Info dump
Series: Cowboy Bebop
Character: Faye Valentine
Currently played at: adstringendum
Age: Technically speaking, Faye is 77 years old. However, due to 54 years spent in cryogenic preservation, she has the appearance and biology of a 23-year-old; thus, for all intents and purposes, she is 23, and would be listed as such by the institute.
Sex/Gender: Female
Canon Role: Faye is one of the three principal characters of the series, alongside fellow bounty hunters (and shipmates) Spike Spiegel and Jet Black.
Personality:
“She’s a puzzle, she’s a maze. She’s got so much going on. She’s such a strong individual. But I think underneath everything, there are many, many layers that make up her complexity. She’s definitely wrestling with what little she does know about her past, and where she wants to be. … I just find her so intriguing in so many ways, even now.”
-Wendee Lee, English dub voice actress for Faye Valentine
Like Wendee Lee stated, maybe the best way to describe Faye Valentine is that she is, in fact, a maze. As the story of the series progresses, the many layers that make up Faye’s personality begin to unravel, and it becomes clear relatively quickly that she is a much more complex woman than she may appear initially.
On the surface, Faye is the quintessential woman with attitude, a femme fatale practically straight out of the classics that can hang with the best of them. Tough, outspoken, brash, and sarcastic, Faye can definitely hold her own in an unforgiving world, and frequently clashes with the people in her life. The most frequent pastimes she engages in include smoking, gambling, lying, and cheating, and, in multiple instances over the course of the series, proves herself to be very capable with a gun.
Ultimately, Faye is out for her own interests first. Due to her past experiences and her attempts to survive and take care of herself in a future she was thrown into blind, she has developed a life philosophy that helps her to serve these goals, and, in fact, underlies much of her behavior. In her own words:
“Survival of the fittest is the law of nature. We deceive or we are deceived. Thus, we flourish or perish. Nothing good ever happened to me when I trusted others. And that is the lesson.”
She has a tendency to come and go as she pleases, going after bounty heads without her comrades or stealing money from them when it seems convenient. If a reward is ever obtained, her share of it is usually gambled away at the casino or bet at the races, and never saved. She will frequently use any tools available to turn a situation to her advantage, and has no qualms with doing so. This includes, but is not limited to, deliberate use of sexual appeal in an attempt to distract men (and thereby suggesting that her wardrobe choice is very conscious and deliberate), although the employment of this strategy has had varying degrees of success. She’s not above such acts as stealing the last can of dog food from the “team pet,” Ein, when she herself is hungry.
Yet this isn’t to say that she doesn’t care about anyone else. Truthfully, Faye grows to care a great deal for her fellow Bebop-ers over the course of the series, more than she’d probably ever like to admit. They have earned her trust, at least more than most other people, and by the end of the series, she has as much as admitted that the Bebop has essentially become her home. She even demonstrates a willingness to come to the aid of someone she cares about when they’re in trouble, such as when she followed Spike to his encounter with a nearly-indestructible assassin in the session ‘Pierrot le Fou’.
When things become difficult, Faye’s first instinct is to run away from whatever is troubling her. This applies to significant life problems such as her large debt, or her fear of growing too close to her comrades (and her desire of wanting to abandon them before they have the chance to abandon her). She employs this tactic time and time again.
Her behavior and her tough, trust-no-one exterior serve as defense mechanisms to protect a vulnerable, insecure individual who is on a quest to figure out who she is and where she belongs. Masked in hardened cynicism, there is an underlying naivety that defines her. For the majority of the series, Faye has no memory of her life before she awoke from cryogenic preservation three years previously, and has had to construct an entire mode of operating based solely on the experiences of these years. When information about her past comes to light and she eventually regains her memories, we see a much different, more vulnerable side to Faye than we are used to. The normally loud and somewhat abrasive woman will grow quiet, pensive. Flashes of that little girl from the beta tape she obtains in the session ‘Speak Like a Child’ can be seen in these times.
Physical Description:
Faye arguably has a fairly striking appearance. She’s on the tall side for a woman (sources say about that she’s about 5’6”), thin, and has short, dark hair and green eyes. In her canon, she’s typically seen wearing a ridiculous fluorescent yellow outfit, consisting of a top and short shorts, with a red over shirt.
Non-otherworldly abilities and skills:
Ultimately, Faye’s greatest skill in life is survival. Scrappy and resourceful, she has street smarts down to an art, and has thus been able to survive very well in the unforgiving future she was thrust into, taking advantage of others before they have the chance to take advantage of her through a variety of means. Over the past three years, she has become quite a con artist, and has been shown to successfully cheat at cards and dice games, although her use of sexual appeal as a tactic to swing the balance of favor to her has varying degrees of success.
