Welcome to the Anime Walk of Fame, a series of retrospectives on the many characters of the anime world. You'll see all your favorites along with a few that deserve more than their reputations give.

So sit back relax and enjoy the show.

Fujiko Mine was Supposed to be Multiple Women

Following on from Faye Valentine, let's cover Fujiko herself and some insight into her design.

Fujiko Mine is a master thief who frequently teams up with the Lupin gang mostly for her own interests and she's one of the few characters who can act on Lupin's level, but her original creation was quite different.
Late author Monkey Punch designed Fujiko as the woman of the week, inspired by the women of Ian Fleming's James Bond stories and films, so called Bond girls, sexy femme fatales that the lead character can hook up with or become a convenient plot device to drive the narrative.
As the franchise continued, readers were confusing the female characters as the same character and Fujiko was born, becoming a foil for Lupin as well as the prototype for all femme fatales that followed, the irony of becoming her own character is that her origins became more mysterious which gave us the art house project Woman Named Fujiko Mine as well as allowing her more freedom in her design as the decades go on.
Definitely a worthy contender for best female character in anime.

Faye Valentine is a Poor Woman's Fujiko Mine

I won't harp on too much longer about Cowboy Bebop, god knows the internet has already done that to death with the Netflix series, so I'm going to bring up something different which covers Faye Valentine.

A quick background, Faye was introduced as a thief who crossed paths with Spike on one of his bounty hunting missions, from there she got involved with the Bebop crew as she was useful at obtaining information on other targets and being sort of half good at looking after herself and is more than capable of getting involved with the crew's weaponry.
The fact that she was a late 90s anime sex symbol hasn't really gone unnoticed but her design, actions and untraceable past is reminiscent of Fujiko Mine, the femme fatale thief of Lupin the 3rd.
The main difference between the two women is that were still no closer to finding out the truth about Fujiko where as Faye we find out pretty much everything.
Faye isn't a bad character, in fact she's probably alot more capable than Fujiko, this is more of an observation into how her character came to be in the first place, Lupin the 3rd will be 55 years old later this year and Faye isn't the first and certainly won't be the last femme fatale to be inspired by Fujiko Mine, I just wish they remembered that in the live action version when they gave Faye some of the worst most cringy lines of dialogue I've ever heard; not every action orientated female character has to be Harley Quinn!

Goh is a Typical Pokemon Player in Anime Form

I've mentioned Goh a few times in the past, all of it not so positive but there is an obvious reason why that is.

Other than obviously being named after the mega mobile hit Pokemon Go, Goh acts like a typical player of any Pokemon game, he picks up any and all new Pokemon he sees and only seems to carry his starter along with anyone deemed necessary for the episode task, what makes his character so annoying is that some of the Pokemon he's captured have quite unique personalities which would thrive in any other season but not with Goh.
If he were in the video games, he'd be celebrated as a challenging and unique rival trainer but in the anime he's boring.
Many question why the anime doesn't follow game logic more or why Red isn't the protagonist. Well it's because the anime's design doesn't support Goh's design, nor does it support Red's design who shares the same traits.
Pokemon is still primarily a kids anime, it's protagonist needs to share the same wide eyed enthusiasm as someone doing it for the first time and making friends for life, this is why Ash is still the protagonist 20+ years on.
Someone who just acts the same as the game is no different to the average player who's done it several times before, in short Goh is a joke at the expense of a regular Pokemon player.

Mutsumi is the Smartest Character in Love Hina

I'm a huge apologist for Love Hina because the anime never did the series justice and the manga was brilliantly written, but it wouldn't be nearly as good without Mutsumi Otohime.

Mutsumi started as the character that could've been Keitaro's promised girl being as she was also present at the beginning of the series when Keitaro made the promise.
Mutsumi also failed her exams multiple times, even worse than Keitaro did but her bad health and luck was always her undoing as opposed to a lack of intellect, in fact about half way through the manga she performed her most genius act in getting Naru and Keitaro together.
At her home town in Okinawa during a visit she loses her memory and she's made to believe that she's a child and playing with Keitaro as his girlfriend, this comes to a zenith when she ends up staging an actual wedding and is about to marry Keitaro only for Naru to call out to stop it, it's then that it's heavily implied that she faked her memory loss all along and did it to bring Keitaro and Naru together, succeeding in what is argubly one of the most genius acts in the anime franchise's run.
While I never really liked her role as the ill girl that always collapsed, a joke that wore out it's welcome pretty quick, her other traits more than made up for it.

Julia was Never a Good Character

I did say for better or worse in my reopening of this world and I guess this acts as the first case of bad character design.
First up is Julia from Cowboy Bebop.

Yes, I will be referencing the live action netflix adaptation, apologies if you really despise it.
Julia was designed as the love interest of Spike and Vicious and the main plot device that drove Spike to leave the syndicate and setup the scenarios that would lead Spike back to Vicious, however her appearances were limited and were always left feeling there should've been more to the story, but I find that nothing would've changed plot wise if Julia wasn't in the anime at all, this became even more obvious when the live action series came along and tried to give Julia a bigger role making her relationship with Vicious more abusive and having her betray Spike to take over the syndicate, for a character already designated as pretty useless to begin with, to give her a role as a twist villain is rather jarring.
I love the Cowboy Bebop anime but Julia was never a good character and I don't believe we would've lost anything if she was scrapped.