Faye Valentine is a fan-favorite character in Cowboy Bebop, deserving of taking a deep dive into knowing what makes her an intriguing character.
Faye Valentine Feature Image:
Faye Valentine – a lovely violet-haired woman, owner and pilot of the Red Tail, and one of the key crew along on the adventure in Cowboy Bebop. She’s just as stunning as she is capable and with her Austria .45, she can hold her own in any shootout. Many fans brought up faults with the live-action version of the anime and many of them were related to how Faye had been transformed as a character. While Spike might be the prominent face to remember in the series, there can be no mistake that the femme fatale bounty hunter is equally famous. That what all went into this persona so many fans have come to love?
Warning: Spoilers for the Cowboy Bebop Anime
And you can’t know what a lady will do by looking, so you’ll have to be very careful.” This comment from Faye herself explains her personality in great detail. She’s never the type to stay in one location too long, and it’s hard to predict exactly what she’ll do at any moment. She also has poor impulse control as indicated by her how often she drinks, smokes, and her explosive use of unnecessary violence. Despite these attributes that many may consider undesirable, she’s also ferociously clever. She isn’t just wearing in provocative apparel to seem sexy, she intentionally uses her excellent looks to create diversions she may exploit. While others might call her beauty rituals vanity, she would call it a battle plan. While she doesn’t want to get too close to others, the series demonstrates exactly how sensitive Faye genuinely is within and how much she cares. She does run away sometimes, trying to abandon the crew before she feels she would be abandoned herself, but it just shows how much she cares when she always comes back in the end.
Before The Bebop Faye Valentine Gun:
One of the most interesting things about Faye is by far her past which is steadily revealed over the series. Valentine isn’t even her genuine 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 horrific accident on her rich parent’s spaceship. As she was unable to be treated at the time, she was cryogenically frozen until a time that she could be helped. Unfortunately, an Astral Gate accident destroyed the Moon, sending meteorites to shower down on the Earth. While her cryogenics pod miraculously survived, all data concerning her identification was obliterated except her first name. So when the technically seventy-seven-year-old woke up with amnesia and suddenly had heaps of medical bills on her plate and was misled into taking on even more, she ended up having to live a life on the run. She finally accrued quite a bounty on her head for all the scams and crimes she committed along the road simply trying to survive. These experiences are part of why Faye is as flighty as she is throughout the series. She continuously has to battle tooth and nail to survive and has been lured into horrific situations innumerable times. With no memory of her old life, she becomes an extremely sceptical and closed-off person.
A Woman With No Roots Faye Valentine Handcuffs.
After Faye eventually joins the crew of the Bebop, she slowly begins to understand more about her background. Thanks to Jet, she is able to personally collect the reward on one of the persons who fooled her into having a mound of debt, realising how it was a hoax the entire time.Shortly after this, the crew ends up obtaining a Betamax tape featuring a short bit of film taken of Faye as a toddler. When Ed proposes that they may be able to identify where the video was taken, the two end up travelling to Earth to find it. While there, she encounters an elderly woman who turns out to be an ex-classmate. She ended up going away before knowing the complete storey of her childhood life but still has memories return. She does ultimately try to go and find her childhood house, only to find it in wreckage. She ends up sleeping on the ground where her bed used to be, a very sad scene. These occurrences seem to completely affect Faye, making her into a more better and more caring person. She even encourages Ed to find out where they belong in the world and tries to fight with Spike to dissuade him from leaving the Bebop to chase the Red Dragon Crime Syndicate.
Faye’s Relationship With Spike Spike and Faye Valentine.
While Spike attempts to convince Faye not to live in the past, it seems he’s unable of doing so himself. The two are typically seen squabbling with one other, yet they do have a bond for those willing to dig below the surface. Whenever Spike gets injured, it’s Faye who stands up to take care of him. It’s easy to guess that she might even love him, especially after seeing her fire rounds into the ceiling of the ship when Spike goes towards his inevitable demise. Shinichiro Watanabe, the director of Cowboy Bebop, once talked about the potential and talked about how Spike would have felt about the circumstance. “Sometimes I’m asked the question, ‘What does Spike think of Faye?’ I suppose that he likes her quite a bit. But he’s not a straightforward person and makes sure not to show it.”