Faye can also more than handle herself in difficult situations. More than once, she demonstrates that she’s a good shot, and typically carries a Glock 30 pistol. For a woman with such a thin frame, she can also pack a surprisingly powerful punch, and her kicks can do quite a bit of damage as well; however, there are limitations to these abilities, as someone physically stronger than her with combat experience could easily overpower her (but she won’t go down without a hell of a fight). Finally, though it clearly will not come up within the context of Landel’s Institute, Faye is a skilled pilot of her MONO carrier, the Redtail, and can be a capable fighter in space battles.
Personal History:
Not much is known about Faye’s life before the age of twenty outside of what can be pieced together from vague images and flashbacks. She was born on August 14, 1994, and evidence presented in the series (mostly via a beta tape of her past self that Faye obtains in Session 18, ‘Speak Like a Child’) suggests that she might have lived in Singapore with a family that appeared to be well-off.1 It could be inferred from these images that Faye most likely had a reasonably happy childhood in this distant past, although canon never delves into the issue for certain.
One single event, however, would change the course of her life forever. In 2014, at the age of twenty, Faye was involved in a shuttle accident, and was put into cryogenic preservation, or “cold sleep,” soon afterward. The reason behind this move is unknown; such extreme measures would suggest that she sustained significant injuries in the accident, but this will never be known for sure. Around this time, a new technology began to emerge: hyperspace gates that could allow one to travel across the solar system at unprecedented speeds. A dark side to this innovation soon emerged, as, in 2022, one of these gates exploded and essentially blew a good chunk out of the moon. In addition to causing constant meteor showers to rain on Earth’s surface constantly and forcing people to take sanctuary in colonizing the rest of the solar system, all data on Faye was lost. Among other pieces of information, this includes her original surname; “Valentine” was a name given to her by the man who revived her.
In 2068, fifty-four years after entering cryogenic preservation, Faye was revived by a man calling himself Dr. Bacchus (who, as it would turn out, is not actually a doctor at all, but a con artist), and awoke with no memory of who she was or where she came from. What she lost in memory she gained in substantial debt, amounting to over 300 million woolongs, an amount that would be almost impossible for anyone, let alone a fish out of temporal water, to pay back.
Shortly after awakening, Faye was visited by Whitney Hagas Matsumoto, a man posing as a lawyer to represent her and help her get out of debt. Alone in a strange world, she put her trust in him, but things did not appear as they seemed. Whitney was later killed in a car accident, and had all his assets transferred to Faye; this transfer, however, only served to increase her already large debt. It is revealed later in the series when he becomes a bounty head by chance that, like Dr. Bacchus, Whitney was not at all what he appeared to be, but a con man who faked his death and took advantage of a naïve young woman.
Over the course of the next three years, Faye avoided paying her debt and gained a gambling habit as an easy way out, picking up notoriety along the way, or at least enough notoriety to earn her a comparison to the old west legend of “Poker Alice”. In her first canon appearance, the third episode, men working for a casino owner named Gordon caught up to her and took her in, threatening to turn her over to the police. Left with no other choice, she agreed to help him obtain a powerful decryption program from the black market disguised as a poker chip by working as a dealer at his casino on an unspecified asteroid. It was during this mission that Faye crossed paths with Bebop crew members and bounty hunting partners Spike Spiegel (a former enforcer for the Red Dragon syndicate) and Jet Black (a former cop with the ISSP, the solar system’s police force) for the first time, mistaking Spike for the man she was supposed to be obtaining the chip from and cheating him out of his money in a blackjack game. Spike, however, would not turn over the final chip upon losing, and after a struggle, Faye found herself handcuffed in the bathroom on the Bebop, with a bounty of six million woolongs on her head. She managed to escape and fly away with a briefcase of money at the end of the episode, leaving a stunned Spike in her wake.
Faye crossed paths with Spike and Jet once again when she was stranded in her spacecraft without fuel in orbit around Jupiter. They took her on board and handcuffed her once again, with Spike interrogating her about what she had done with the money she stole. She had also brought along a briefcase that a dying man had told her to take to the ISSP, which contained a vial of a virus that the terrorists Spike and Jet were currently after planned to use to turn people into monkeys. Shortly afterward, she managed to slip out of her handcuffs and offer to get Spike out of a tough spot in exchange for a share of the reward. The bounty heads were trapped in hyperspace and no reward was handed out, but Faye moved onto the Bebop and invited herself to be a part of Spike and Jet’s bounty hunting team after this episode’s events, much to the initial chagrin of the two men.
