Numbers 45 - 41

45. Olivier Mira Armstrong (Fullmetal Alchemist)

Do you know how awesome Olivier is? She doesn’t appear until the second half of the series, and has still had enough of an impact for you guys to vote her into the top 50. But are you surprised? In her first appearance, she mocked Edward for his height (or lack thereof) and he squirmed. He normally kicks people’s ass for that. Olivier is a powerful woman, seen as a ruthless leader, but under that tough exterior is a kind, caring woman…if you adhere to the “survival of the fittest” rule. Hell, this woman’s so awesome, she stabs one of the bad guys and throws him in wet cement, and doesn’t even deny it when Bradley (one of the bad guys with IMMENSE power) asks about it.

44. Leeloo (The Fifth Element)

Did you know that all that alien gibberish Leeloo says to Korbon Dallas was scripted? The things you find out when you research this stuff…Anyway, about Leeloo herself. Leeloo was literally created to save the world, so you know she’s going to do something awesome. One of those somethings was break out of the lab she was constructed in within minutes of said creation. Another (and much more awesome) moment was when she beat the living crap out of several dozen alien with her bare hands (seeing as how at least a few of them had some kind of weapon).

43. Black Widow (The Avengers)

You know what a good way of proving you’re dangerous is? Naming yourself after one of the most poisonous spiders in the world. As a Russian spy, Black Widow was trained in several different martial arts, she's a weapons expert, and has some hypnotic abilities. She was also experimented on to make her resistant to aging and heal faster than normal humans (basically making her female Wolverine without the claws…that role’s taken by X-23). Natasha Romanova was in fact the second Black Widow, after Claire Voyant, however Claire is unrelated to the later incarnations of the character.

42. Amy Farrah Fowler (The Big Bang Theory)

What’s better than one Sheldon? Two Sheldons, one of which is female. I suppose it was the only way to give Sheldon a love interest. Since her introduction in the season three finale, Amy has become the only character able to openly criticise Sheldon and get away with it. Despite being another Sheldon, Amy has managed to become friends with the rest of the main cast (arguably more so than Sheldon himself). She is also one of the co-creators of Counterfactuals, a game so complex that only two people (herself and, you guessed it, Sheldon) have managed to master it.

Oh, and she’s been a neurobiologist for twelve years, which is also cool.

41. Samantha Carter (Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis)

People in the military are cool, if only because they’re willing to put their lives on the line to defend your country. And it’s even better when a) they’re a woman, and b) they have attained a high rank, since that’s extremely rare. Sam Carter fits both of these. Prior to the series beginning, she was already a Captain, and had logged 100 hours in enemy airspace during the Gulf War. And now she’s kicking ass on an interplanetary level, starting with Turghan in the fourth episode. Destroying a sun is a pretty nice touch too.

Numbers 50 - 46

50. Lady Macbeth (Macbeth)

What better way to start off this list than a woman who encourages her husband to murder people? Upon being introduced, she convinces her husband to kill his dear friend King Duncan, which pretty much sets in motion all the remaining events of the story. Lady Macbeth’s insistence on killing Duncan pushed her husband into a killing frenzy to keep the throne, which more or less led to her eventual suicide.

49. Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables)

Two things I like about any character: going from nothing to something, and succeeding with brains rather than beauty. Anne does both. She starts as an orphan, gets adopted by the elderly Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert (accidentally, since they wanted a boy), and very quickly excels at school (despite her education being pretty well neglected until this point). Anne adapts to pretty much any situation quickly, and manages to be well-loved by the village. That includes Gilbert Blythe, even though she openly despises him for quite a while.

48. Rogue (X-Men)

Rogue has to have one the best and worst powers of all the X-Men. I mean, she can literally have every power ever, the downside being that she has no control over her powers, and on a few occasions they all fight for dominance. Rogue’s powers first emerged during her first kiss with a boy named Cody. Cody fell into a coma, and Rogue began wearing body concealing clothes to protect others from her power. She was later adopted by Mystique, who recruited her to the Brotherhood of Mutants. Unfortunately, the more Rogue used her powers, the more psychologically screwed up she became, and eventually begged Charles Xavier for help. Rogue isn’t always at the mercy of her powers though, on a few occasions being able to control who she absorbs from.

47. Nancy Drew (Nancy Drew)

What would the Hardy Boys be like if they were girls…and there was only one of them? Nancy Drew has been one of the biggest names in literature for the last eighty five years (and is somehow the second youngest character in this post). With over a hundred and seventy books to her name, Nancy Drew is the biggest name is female crime solvers (sorry Daphne and Velma). Speaking of the Hardy Boys though, she has occasionally crossed over with them to solve mysteries, when she's not doing so with George and Bess.

46. Belle (Beauty and the Beast)

So, is this about the 1756 fairy tale by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, or the 1991 movie by Disney? Screw it, I’m doing both. It keeps my Nancy Drew fact alive if I include Beaumont’s version. They both feature Belle falling in love with a prince who was transformed into a beast until such time as he could get a woman to love him. In Disney’s version, she a bibliophile (person who loves books), and doesn’t care that the rest of her village thinks she’s weird for being so. In Beaumont’s version, her (evil) sisters guilt her into staying with them long enough for The Beast to almost die of heartbreak. Because fairy tale logic.