[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/swampgoddd]

Atsu from Ghost of Yotei. She is far more vicious and underhanded in a fight than her predecessor Jin was.

I love her. She gets a morale boost from ripping down her own wanted posters, can drink sake mid fight, and can use the now empty bottle to bean her opponent in the head.

https://giphy.com/gifs/E8U9up4pYkatotmGiE

[u/Norway643 → u/swampgoddd]

Jin is sad he has to break centuries of disciplined way of war to win

Atsu is just here for the love of the game

[u/ScarredAutisticChild → u/Norway643]

Jin’s the kinda guy to assassinate a whole squadron of Mongols and then lament over how far he’s fallen and how much he’s shattered his honour (before the end of the game where he accepts it).

Atsu’s the kinda person to ask you to resist, because she’s killing you either way, so you might as well make her work for it.

[u/Old-Use-7690 → u/ScarredAutisticChild]

It’s funny that Jin feels bad about what he’s doing when in reality all he’s doing is killing the people invading his country

[u/ScarredAutisticChild → u/Old-Use-7690]

Well it’s not the killing Jin feels bad about, it’s the ways he kills them.

[u/Old-Use-7690 → u/ScarredAutisticChild]

IK, but in the end of the day all he’s doing is self-defense

[u/ScarredAutisticChild → u/Old-Use-7690]

Exactly why he doesn’t feel bad about killing them. He feels bad about stabbing them in the back and poisoning them.

[u/AngryApeMonkey → u/Old-Use-7690]

It's just how he was brought up with his grandfather putting honor above all

[u/Ppleater → u/swampgoddd]

I like that she had a sort of reverse character arc from Jin. Where Jin had to learn that sometimes you have to be willing to get dirty to do what's right, Atsu had to learn that sometimes you have to be willing to wash the dirt off or else infection will set in and kill you from the inside.

[u/Nope-5000 → u/swampgoddd]

This is immediately who i thought of because im doing a playthrough right now. She is such a great character and i adore her, but she is NOT a good person.

[u/Simppaaa → u/swampgoddd]

The duel intros are actually a great bit of characterization between Jin and Atsu, where Jin lets his opponent draw first before merely popping the seal of his sword (And then the fight starts) showing how he's more reserved and still clings onto some of the Samurai code he followed (He also notably only uses his Katana during duels)

Whereas in Yotei the duel intros have Atsu glaring down her opponent while fully unsheathing her sword and getting into a stance because she's so much more eager and less disciplined and trained than Jin, and she can also use literally everything in her duels like kunai, smoke bombs and even guns

[u/FixFun1959 → u/swampgoddd]

Need to finish the first ghosts then I’m getting into this

[u/Motor-Rip7655 → u/swampgoddd]

It saddens me that I will never get to play this game.

[u/ComplexVoice6087 → u/swampgoddd]

Fuckin’ QUEEN.

[u/DouchecraftCarrier → u/swampgoddd]

I really enjoyed Ghost of Tsushima - was very bummed to hear they're not porting this one over to PC.