Faye Valentine

Faye is a slim, tall young woman of Singaporean background whose skin stays pale and whose eyes are a clear green. Her hair falls to the chin in sharp, angular strands of deep purple. Day to day she wears a matching set of yellow shorts and a buttoned yellow top, sheer stockings, white ankle boots, and a loose red jacket slung over it all. The revealing cut of her clothing is a deliberate tool: dressing to be noticed pulls eyes toward her and buys the distraction she needs to work an angle, a tactic she leans on from her very first appearance onward.

On the surface Faye is brash, indolent, and vain, more likely to lounge around fussing over her looks than to chase a bounty while the others do the heavy lifting. Her vices run long: compulsive gambling, drinking, chain-smoking, sudden violence, and a habit of dumping work onto everyone else, all of which keep her at odds with her crewmates. She flirts and seduces to get what she wants, yet bristles at being desired and seldom lets herself want anyone back. Years of dodging creditors have left her wary of trust and allergic to staying put.

Underneath the armor, though, sits a raw vulnerability she works hard to hide. Over the series she softens, learning to lean on her companions, to value friendship, and to care for Jet and Edward in her own guarded way. More than once she bolts from the Bebop, spooked by her own attachment and living by a rule of leaving before she can be left, but she always drifts back to the only place she calls home. Her bond with Spike is the knottiest of all, a constant sparring match shot through with unmistakable, unspoken concern.

Faye is born on Earth in 1994, likely in Singapore, into a well-off family, and grows up a shy but sociable teenager who cheers at her high school and buries a Betamax time-capsule message for her future self. At twenty she boards a private spacecraft with her parents in 2014, but a crash kills them and leaves her so badly hurt that doctors freeze her cryogenically to await a cure. While she sleeps, the Astral Gate disaster shatters the Moon and rains debris across Earth, erasing every record of who she is except her first name.

Revived in 2068 after fifty-four years on ice, she wakes with amnesia and a crushing medical debt engineered by Doctor Bacchus, who hands her the surname Valentine and a fabricated identity. His nephew Whitney poses as a lawyer, wins her heart, then fakes his own death in a staged escape from supposed creditors, leaving her saddled with even more debt. Broke and hunted, Faye slides into a life of scams and theft that earns her a six-million-Woolong bounty, and the whole ordeal hardens her into someone scheming and slow to trust.

By 2071 a man named Gordon presses her into a rigged microchip handoff, during which she mistakes Spike Spiegel for her contact and lands in the custody of Spike and Jet Black. Gordon betrays everyone, and Faye turns the double-cross to her advantage, escaping with the money and blasting his ship apart. Stranded out of fuel near Jupiter, she inherits a vial of the Monkey Business virus from a dying ISSP officer and is scooped up by the Bebop; after she helps the crew put down the Space Warriors, she simply invites herself to stay, over the men's objections. Chasing Mao Yenrai on her own, she walks into a trap set by Vicious, ends up seated beside a corpse, and is used as bait before slipping free once Spike arrives.

Frightened by how much she has come to care, Faye flees to the fugitive moon Callisto, where she meets Gren before Jet retrieves her. A stray Betamax tape, one she filmed as a girl, eventually pulls her back toward Earth with Edward in tow, and an old classmate confirms that Faye is her true name. When she finally reaches her childhood address, she finds only rubble, and she lies down in the sunset where her bed once stood. The discovery makes her gentler and more open. In the closing chapter she saves Julia during a car chase, carries her message to Spike, and then, as he walks off toward the Red Dragon syndicate and near-certain death, presses a gun to his head and begs him not to throw his life away. She tells him she has her memories back and that he and Jet are the only family she has. He answers that he is only going to see whether he is truly alive, and as he leaves she empties her pistol into the ceiling and breaks down in tears.