Character Writing

I love the way Brian Jacques changes the tone of his writing when he introduces the villain in Redwall. The tempo of the writing is pretty calm until the appearance of Cluny. I have to say, even though I am much bigger than  a rat, if I were to see one with one eye, walking around with a ferret's skull on a stick, I would be running for the hills. In the Redwall books, rats are almost always bad, while mice are good. This of course does not always happen, but most of the time. I guess it's just because mice are smaller, and do not seem as menacing as a big ugly rat.