Archive of Our Own ^beta

Hope is a lie.

And lies are hope.

A cruel, crude, manipulative, vulgar farce. She crafts Kurokuma, black hope, from her image of what it is, and it is fitting, then, that all he can tell, sing with promise to those kids who look at him with stars in their eyes, are lies he never believed in in the first place. Soothing, beautiful lies of a world where no one hurts them, where what is lost can be regained, whether that is safety or love. Paradise. The Successor. And it's all, all, all, all a lie.

The fact that they believe in it means they never knew her in the first place.

Junko doesn't hate hope; she simply doesn't believe in it. Maybe a girl like Junko cannot believe in anything, because she cannot hope for anything but despair. Maybe it is because she looks at hope and thinks it is a facade. She doesn't hate hope; she simply doesn't believe in it.

Despair always follows hope. Always, always. No matter what. Hope only existed to make the despair of falling worse. She loved hope, because she loved despair; and she didn't believe in either.

Junko Enoshima didn't believe.

But she did forgive, because how else would she stay sane? She forgave despair, she forgave hope; and she embraced both, embraced the world, because she knew she could not escape it if she tried. (Ryouko Otonashi tried.) She forgave everything, forgave the world, because nothing was unforgivable to Junko Enoshima, because everything was despair. And if everything was despair, what choice did you have but to love it? A paradox: to escape the pain of it, she embraced it instead. Despair cannot hurt you if you love despair, and Junko Enoshima called that “Freedom.”

Insane? She's not insane. She is the only one who is sane. 

Hope is futile; despair is inevitable. Anyone who doesn’t see that is the insane one.

She forgave Yasuke, and she forgave Nagito, and she forgave Mikan, she forgave the whole 77th class. She forgave the world. And she loved it, and she loved them, if only for the inherent despair the entire thing brought.

Hope is a lie. Lies are hope.

Junko doesn't hate it; but she doesn't believe in it, either.

Chiaki Nanami is not hope. 

Oh, she's cute, she'll give her that. All her talk of belief, and yet she is blind. And that is what belief is, isn't it? Blind. Naive. Worth less than trash. Only seeing the best means being blinded to their worst. And not being seen is how resentment breeds.

Junko tears her apart.

She tears her belief apart. Belief in good, belief in kind, belief as good and as kind, it's all worthless lies. There is no hope, and Junko will prove it. Chiaki Nanami isn't hope. She couldn't be. She falls, too. She despairs, too. It's natural, isn't it? Everyone does it. And it spreads.

She cannot be allowed to be blind. Because to be blind is to be hopeful, and Junko Enoshima wants to rip her hope to shreds. 

Chiaki Nanami is not hope. What hope doesn't save anyone? A pretty shitty one. 

Another lie.

(Chiaki isn't hope, because there is no hope. Not for them. Not for her. Not for anyone.)

Izuru Kamukura is even less hope than Chiaki. 

He's talented, sure, but talent isn't hope. Talent is despair. You can hope for talent, and whoever Izuru used to be did, but all that will get you is taken advantage of and manipulated and lobotomized by the Academy you love. All that will get you is despair.

And Izuru is despair. He is empty (like her), he is hollow (like her), he is apathetic and wrathful with it, because nothing ever has anything to do with him. 

(Like Ryouko Otonashi, but not Junko; not anymore.)

He wants to care. But he has no ambition. They ripped it from him. Limitless, unlimited potential, and he does nothing with it. He is nothing with it, even with everything, even when everything.

To someone like him, despair is salvation, but maybe so is hope. 

He hasn't decided whether he believes in either, yet.

How could he be hope when he doesn't even know what it means?

Like the scientists who made him, he seeks it. Another experiment. Another test. Another attempt to not feel hollow. Everyone is a lab rat to Izuru Kamukura; even himself.

It's just learned behavior.

Junko teaches him, her despair incarnate, her despair made flesh, “Hope is a lie.”

And the despair is he doesn't believe her, either.

Nagito Komaeda has no fucking clue what hope even is.

