Talk:Bellwether/@comment-24308881-20160308140458/@comment-961279-20160327175840

Let's add in #10: Lionheart puts his paw on Bellwether's face and roughly pushes her aside at one point. That's another sign of disrespect.

As to her motivations not being "as deep-rooted and personal" as another character, that's kind of like saying "pizza isn't very good because it isn't steak from this other restaurant" or "the movie Casablanca isn't very good because it isn't Citizen Kane". Take the motivations as they are presented in the movies themselves.

We accept that Hans is telling the truth in Frozen when he says he has twelve older brothers and that three of them pretended he was invisible. Based on how he treated Anna and Elsa, he could have been lying to gain Anna's trust. The only proof we have in the movie is him saying essentially "I am a prince, I have twelve older brothers and three weren't nice to me". But since it is the truth, we can infer that he had over a decade to work on how to get out from under the shadow of his family and find a place where he could be in a position of power.

Likewise, based on the motivations I listed above plus the fact that at the ceremony where Lionheart announces where Judy Hopps will be assigned to, Bellwether scrambles to find a spot where she wouldn't be blocked from view during the photographs, we can infer that all of those have been eating at her for a long time.

How long has she been Assistant Mayor during Lionheart's administration and subject to that kind of callous treatment? This was his fourth term. Has she been there for all four terms, and how long is a term of office in that government? Some branches of local and state governments in the US operate on a four-year or a six-year cycle. If it's six years and she's been there for all four terms, that's about two decades.

What about her childhood? We know Judy and Nick were subjected to bullying when they were young. It's likely Bellwether was at least once, given the 90%/10% ratio of prey to predator in her society. She says at least twice, "Us little guys have to stick together", which indicates she's felt put down before, providing insight as to why she feels she needs to correct the inequality that exists in her society. But as the movie shows, the prey species can be bullies just as much as the predator species.

To me, that's just as "deep-rooted" as it is for Hans. Actually, it's more. There are fewer reasons for Hans' behavior shown in Frozen than for Bellwether's behavior in Zootopia.

But ultimately, it doesn't matter if people think Bellwether is less of a villain than another character, or more than a villain than another character, or the same amount of a villain as another character. She is the villain within the movie of ''Zootopia".

Villains do think about possible outcomes that may stop them. The cliche is the ones that have the self-destruct button to blow everything up so they can escape. The better ones are the villains who plan ahead and put measures into place to deal with them as they occur, rather than as a last resort. They don't say, "well, I can see that this would prevent me from doing what I wany, so I'll just give up on the whole thing".

You may have missed it, but Bellwether demonstrated a skill in seeing and analyzing one of those possible outcomes on the fly. It's very sneaky, but it shows how intelligent she really is.

When Bogo is disciplining Hopps in his office, Mrs. Otterton comes in to plead for help in finding her husband. Judy volunteers to take the case, which Bogo does not like. He gets Otterton out of the way and makes it clear that she's going to drop it and apologize to Otterton. When he opens the door, Bellwether is there, pleased that someone is going to help the otter.

As he stammers and tries to deal with the sudden appearance of someone who is technically one of his superiors, Bellwether forces him into a position of having Judy to investigate the disappearance by quickly sending a message to the mayor, announcing that Hopps was taking the case.

How long did it take for Bellwether to think about a possible outcome that might stop her and find a way around that?

Two minutes.

And why is this sneaky and shows her intelligence? Consider who is going to be doing the investigation: a recent police academy graduate who has been on the job for just over one day. Someone who comes from a background that does not lend itself to being a police officer nor has typical investigation skills. Someone who is not as physically strong as other officers such as the ones who are elephants or wolves.

Within two minutes, Assistant Mayor Bellwether identified a person who was more likely to impede the search for the missing animals and to cause it to fail, and she used her position within the government to force this to happen.

As I said above and on other occasions, it's kind of pointless to try and rank characters as being more or less of a villain/antagonist/protagonist/whatever. But if you're going to do it for Bellwether and Hans, Bellwether gets my vote as being more of a villain than Hans, going purely by the motivations shown in their respective movies and leaving out any supplemental material like A Frozen Heart. There are simply more reasons shown in Zootopia than in Frozen why the villain does what they do.