As time progressed, Faye’s life became more intertwined with that of her fellow Bebop-ers, including the addition of their fourth shipmate (fifth if you count Ein, the genetically engineered Welsh corgi), eccentric thirteen-year-old hacker Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV. Though she couldn’t articulate why exactly, or maybe simply wouldn’t admit to herself, these emerging bonds began to scare her. Eventually, one day, she took off from the Bebop (sucking out the coolant but leaving the ships belonging to Spike and Jet, the Swordfish and the Hammerhead, fully operational) and ended up on Callisto, a remote moon of Jupiter. It was there that she met Gren, a veteran from the war on Titan who made a living playing the saxophone at the local bar. Though she brushed him off initially, he pulled her out of a fight she was about to get into with a bunch of thugs in a back alley, and took her back to his apartment. He correctly deduced that she had “abandoned” her comrades before they “had the chance to abandon [her].” In a sense, he was one of the first people to see through her, past her superficial, nonchalant façade, and a connection developed. However, soon afterward, she learned of his connection to Vicious, Spike’s arch nemesis who she herself had tangled with once. He explained his story, how they were comrades on Titan and just how important comrades were to him, but Faye still wasn’t calmed. After a struggle, he subdued her, and went off to face Vicious, who had come to Callisto for a drug deal. Jet found her there, and she went back to the Bebop with him.
Though her place on the “team” became more solidified and she began to regard her shipmates as true comrades after that turning point, a desire to know more about her elusive past always lingered at the back of Faye’s mind. When she was reunited with the not-dead Whitney Hagas Matsumoto after he became a bounty head, she learned the full truth of the incident that happened three years ago, but was left with more questions than answers regarding her life before she was put into cryogenic preservation. Later in the series, she received an old beta tape, which consisted of a message she had filmed for her future self when she was thirteen years old. The tape offered her the most definitive clues to her past she had received to date. Eventually, Faye left the Bebop to search for her childhood home, after being led to the place depicted on the tape by Ed, but she found nothing there. The world of her past was gone.
This is Faye's canon point for Adstring.
Character: Faye Valentine
Currently played at: adstringendum
Age: Technically speaking, Faye is 77 years old. However, due to 54 years spent in cryogenic preservation, she has the appearance and biology of a 23-year-old; thus, for all intents and purposes, she is 23, and would be listed as such by the institute.
Sex/Gender: Female
Canon Role: Faye is one of the three principal characters of the series, alongside fellow bounty hunters (and shipmates) Spike Spiegel and Jet Black.
Personality:
“She’s a puzzle, she’s a maze. She’s got so much going on. She’s such a strong individual. But I think underneath everything, there are many, many layers that make up her complexity. She’s definitely wrestling with what little she does know about her past, and where she wants to be. … I just find her so intriguing in so many ways, even now.”
-Wendee Lee, English dub voice actress for Faye Valentine
Like Wendee Lee stated, maybe the best way to describe Faye Valentine is that she is, in fact, a maze. As the story of the series progresses, the many layers that make up Faye’s personality begin to unravel, and it becomes clear relatively quickly that she is a much more complex woman than she may appear initially.
On the surface, Faye is the quintessential woman with attitude, a femme fatale practically straight out of the classics that can hang with the best of them. Tough, outspoken, brash, and sarcastic, Faye can definitely hold her own in an unforgiving world, and frequently clashes with the people in her life. The most frequent pastimes she engages in include smoking, gambling, lying, and cheating, and, in multiple instances over the course of the series, proves herself to be very capable with a gun.
Ultimately, Faye is out for her own interests first. Due to her past experiences and her attempts to survive and take care of herself in a future she was thrown into blind, she has developed a life philosophy that helps her to serve these goals, and, in fact, underlies much of her behavior. In her own words:
“Survival of the fittest is the law of nature. We deceive or we are deceived. Thus, we flourish or perish. Nothing good ever happened to me when I trusted others. And that is the lesson.”
She has a tendency to come and go as she pleases, going after bounty heads without her comrades or stealing money from them when it seems convenient. If a reward is ever obtained, her share of it is usually gambled away at the casino or bet at the races, and never saved. She will frequently use any tools available to turn a situation to her advantage, and has no qualms with doing so. This includes, but is not limited to, deliberate use of sexual appeal in an attempt to distract men (and thereby suggesting that her wardrobe choice is very conscious and deliberate), although the employment of this strategy has had varying degrees of success. She’s not above such acts as stealing the last can of dog food from the “team pet,” Ein, when she herself is hungry.
