👂
Send me 👂 and I will tell you something random about the way I write my character
Despite how this isn't so in any of the canon depictions of the character as far as I'm aware, I write Bagheera as having emerald green eyes. I do this because green is usually a color reserved in media, but especially in Disney media, for the villains (eg: Scar, Maleficent, Ursula, Oogie Boogie, etc) and I believe Bagheera to be far from completely good. I'd describe her as ever so slightly dark morally gray leaning because —the ableism from the book aside cause I try and keep that off my portrayal—:
Bagheera is said to have killed off the entire river turtles population in The Water Truce.
Also in the book, Bagheera is described as having become even more dangerous than Shere Khan due to the time spent with humans since birth and until the escape.
In the 1998 movie she not only downplays Baloo's warning to Mowgli about Shere Khan but makes them both believe they were being attacked by him by mimicking his roar cause she thinks it's funny during a time when Mowgli was being actively hunted down by Shere Khan (like, please read the room big cat lady).
She more than once threatens to eat other animals if they anger her. Off the top of my head I can remember her threatening Tabaqui and Shere Khan (sort of, since the threat was made after Tabaqui spoke) with eating them.
She didn't really intervene in the situation between Shere Khan and Mowgli until 1) Shere Khan "cheated" by getting the monkeys to lock Mowgli up, and then 2) when Tabaqui got involved. So it was more a matter of keeping Mowgli from being outnumbered or trapped in a reduced space when facing Shere Khan than actually protecting him from Shere Khan.
I use the green eyes as symbolism for how she's got a bit of badness in her.













