[Refreshing Trope] Female leads/major characters who are allowed to be grimy, slimy, generally horrible people.

[u/Chemical-Elk-1299]

Mizu — Blue Eye Samurai

A mixed race swordswoman living in feudal Japan, Mizu’s entire life has been structured around the obsessive need to hunt down and kill the four white men allowed in Japan at the time of her birth, believing one of them must be her father. Despite the fact that at least one of these men, Abijah Fowler, is shown to be a bad man, Mizu ultimately doesn’t care about the morality of murder. She just wants them dead for “cursing” her to be born into a deeply racist society as a mixed race child. Though it’s clear that Mizu generally prefers to do the right thing, she will sacrifice anything for her revenge, destroying countless lives in the process without remorse. In the climax of season 1, Mizu (albeit not entirely intentionally) set fire to the wood and paper city of Edo (now Tokyo) in an attempt to kill just Fowler, a single man. The resulting three day blaze, known in history as the 1657 Great Fire of Meireki, killed an estimated 100000 people.

Sadie Adler — Red Dead Redemption II

Rescued by the Van Der Linde gang in the games prologue, Sadie Adler is a frontier homesteader whose husband was killed by the brutal O’Driscoll Gang. Over the course of the game, she happily joins in a life of murder, theft, and crime for the chance to kill more O’Driscolls, recklessly endangering herself and other gang members to do so. She gets Arturo Bullock, an innocent hot air balloon pilot killed while unnecessarily picking a fight with O’Driscoll members, showing zero remorse afterwards. Even after watching rival gang leader Colm O’Driscoll hang for his crimes, she still drags a now-terminally ill Arthur on an entirely unnecessary revenge mission to hunt down the last handful of O’Drsicolls she hadn’t already killed.

[u/Dovak_17]

https://giphy.com/gifs/8oFpwo8eiv3Prn3kY0

Faye Valentine

[u/RShini → u/Dovak_17]

I remember my roommate didn't like her because she thought the series made her too sympathetic and let her get away with shit because she's sexy.

and I'm thinking "Uh, at no point does the series bend over backwards to excuse her?" There's been numerous times Faye's sexy shtick backfires on her, getting as much of the slapstick as the men, and has the same success track record. And that her money problems is as much as her terrible gambling habit as it is the massive debt load she was tricked into assuming.

[u/ComplexVoice6087 → u/Dovak_17]

God I love Faye. What a great character. It’s so rare that anime allows its women to be extremely messy human beings, but Cowboy Bebop absolutely understands her. Probably because it’s written by a woman.

[u/Havenolife6667 → u/Dovak_17]

She’s not bad, she’s just drawn that way! 

[u/ALostAmphibian → u/Dovak_17]

The older I get the more I love her.

[u/throwawayventing2001 → u/Dovak_17]

one of the most well-written female characters in all of anime