Peak Academy and Chisa's brainwashing running their full courses completely unfazed. Izuru enjoys unpredictability, which can make him feel more emotional, but he also tends to quickly grow bored because his supernatural analytical skills and intuition cause him to quickly predict things with surprising accuracy. This is seen in Chapter 0 of Danganronpa 2, as he is visibly excited by the rocking of the boat only to find it boring a few seconds later (he is also so focused on the rocking that he doesn't even realize he's on a boat, at first). Notably, he appears aware that he is only being used and his talents are "leeched off" to create hope he finds boring and predictable, but he has no motivation to change his situation. Junko eventually used this to manipulate him, as she told him to strive for the unknown of despair and chaos, finally motivating him to strive to actively free himself from the boredom. In Danganronpa 3, Izuru is shown to be quite silent at times, acting responsively only when he finds it necessary. Instead, he often observes other people and situations silently with no changes in his facial expressions, often without being noticed by other people. He appears to have no interest in humor nor romantic approaches from other people, as he often doesn't even look at other people during those moments, and ignores such behavior from Junko. He never laughs nor smiles, and generally doesn't change his expressions much. However, while he lacks sympathy for others, he differs from Junko in that he does not enjoy the suffering of others, and thus mostly hurts or kills other people only for self-defense. While he usually has no interest nor care for other people, the only exception is Chiaki due to his past life, as Hajime's attachment to her made him shed tears (though he didn't appear to know why) and she is the only person he subconsciously cared for as shown when he kept her hairpin and mourned for her after the Tragedy. In Danganronpa Another Episode, Izuru appears completely silent and seemingly unemotional. However, he rips the hard drives from Shirokuma and Kurokuma in a rather aggressive and seemingly annoyed manner, which is even commented on by the Alter Ego Junko. Similarly, he appears unusually bitter and vengeful while talking about Junko during Chapter 0 of the second game, because she used him in the past. It's also possible that he is subconsciously angry because she killed Chiaki. After the Neo World Program, the person who went in as Izuru started to identify as Hajime. He still expresses boredom to some things, but his personality is mostly like Hajime's, as he has an easier time feeling emotions and is more proactive.

As a young fashionista, Junko Enoshima is described as simply "not fake", charismatic and eager to try new things. During her first appearances, she comes across slightly air-headed and hot-tempered. In the official artbook, she is described as a person who "drips with dissatisfaction the moment she opens her mouth" and tends to be in trouble with her classmates. She is also mentioned to be a bit too talkative with an overly carefree attitude. However, Junko's real personality, revealed at the conclusion of the Killing School Life, is notably different: very apathetic and easily bored to an unhealthy and abnormal degree. Because of this, her behavior and mannerisms tended to be extremely erratic and unstable by her own autonomous design; keeping up one "appearance" for too long bores her, which causes her to often switch between different personas. However, she is capable of maintaining one persona for extended periods of time when necessary, such as when she was overseeing the students through Monokuma. Junko's "moods" included (but were not limited to) her Monokuma persona, sickening cuteness, severe depression, clinical sophistication, boisterous vulgarity, eerie stoicism, and haughty superiority. She switched between "moods" regularly, often imitating other students' expressions, which made for a highly unsettling conversation with the survivors. Her voice will either have a different tone or accent within the switches, such as "haughty superiority" giving her a British voice, her "sickening cuteness" giving her a higher pitched voice, her "clinical sophistication" giving her a slightly deeper voice, making her speak as if she was, as her appearance suggests, a teacher/professor, her "severe depression" giving her a more sad voice, as if she was on the verge of crying, her "eerie stoicism" giving her a monotone voice, her "boisterous vulgarity" sounding similar to a stereotypical rockstar, and her Monokuma one mimicking his voice. While entering the Hope's Peak Academy as one of Class 78's students, she often talked as if narrating a story, writing down her thoughts in a notebook. Above all, Junko was deeply obsessed with despair, having found despair to be the most (and possibly the only) enjoyable emotion for her, whether it be inflicting despair unto others, or suffering from despair wholeheartedly. This made her extremely dangerous, as she wished to make the whole world feel absolute despair. However, this also often proved to be her biggest weakness, as she gave her opponents a "fair" chance to defeat her in order to make their despair all the greater if they fail, and happily welcomed her own despair if her plans failed. Both Junko herself and the game's creators have confirmed that she truly has no reason to do the things she does other than despair itself, which makes her all the more dangerous and unable to be reasoned with. However it is hinted at in the anime that her analytical talent was what caused her to turn to despair, and that Hope's Peak was her first target because they see talent as hope, and use that talent for their own benefit, which drove Junko to take the talent they loved so much and use it for evil, which shows her in a more understandable light. It's also shown that under her amnesiac state, Junko doesn't show a thirst for despair or particularly strong hatred of boredom, implying that her constant case of forgetfulness had spared her from embracing despair again. However, the return of her memories reverted her to her former ways. As the mastermind and leader of Ultimate Despair, Junko was shown to be highly intelligent, cunning, somewhat impulsive, extremely manipulative, and violent and cruel without remorse. She was a highly toxic individual, being both physically and mentally abusive to everyone around her. She manipulated people into falling madly in love with her and used their weaknesses, their despair, against them. Things like hope, peace, and happiness disgusted her, but she sometimes gave hope to others, only to turn it into greater despair later. She often manipulated people into doing bad things instead of directly doing them herself and then had a habit of blaming these manipulated people and claiming it wasn't her fault, as a part of proving her point that despair exists in everyone and that hope will naturally lose to that despair. While she is very skilled, Junko can also lie and cheat to further her own goals, even if it's hypocritical and goes against her beliefs. It should be noted that even though she claims despair is the great unknown, in the end, the road of despair went exactly the way she had planned. Despite that she can be cruel and abusive to some, Junko is actually capable of feeling love to those she's close with, however due to how far despair has driven her, she kills them anyways to cause herself to feel large amounts of despair. According to Kodaka and Junko's voice actress, her personality in Despair Arc is a more natural version of her, closer to her true self and more neutral, before she started changing her personalities regularly. This seems to imply that her behavior in the first game is a result of decreasing mental health and deeper sinking into despair, explaining her more jaded and apathetic personality. This also implies that even the Tragedy was beginning to bore her, as the seemingly chaotic event went just like she planned.