Yet this isn’t to say that she doesn’t care about anyone else. Truthfully, Faye grows to care a great deal for her fellow Bebop-ers over the course of the series, more than she’d probably ever like to admit. They have earned her trust, at least more than most other people, and by the end of the series, she has as much as admitted that the Bebop has essentially become her home. She even demonstrates a willingness to come to the aid of someone she cares about when they’re in trouble, such as when she followed Spike to his encounter with a nearly-indestructible assassin in the session ‘Pierrot le Fou’.
When things become difficult, Faye’s first instinct is to run away from whatever is troubling her. This applies to significant life problems such as her large debt, or her fear of growing too close to her comrades (and her desire of wanting to abandon them before they have the chance to abandon her). She employs this tactic time and time again.
Her behavior and her tough, trust-no-one exterior serve as defense mechanisms to protect a vulnerable, insecure individual who is on a quest to figure out who she is and where she belongs. Masked in hardened cynicism, there is an underlying naivety that defines her. For the majority of the series, Faye has no memory of her life before she awoke from cryogenic preservation three years previously, and has had to construct an entire mode of operating based solely on the experiences of these years. When information about her past comes to light and she eventually regains her memories, we see a much different, more vulnerable side to Faye than we are used to. The normally loud and somewhat abrasive woman will grow quiet, pensive. Flashes of that little girl from the beta tape she obtains in the session ‘Speak Like a Child’ can be seen in these times.
Physical Description:
Faye arguably has a fairly striking appearance. She’s on the tall side for a woman (sources say about that she’s about 5’6”), thin, and has short, dark hair and green eyes. In her canon, she’s typically seen wearing a ridiculous fluorescent yellow outfit, consisting of a top and short shorts, with a red over shirt.
Non-otherworldly abilities and skills:
Ultimately, Faye’s greatest skill in life is survival. Scrappy and resourceful, she has street smarts down to an art, and has thus been able to survive very well in the unforgiving future she was thrust into, taking advantage of others before they have the chance to take advantage of her through a variety of means. Over the past three years, she has become quite a con artist, and has been shown to successfully cheat at cards and dice games, although her use of sexual appeal as a tactic to swing the balance of favor to her has varying degrees of success.
Faye can also more than handle herself in difficult situations. More than once, she demonstrates that she’s a good shot, and typically carries a Glock 30 pistol. For a woman with such a thin frame, she can also pack a surprisingly powerful punch, and her kicks can do quite a bit of damage as well; however, there are limitations to these abilities, as someone physically stronger than her with combat experience could easily overpower her (but she won’t go down without a hell of a fight). Finally, though it clearly will not come up within the context of Landel’s Institute, Faye is a skilled pilot of her MONO carrier, the Redtail, and can be a capable fighter in space battles.
Personal History:
Not much is known about Faye’s life before the age of twenty outside of what can be pieced together from vague images and flashbacks. She was born on August 14, 1994, and evidence presented in the series (mostly via a beta tape of her past self that Faye obtains in Session 18, ‘Speak Like a Child’) suggests that she might have lived in Singapore with a family that appeared to be well-off.1 It could be inferred from these images that Faye most likely had a reasonably happy childhood in this distant past, although canon never delves into the issue for certain.
One single event, however, would change the course of her life forever. In 2014, at the age of twenty, Faye was involved in a shuttle accident, and was put into cryogenic preservation, or “cold sleep,” soon afterward. The reason behind this move is unknown; such extreme measures would suggest that she sustained significant injuries in the accident, but this will never be known for sure. Around this time, a new technology began to emerge: hyperspace gates that could allow one to travel across the solar system at unprecedented speeds. A dark side to this innovation soon emerged, as, in 2022, one of these gates exploded and essentially blew a good chunk out of the moon. In addition to causing constant meteor showers to rain on Earth’s surface constantly and forcing people to take sanctuary in colonizing the rest of the solar system, all data on Faye was lost. Among other pieces of information, this includes her original surname; “Valentine” was a name given to her by the man who revived her.
In 2068, fifty-four years after entering cryogenic preservation, Faye was revived by a man calling himself Dr. Bacchus (who, as it would turn out, is not actually a doctor at all, but a con artist), and awoke with no memory of who she was or where she came from. What she lost in memory she gained in substantial debt, amounting to over 300 million woolongs, an amount that would be almost impossible for anyone, let alone a fish out of temporal water, to pay back.
