How jarring would it be to have the bad guy turn around, save the day, and then the heroes still kill them or drag them off to a trial for their crimes?

I'd love to see that in a story!

RDR2 in a nutshell

What is better - to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?

Even after he turned good, he was still willing to kill a stadium full of people to get Kakarot to fight him. He acted like he was under control of the Majin spell but only went along with it until they started acting superior to him, then was just like, "nah, I just want to fight Kakarot because I've been training very hard and he's usually dead these days and I miss fighting with my buddy but don't tell anyone I called him my buddy, and I thought pretending to be under your control would get him to fight me, but I'm not going to bow to you or any of that shit."

Though I can't remember if he actually did kill some of them or if he just did an attack he knew Goku would stop, which would affect how evil the ruse was.

well hold on now, maybe that was just trauma from being short

Wait not everyone has killed someone?

It's got to be better to encourage people to be better and allow them to have a chance to change.

anime fans have a nasty tendency to ship the most absolutely toxic, nonsensical, garbage pairs. That includes the creators.

Agreed 100%. I think it’s a combination of that and a severe lack of media literacy. I don’t know if there’s a real name for it, but what I think of as sort of internet neo-Puritanism is a driving force behind people being extremely uncomfortable with media that isn’t a morality play with clearly delineated good and bad guys, where the bad guys always suffer. Like, we had that, it was called the Hayes Code and it was terrible.

I agree, though I also think there's a discussion to be had about society's obsession with punishment over anything else, and how sometimes it's okay to let go of the past and appreciate that someone has become a better person and is working to attone for that they did and do good things from that point onwards, which is overall better for the world as a whole than them being forced to suffer endlessly for their past actions for the sake of vindication or revenge. If you're going to take the stance that someone can have a moral debt they must be forced to pay, then you have to likewise acknowledge that there must be a point at which it can be paid. If you try to claim that some things can never be made up for and thus some moral debts can never be repaid, then that only highlights the problem with that sort of reasoning. Because if someone takes a life then saves a life, and you claim that one is not enough to make up for the other, then you're essentially treating life 1 as more valuable than life 2. And what if they take 100 lives but save 1000? Can human lives even be stacked up against each other like that to say which group has more "value" than the other? That's the paradox of a moral debt, something can not simultaneously be priceless and yet also not hold enough value to balance the scale against itself at the same time.

In real life this can be complicated further because it can be hard to judge whether someone has truly learned from their mistakes and genuinely changed their ways, but in a fictional story you often get to see for sure that the character truly is sincere. So to tie that in to what you said, just because a viewer/reader is capable of accepting a character's redemption in a fictional setting, where they are 100% certain that the former villain has had a change of heart and feels bad and will continue to do good things into the future, that doesn't mean it's a moral failing on the audience's part. But it's also worth noting that being willing to give someone a chance to improve themselves and grow as a person instead of demanding their eternal damnation and punishment isn't a moral failing either even outside of fiction.

Fred Johnson is such a great character. The Expanse writers absolutely nailed him in the books as he puts everything into atonement with the Belters. I need to read the Fred Johnson short story soon

Accelerator wasn't inherently evil though, he was practically cultivated to be a killing machine for the sake of Level 6. Like yeah what he did was absolutely horrible and fucked up, but that's kinda what happens when you make a child kill more than 10,000 people that were actively attempting to harm him.

I did always like the twist of fate where his life is now dependent on his former to-be victims. I had no qualms with his redemption arc.

Teal'c was always willing to pay for what he did in his past evident in Cor-ai. I don't know if I would classify him as a villain. His whole backstory basically consists of him being trained by Bra'tac to take down the false gods

Tealc was a soldier/slave just mostly obeying orders to survive. He jumped at the chance to rebel.