Jack Savage
Jack Savage is a male rabbit and a ZPD officer assigned to Precinct 7, introduced in the W-Series. He trained in the Academy class that Luther infiltrated undercover, arriving as the smallest cadet in the company and leaving as its most improved.
Background
Savage's father pins his badge at graduation, wet-eyed and loud about it. His name gets to the Academy ahead of him: the larger cadets have already turned it into a joke by his first week, and the expectations attached to a rabbit in a police academy are not news to him.
Personality
Savage is determined well past the point where determination stops helping. His answer to an obstacle is to hit it again harder, and the medical log he carries in his breast pocket keeps getting thicker. None of it is done for an audience. He works out the maintenance schedule on the ice wall so he can fail against it privately, in the hours when no instructor is watching, and he does not ask anyone for help, which looks like grit from the outside and is closer to going under from the inside. Praise was never the thing he was short of. Give him a method and he stops trying to outlast an obstacle and starts trying to take it apart.
Series History
W-Series
In "Recruit Grumpiski", Savage has spent weeks running headfirst at the Tundratown ice wall and going into the freezing pool at its base every time. Judy finds him there alone after hours and tells him she failed the same wall twenty-one times, then goes over it in front of him at an angle, working the ridges and her own spring instead of reach. She sends him back at it and gives him nothing encouraging, on the grounds that encouragement was never the missing piece. He clears it days later, before reveille, with the training yard empty and nobody there to see it. In the final assessment he takes the scaffolding above a rhinoceros too large for any cadet to subdue alone and drops onto its back on Packard's call, and the peer review names him the most improved cadet and the most valuable specialist in the class. He graduates to Precinct 7.
In "Scare Tactics", Savage plays the second rabbit silhouette in the guest wing of Pawthorne Mansion during the operation Luther runs on Nick, in a sweater that is unmistakably Judy's. He apologizes to Nick afterward, sheepishly, and gets back a compliment and an indictment in the same sentence.
Key Relationships
Judy Hopps
Judy reaches Savage where the instructors have not, and not by being kind about it. She is a rabbit who was told the same things he is being told, who failed the same wall more times than he has, and who solved it by treating her size as a toolkit rather than a handicap. What she gives him is entirely technical: angles, ridges, spring, the wall's own surface used against it. That is exactly why it lands.
Ralph Packard and Miles Mobian
Savage comes out of the Academy attached to the two cadets he cleared the final assessment with. Packard calls for the high ground and Savage takes it; Mobian calls the opening. The three of them turn up together when Luther needs cadets, and at the end of that night Savage is sitting cross-legged on the floor with his back against Packard's knee.
Trivia
- Jack Savage is named after the early concept of Zootopia, which featured a rabbit named Jack Savage as the main character before the story was reworked around Judy Hopps.