Voice Actress: Aoi Tada
English Dub Voice Actress: Melissa Fahn
"Edward" (born January 1, 2058) is the self-invented personal name of an elite hacker prodigy from Earth. Her birth name is Françoise. "Radical Edward" is a very strange, somewhat androgynous, teenage girl claiming to be around 13 years in age. This androgyny seems to have come from a last minute gender shift of the character, further mentioned below. She has a feral aspect reflected in her mannerisms, bare feet, strange postures and gangling walk. Ed could be considered a "free spirit"; she is fond of silly exclamations and childish rhymes, easily distracted, and the show's primary source of physical humor. It is presumed she has a learning or developmental disability similar to ADHD or Autism but this is never specified (of note however is the fact that this is considered highly inheritable, and the condition seems to affect Ed's father as well).
Over the course of the show she rarely walks anywhere, preferring to run, crawl, flip, roll, walk on her hands, ride piggy-back, or at the very least saunter. Ed wears a very loose sleeveless shirt and very tight violet bicycle shorts. She wears a pair of large green goggles around her neck or on her head that act as a virtual reality accessory for computers when connected. She is always barefoot; she uses her feet for tasks which one would usually use hands, such as scratching her nose, clapping, and typing, and it seems she has followed this habit throughout her life: even during a flashback of several years ago wherein she appears to be around 7-9 years in age, she wears a dress over her usual loose shirt and shorts but is still barefoot. This also works the other way around, where she walks on her hands instead of her feet. In one episode, she considers putting on socks and shoes, but quickly removes them, as even wearing socks hampers her, and she falls over seconds after putting them on (session #17, Mushroom Samba). She also appears to be exceptionally strong and flexible, being able to support her weight on her arms for several minutes at a time, and to scratch her nose with her toe.
In the English version, she almost always refers to herself in the third person. Not much is known about her origins, only that she spent some of her earlier childhood in an orphanage after being left there by her father, a cartographer (a questionable occupation on a planet which undergoes changes to its landscape daily due to asteroid impacts) named Appledelhi Siniz Hesap Lütfen (which means "excuse me, check please" in Turkish). In the manga it is revealed that she was a friend of a timid young boy in the orphanage known simply as "Tomato" (which also happens to be the brand name scrawled in katakana on her PC) who, like Ed, knew a great deal about computers and the net, and it is probably safe to assume that his friendship with Ed helped turn her into the hacker she is today. Ed's primary use to the
Bebop crew is as a hacker; she is widely known to be a whiz kid behind a computer. Ed's computer of choice is a carry-along Tomato desktop, and when traveling by foot she will balance it on her head. Her goggles can interact with it to give her a virtual reality environment in which she can browse an entire network at once. In certain scenes she drives a stand-up red Motorscooter and uses "stinkygas guns" which look like normal Super Soaker 50s filled with Gas. Also, "swimming" motions with her hands seem to navigate her through the environment, although her hand motions may be unrelated. Ed has a strong rapport with Jet, who acts as a surrogate father, and Faye, who acts as something of a big sister (much to Faye's chagrin). Ed also seems to be the only person who can understand Ein (though in a few instances Jet could also understand Ein).
Originally, Ed's character was based on a description of the series' music director ("a little weird, catlike, but a genius at creating music") and was originally going to be a dark-skinned boy. It was changed to even the gender ratio on the
Bebop, which was, with Ed as a boy, three guys and one girl. This original character design appears in session 5, stealing a clearly adult magazine from Annie's bookstore by smuggling it under his shirt.
Source:
Wikipedia 
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