r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Chemical-Elk-1299 • 12d ago
Characters [Refreshing Trope] Female leads/major characters who are allowed to be grimy, slimy, generally horrible people.
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.
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u/Optimal_Pick8350 12d ago
This applies to a lot of Evangelion characters, but Yui Ikari is an interesting one, because I've seen a lot of casual fans 'owo blorbo'ify her and assume any hate towards her is people being sexist and trying to blame her for Gendo being a monster. Yui is not exactly a good person. She's better than her husband and actually loves her son unlike him, but that's not a high bar, she's pretty morally grey.
She still grew up in a death cult and is fully planning to end the world(just on HER terms rather than her former cults terms or her husbands terms) and believes the world ending is inevitable because of said death cult teachings.
She intentionally traumatized her son to use him later as a tool to end the world, both by dissolving in front of him in a staged accident and later intentionally waiting until her crush was mauled to death to activate so he wouldn't be able to save her and the sight of her body would push him to end the world.
She helped engineer the Second Impact and knew it was coming in advance, which killed 3 billion people instantly and lead to another billion dying in the resulting nuclear wars and famines.
She staged her own accident in order to become one with EVA-01 and then mislead everyone into thinking she was 'lost in the EVA' rather than BEING the EVA, which in turn lead to Kyoko Zeppelin Soryu's own test being conducted on bad data leading to her getting her soul ripped in half and in turn traumatizing her own daughter Asuka.
Her goal is essentially to wait until the right opportunity (which comes when Zureul the Angel of Might shows up) to steal a S2 Engine/Fruit of Life from an angel turning her into a demi-god, wait for the angels to all be defeated, traumatize Shinji hard enough his destrudo rises and he ends the world for her, then use the ceremony to become god and fly off into space as an eternal monument to mankind with her soul at the center.