Nala (The Lion King) accompanying her and her best friend Simba on their adventures. Pronounced "me too", the character's name is a reference to this personality trait. Simba was intended to save the cub from a wildebeest stampede, and Nala would eventually become responsible for protecting Mheetu from Simba's tyrannical uncle Scar. Nala also had a fox friend named Bhati. According to Woolverton, Mheetu and Bhati were eventually written out of the film because their stories were beginning to distract from Simba's, in addition to the Mheetu-Scar subplot making the film too dark when combined with the death of Simba's father Mufasa. At one
Nala (The Lion King) felt that "Nala is really the agent of change in "The Lion King"", dismissing Simba as a "rich, lazy boyfriend." Leab observed that "The Lion King"'s male characters tend to "take the center stage" while "female characters take a backseat to the action." Lenka Křivánková of Masaryk University wrote in her thesis "1990s Hollywood Break-Away Hits: A Feminist Perspective" that she was not particularly surprised by the film's lack of strong roles for women because of its Shakespearean source material, dubbing the film "an old traditional fairy tale with all its traditional features", including patriarchy and monarchism. Writing for the