Monaca is seemingly very amiable and caring. She appears very cheerful and has a childish way of talking, sometimes meowing and almost exclusively referring to herself in the third person. Because of her charming personality, all of the Warriors love her and try their best to keep her happy and go along with what she wants. However, it's slowly revealed that she is actually manipulative and cunning behind her friendly facade. Her 'true' personality resembles that of Junko's. She is also mentioned to be very intelligent for her age and very skilled with robots. When things are not going her way, Monaca will manipulate the situation by any means necessary, such as throwing fits or causing the Warriors to turn on each other. She ultimately has very little regard for their well-being, knowingly using their traumatic pasts against them and not feeling any sympathy nor sorrow for them nor anyone else. She greatly admires Junko, who seems to be the only person she ever (genuinely) cared about, and she hates the idea of Junko being disappointed in her. Despite her cheerful front, Monaca has suffered from suicidal thoughts in her past and present, though she claims it's all just a joke. According to Monaca's voice actress, Aya Hirano, "Monaca-chan, just based on appearance, gives you the feeling that she has some special circumstance about her, but in reality, it is not at that level… She is a terrible little girl. She can be angelic, and she can also be a demon." Hirano also commented that Monaca's outer skin crumbles away to reveal her true character as the various mysteries in the game become clear. "She is truly villainous." In Danganronpa 3, Monaca has the same manipulative and somewhat childish personality. She considers Makoto a loser, because he needs the help of friends, especially since he is a boy and the said friends are girls. In the end, it's revealed that The Servant's constant ramblings about hope and despair made her feel bored and embarrassed about becoming the second Junko Enoshima, having been disgusted by how insane he acted. She claims she became an adult in a sense, as she turned more cynical, lazy and apathetic, not really caring about anything. She gives up on despair, knowing that it's all too complicated for her and hope would win in the end, seemingly ending her villainous days.

Tsumugi is an honors type student who speaks in a docile and gentle way, but she becomes very passionate when she talks about her favorite series or cosplays, having a habit of slipping infamous quotes from various sources into the conversation. Being a self-proclaimed introvert, she also tends to ignore people while she's in her thoughts, no matter how many times they try talking to her, and appears rather distant at times.[3] She tends to call herself and everything that she has done "plain," as she believes that among all of the students, she is the one who has the plainest appearance and personality. She uses the word repeatedly and sometimes appears even offended if someone else tries to argue that she isn't plain. She understands that some people might not recognize her as the Ultimate Cosplayer since her plain appearance conceals her talent. While Tsumugi is the Ultimate Cosplayer, she only enjoys making costumes, not wearing them, as she is not really fond of people looking at her. However, she hates using cosplayers who care more about standing out than the love of the characters, so she wears her own costumes as well but with love. She deeply loves cosplaying as she states that cosplaying is an expression of love. She has deep respect for fictional characters and gets very offended if they are disrespected. Despite her plain and docile attitude, certain hints suggest that she may actually be quite perverted, as she is a big stereotypical fan of anime and manga. After the time limit motive was made apparent in Chapter 1, she was saddened by not being able to hide her "special art commissions" and "that pillowcase" she bought before she dies. She also at one point, in an optional dialogue conversation, wonders if she could wipe her entire hard drive at home from within the Ultimate Academy, worrying about the pictures that were saved on it, perhaps hinting at an interest in pornography, hentai, or something similar to them. In her Love Suite fantasy scene, she appears to have an interest in incest, as she imagines her "ideal" as her older stepbrother, and sex is heavily implied (which seems to refer to the quite popular hentai trope of romance between step-siblings). She seems very intent on keeping this side of her hidden, as it is very rarely brought up or acknowledged by anyone in the killing game. Tsumugi is somewhat timid, and she is usually the first person who screams whenever something scary happens. Another notable trait of hers is that she is somewhat pessimistic, as shown in Chapter 5 when she refused to fight Monokuma, thinking that it was too reckless and dangerous. Furthermore, whenever someone else has a some sort of character establishing moment, she tends to act threatened and inferior, as she closes her eyes and puts her hands up in slight defense while she squeals something about how much more interesting, stronger, cooler or pure the other person is compared to her. Regardless, she generally appears to be a kind person, as seen in the way she grieves the deaths of others and treats Gonta in patient, gentle manner. However, she also seems to be very skilled with blending in her environment. She constantly changes her mind and follows any decisions made by the majority, even if she doesn't have any actual reasons for it, and she eventually followed everyone to beat the Death Road of Despair. In any occasion, she tends to react to even the most minor things said by the others. She is able to follow the conversation with Himiko about her "magic", asking Tenko why her technique is far too aggressive