User blog comment:Itay66647/Pure Evil Proposal: Mother Gothel/@comment-39032584-20190927233120

No, no, no. She's not even close to being Pure Evil. Even discounting the follow-up series and there apparently being some villains in it who are worse than her, which I can't comment on due to not having seen it, everything she does is standard Disney-level villainy. Her abuse of Rapunzel isn't even as bad as it could have been, to the point it almost came off like she had some affection for her before Rapunzel became defiant, which she may have actually had, even if she needed her to stay young.

There's a couple of other important factors to consider; you're kind of overplaying her lack of an excuse. As evidenced by her immediately growing so old that she disintegrated into dust right after Rapunzel cut her hair, you could make a strong case for her actually doing this to preserve her life. That may not automatically make what she did right, but she definitely wasn't just "being evil for its own sake". And as you even mentioned, she agreed to let Rapunzel heal Flynn if it meant her cooperation. Someone who qualifies for the the category wouldn't even consider showing even a bit of genuine mercy like that. From my perspective, all she really cared about was keeping herself alive, making her probably one of the least evil main villains in the Disney Animated Canon (though the top honor for that still easily goes to Edgar from The Aristocats).