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.

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!

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.