Shortly after awakening, Faye was visited by Whitney Hagas Matsumoto, a man posing as a lawyer to represent her and help her get out of debt. Alone in a strange world, she put her trust in him, but things did not appear as they seemed. Whitney was later killed in a car accident, and had all his assets transferred to Faye; this transfer, however, only served to increase her already large debt. It is revealed later in the series when he becomes a bounty head by chance that, like Dr. Bacchus, Whitney was not at all what he appeared to be, but a con man who faked his death and took advantage of a naïve young woman.
Over the course of the next three years, Faye avoided paying her debt and gained a gambling habit as an easy way out, picking up notoriety along the way, or at least enough notoriety to earn her a comparison to the old west legend of “Poker Alice”. In her first canon appearance, the third episode, men working for a casino owner named Gordon caught up to her and took her in, threatening to turn her over to the police. Left with no other choice, she agreed to help him obtain a powerful decryption program from the black market disguised as a poker chip by working as a dealer at his casino on an unspecified asteroid. It was during this mission that Faye crossed paths with Bebop crew members and bounty hunting partners Spike Spiegel (a former enforcer for the Red Dragon syndicate) and Jet Black (a former cop with the ISSP, the solar system’s police force) for the first time, mistaking Spike for the man she was supposed to be obtaining the chip from and cheating him out of his money in a blackjack game. Spike, however, would not turn over the final chip upon losing, and after a struggle, Faye found herself handcuffed in the bathroom on the Bebop, with a bounty of six million woolongs on her head. She managed to escape and fly away with a briefcase of money at the end of the episode, leaving a stunned Spike in her wake.
Faye crossed paths with Spike and Jet once again when she was stranded in her spacecraft without fuel in orbit around Jupiter. They took her on board and handcuffed her once again, with Spike interrogating her about what she had done with the money she stole. She had also brought along a briefcase that a dying man had told her to take to the ISSP, which contained a vial of a virus that the terrorists Spike and Jet were currently after planned to use to turn people into monkeys. Shortly afterward, she managed to slip out of her handcuffs and offer to get Spike out of a tough spot in exchange for a share of the reward. The bounty heads were trapped in hyperspace and no reward was handed out, but Faye moved onto the Bebop and invited herself to be a part of Spike and Jet’s bounty hunting team after this episode’s events, much to the initial chagrin of the two men.
As time progressed, Faye’s life became more intertwined with that of her fellow Bebop-ers, including the addition of their fourth shipmate (fifth if you count Ein, the genetically engineered Welsh corgi), eccentric thirteen-year-old hacker Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV. Though she couldn’t articulate why exactly, or maybe simply wouldn’t admit to herself, these emerging bonds began to scare her. Eventually, one day, she took off from the Bebop (sucking out the coolant but leaving the ships belonging to Spike and Jet, the Swordfish and the Hammerhead, fully operational) and ended up on Callisto, a remote moon of Jupiter. It was there that she met Gren, a veteran from the war on Titan who made a living playing the saxophone at the local bar. Though she brushed him off initially, he pulled her out of a fight she was about to get into with a bunch of thugs in a back alley, and took her back to his apartment. He correctly deduced that she had “abandoned” her comrades before they “had the chance to abandon [her].” In a sense, he was one of the first people to see through her, past her superficial, nonchalant façade, and a connection developed. However, soon afterward, she learned of his connection to Vicious, Spike’s arch nemesis who she herself had tangled with once. He explained his story, how they were comrades on Titan and just how important comrades were to him, but Faye still wasn’t calmed. After a struggle, he subdued her, and went off to face Vicious, who had come to Callisto for a drug deal. Jet found her there, and she went back to the Bebop with him.
Though her place on the “team” became more solidified and she began to regard her shipmates as true comrades after that turning point, a desire to know more about her elusive past always lingered at the back of Faye’s mind. When she was reunited with the not-dead Whitney Hagas Matsumoto after he became a bounty head, she learned the full truth of the incident that happened three years ago, but was left with more questions than answers regarding her life before she was put into cryogenic preservation. Later in the series, she received an old beta tape, which consisted of a message she had filmed for her future self when she was thirteen years old. The tape offered her the most definitive clues to her past she had received to date. Eventually, Faye left the Bebop to search for her childhood home, after being led to the place depicted on the tape by Ed, but she found nothing there. The world of her past was gone.
This is Faye's canon point for Adstring.