She doesn't even think he really loves it. It makes him bleed, after all, and how can someone who hates pain and despair truly love a wound? It's all empty words. It's all posturing, all fluff, no substance. Hope is absolute good but what can he even say is good about it? Hope has to be good because how else can he stay sane? But he's not sane; not to Junko Enoshima, every word he speaks sounds crazy. He knows just as well as her that despair is everywhere, inevitable, bad luck always following the good, and yet he says it in reverse, as if that good could ever really justify that bad, and it's all empty, it's all hollow, it's all—

She hates him, she hates him, she hates Nagito Komaeda because shouldn't he see? He believes in hope and nothing she can do can break that, and she wants to break it, wants to break it more than anything, and yet he keeps getting up. And it's all lip service, isn't it? He just wants to matter, he just wants it to be worth it, but he doesn't matter, because nothing matters, and it never has been worth it in the least. Nagito believes in hope because he would go insane otherwise, but he doesn’t even believe in it for him.

Hope, quite simply, is survival for Nagito Komaeda.

What does it say when he doesn't plan to survive?

Mikan Tsumiki is no one's idea of hope; including her own.

She is bitter and anger and she is meek and fearful and she is violence suppressed, hatred cowering, she is envy and jealousy and she already knows there has never been anything known as hope.

Why do you think she’s given up on anything better?

But she hasn’t given up, not completely, she is holding on by a spiders thread, she is begging with the world, she is screaming her want for forgiveness through her every action, but her mouth is silent, because she has been taught to die quietly. Junko doesn’t know what to do with her; whether to lift her up or cut that spiders thread— which is the worse, to not reach salvation or to know the only way you can get it is to hurt?

Junko is her spiders thread.

And she forgives her for that, too.

Mikan is not hope; but she is hopeless enough to want it, and Junko is despairing enough to sell her that lie.

They forgive each other. It will not save them. Instead, they will drown together, hand in hand, because this is all that’s left.

You can’t call that hope, either.

Yasuke tries to save her, but he never understood her, so how can he ever be hope to someone he does not even know?

Hope is supposed to save, but all it's ever done for Junko Enoshima is kill.

Yasuke isn't her hope, even if she wishes he could be. For Ryouko, maybe he is, but only because he is the only thing in her world. And he's also despair, too; why do you think she begged him to erase him from her memory in tears? Because to hope was to despair, even for Ryouko Otonashi, and to care was to hope; and he was all she cared about. (Junko cares about everything; that is why she despairs at everything.)

He tried to save her, but he also tried to kill her, and he killed to save her, and how could any of that be hope?

He didn't understand her, either.

If he did, he could have never asked her if it all was a lie.

But that's okay, because no one understands Junko Enoshima. They couldn't hope to.

Makoto Naegi

does not

despair.

He says he does, but he's lying, she thinks. He must be a sociopath. That's the only explanation. How else can he look at all the human suffering around him and still, genuinely say, “There is still hope”?

What hope? It's a fantasy, a delusion. He must be delusional. He must be completely insane. Where there's hope, there's despair, but Makoto tells her the same is true, too; where there's despair, there's hope.

But so what?

Nagito believes all despair gives into hope; Junko believes that all hope gives into despair; but Makoto Naegi believes…

What, exactly? That they co-exist?

He must think that, she thinks, as she stares at his outstretched hands. He is asking for her to walk hand in hand with him. If he is hope, and she is despair, he is asking them to… what? Exist peacefully together? As friends?

(Are they still friends? To him, even when he's forgotten her, even when he doesn’t know her in the least… are they still friends? He is trying to stop her like they are.)

He believes he despairs, and that she hopes, and he believes she despairs, and he hopes, because he's never seen either of them as hope or despair in the first place.

Balance, he preaches. 

What about this has ever been fucking balanced?

Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. It's all nonsense. Completely nonsensical, even more so than Nagito. Makoto Naegi, fundamentally, does not make sense.

That's not despair. Not in the slightest. What the fuck is that? Hope? Hope?

There is no hope.

There is no hope.

There is no hope.

Is there?

“There is,” Makoto tells her.

But Junko Enoshima is not a girl who believes.