for a martial art like Aikido, and most notably she tries to tell Gonta not to be a too honest person. Notably, despite her somewhat timid and plain personality, it is indicated that she actually has the ability to take control in the few situations she wishes to. Right after meeting her, Kaede describes her as "exuding pheromones" and is distracted by her "sexy" face while having a conversation with her. When she later makes a cocktail for Shuichi in her personal bar, he notices that Tsumugi is discreetly seducing him through the clinking sound of the glass and the suddenly notable lack of her jacket covering her blouse. He ends up wondering just what kind of place she worked in. During her Love Suite Event with Shuichi, she quickly seduces him, as if "wrapping her voice around his brain" and he feels he cannot resist her. After being revealed as the mastermind of the Killing School Semester in Chapter 6, she reveals herself to not be that much different from Junko Enoshima herself, with the exception of not possessing any special analytical prowess and superior charisma that Junko had. She is manipulative and cruel, choosing to murder Rantaro and frame Kaede for his death all so that the killing game would not end due to the motive Monokuma presented at the time. She openly fooled her fellow "classmates" as a friend and comrade all the while secretly orchestrating the killing game and making sure that everything went according to the "setting" provided for them. She also displays great skills in hiding her true personality and does not display it before she is revealed as the true culprit and can act as if she were another person without arousing any suspicions. She takes great pride in her cosplay, claiming her mimicry of the characters from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc and Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair to be "complete reproductions", or exactly like the real thing even down to their personality, behavior, speech patterns, and goals. She claims that she can even use her cosplay skills to make the fictional world around her seem like it is real. As a likely benefit of her talent, she is also a master of deception and trickery, able to fake her entire character as the Ultimate Cosplayer and as an Otaku throughout the entire killing game and subsequently fool everyone else around her by constantly saying how plain and simple she was. She turns noticeably arrogant as the final class trial continues, claiming that everyone else was a fool to think of her as a comrade and friend. She cares nothing for those that participated in the killing game, claiming that they were born for the killing game and cannot live outside the world of Danganronpa anymore. Her arrogance also shows her insanely hypocritical nature, breaking her own rules on numerous occasions and practically making them up as she went along just to benefit her the most. She also claims that fiction cannot change the outside world after Shuichi insisted on "changing the outside world from within this fiction" despite she tried to do the very same thing prior by filling the outside world with despair. This is also quite an unusual statement for her to make considering that she takes immense pride in her cosplay and her ability to twist and manipulate people using fiction. As a result, what she truly believes in is uncertain though it could always be assumed she only said this out of fear and panic. Going further with this, despite all her hubris in the final trial, she proves herself to be rather incapable as a Mastermind overall, especially when compared to prior master manipulators like Junko herself, Monaca, and to some extent Chisa and Kazuo as well. She nearly got her Killing Game shut down in only the first chapter due to the motive presented at the time as well as "writing" Kaede Akamatsu to be too strong as her determination and optimism kept a killing from happening. Her killing game also follows many noticeable tropes that are often shunned such as a double murder occurring in Chapter 3, and the "gentle-giant" archetype dying in Chapter 4. Far more noteworthy however, is Kokichi taking over her role in Chapter 5, proving himself to be a far more-threatening "Mastermind" by filling everyone with so much despair that they almost killed themselves. Of course K1-B0's antenna getting knocked off during Kaito's execution was also unexpected, which she even admits herself. As a result despite her constant claims that every action and thought the characters made and felt in the Killing Game were a result of her own writing, it is unclear just how much control she truly had over everything that happened. Once the final vote was cast and it is revealed that no one had voted, she grows considerably bewildered, unable to comprehend as to why the outside world would want a world without Danganronpa. She states that she has no interest in a world without Danganronpa, before getting executed by K1-B0 while wearing a completely bored and apathetic expression (contrasting Junko's gleeful face when she was executed), showing her obsession with fiction and love for the series. She idolized Junko to a great degree, almost as much as the Remnants of Despair do, claiming in the end that she could be proud that her plan failed as it made her "imitation" perfect. This dramatic change in personality from before being found out as the mastermind and after, along with her arrogant and hypocritical "true self" seems to paint her in the light of a crazed, radical Danganronpa fan-girl, completely obsessed with the franchise to the point where she shows no sympathy or remorse for putting real people into an actual Killing Game for mere entertainment purposes. Among her final words, she referred to herself as a "cosplaycat criminal", and it's speculated by Shuichi that she may have been lying about everything being fictional.