Faye Valentine — a beautiful violet-haired woman, owner and pilot of the Red Tail, and one of the main crew along for the journey in Cowboy Bebop. She's just as gorgeous as she is capable and with her Austria .45, she can hold her own in any firefight.
Many fans brought up issues with the live-action adaptation of the anime and many of them were related to how Faye had been changed as a character. While Spike might be the main face to remember in the series, there can be no doubt that the femme fatale bounty hunter is equally iconic. So what all went into this character so many fans have come to love?
Warning: Spoilers for the Cowboy Bebop Anime
Faye Valentine - A Character Breakdown
“And you can’t tell what a woman will do by looking, so you’ll have to be very careful.” This quote from Faye herself describes her personality in great detail. She's never the type to stay in one place too long, and it's hard to know exactly what she'll do at any moment. She also has poor impulse control as evidenced by her how much she drinks, smokes, and her explosive use of unwarranted violence.
Despite these traits that many may consider bad, she's also fiercely clever. She isn't just dressing in seductive clothing to look hot, she actively uses her good looks to create distractions she can exploit. While some would call her beauty routines vanity, she would call it a battle strategy.
While she doesn't like to get too close to others, the series shows just how vulnerable Faye truly is inside and how much she cares. She does run away sometimes, trying to abandon the crew before she feels she will be abandoned herself, but it just shows how much she cares when she always comes back in the end.
Before The Bebop
One of the most interesting parts of Faye is by far her backstory which is slowly revealed over the series. Valentine isn't even her real surname, in fact, she doesn't know what it is at all. This is because when she was twenty years old, she got into a severe accident on her rich parent's spaceship. As she was unable to be cured at the time, she was cryogenically frozen until a time that she could be helped.
Unfortunately, an Astral Gate accident destroyed the Moon, causing meteors to rain down on the Earth. While her cryogenics pod miraculously survived, all data surrounding her identity was destroyed except her first name. So when the technically seventy-seven-year-old woke up with amnesia and suddenly had tons of medical debt on her plate and was tricked into taking on even more, she ended up having to live a life on the run. She eventually accrued quite a bounty on her head for all the scams and crimes she pulled along the way just trying to survive.
These events are part of why Faye is as flighty as she is in the series. She constantly has to fight tooth and nail to survive and has been tricked into terrible situations countless times. With no memories of her former life, she becomes a highly suspicious and closed-off person.
A Woman With No Roots
After Faye eventually joins the crew of the Bebop, she slowly begins to learn more about her past. Thanks to Jet, she is able to personally collect the bounty on one of the people who tricked her into having a mountain of debt, learning how it was a scam the entire time.
Shortly after this, the crew ends up receiving a Betamax tape with a small bit of footage taken of Faye as a child. When Ed suggests that they may be able to find where the video was taken, the two end up heading to Earth to find it. While there, she meets an elderly woman who turns out to be an ex-classmate. She ends up running away before hearing the full story of her childhood life but still has memories resurface. She does eventually try to go and find her childhood home, only to find it in rubble. She ends up sleeping on the ground where her bed used to be, a tragically sad moment.
These events seem to really change Faye, making her into a much kinder and more caring person. She even encourages Ed to find out where they belong in the world and tries to fight with Spike to stop him from leaving the Bebop to pursue the Red Dragon Crime Syndicate.
Faye's Relationship With Spike
While Spike tries to tell Faye not to live in the past, it seems he's incapable of doing so himself. The two are often seen bickering with each other, but they do have a relationship for those willing to look beyond the surface. Whenever Spike gets injured, it's Faye who steps up to take care of him. It's easy to speculate that she might even love him, especially after seeing her fire shots into the ceiling of the ship when Spike leaves towards his eventual death.
Shinichiro Watanabe, the director of Cowboy Bebop, once talked about the possibility and talked about how Spike might have felt about the situation. "Sometimes I'm asked the question, 'What does Spike think of Faye?' I think that he likes her quite a bit. But he's not a straightforward person and makes sure not to show it."
One thing is for sure, the two share the most complex relationship among all of those on the Bebop crew.