On the contrary, I’d argue that it’s especially important for them. Read the post: “[Redemption is] making the choice to change the way you live your life, to be better, to do good things instead of bad things and try to make up for the bad things.” If their past actions have been particularly heinous, it’s that much more important that they change, stop doing those things, and live better lives.

You’re right, their actions now can’t change that they already traumatized someone, because nothing can change the past. Killing the wrongdoer won’t change that. Torturing them won’t change that. Giving them an ice cream sundae won’t change that. Because that is how time and causality work. What we can change and affect is the future. If a rapist decides to stop raping people and become a better person, that’s a good thing for everyone. That is the best possible outcome, because it results in fewer people being raped.

I’m not saying that you, personally, have to give a sex offender a hug or let back into your life anyone who’s harmed you or feel any particular way about any particular person. You don’t. But you do need to refrain from standing in the way of positive change. If you (general you, not necessarily anon you) run around telling people that it’s impossible for rapists (or whatever flavor of wrongdoer that you personally hate most) to change or, worse, that they don’t deserve to change, then what happens if people believe you? If you convince someone who hurts people that it’s impossible for them to stop hurting people, you take away their motivation to try. You also take away potential sources of help with such a change. You’re basically campaigning for them to continue hurting people. Which, if this needs to be spelled out, results in more people getting hurt. Which is bad.

We could quibble all day over semantics, whether this concept should be called redemption or atonement or something else. But that’s really not the point. The post you’re referring to is about the human capacity to change for the better—change actions and value systems—and that’s even more important, not less, the worse the things are that someone has done. Because that just means the stakes are higher when it comes to what they’ll do in the future.

It’s one of the most important things about Star Wars for me. There are other themes I find really meaningful, of course—resistance to oppression and injustice, redemption, the power of love—but Anakin’s arc especially really hits me where I live, and all those things tie into it too. 

Just—we meet him when he’s a small child whose world, aside from his mother, treats him like an object, but he holds on so hard to his personhood and his identity, both in spite of that and because of that. Then he’s trained by the Jedi, which in theory should mean he’s allowed to be a person, but instead it’s kind of more of the same—no personal relationships, no feelings, no choice in self-presentation or much of anything, not to mention the constant reminder of “you may be a child, but we don’t trust you for a second.” He’s a Jedi, and maybe the chosen one, and maybe a threat, and where does that leave room to just be Anakin? The Jedi mean well, and in name he’s free, and maybe that should make it better, but instead it seems like it gets into his head in a way that outright slavery didn’t manage. (Palpatine’s grooming can’t help.) Gone is the certainty of “I’m a person, and my name is Anakin,” replaced with the kind of posturing that masks insecurity. Somewhere along the way his sense of self is damaged, gets more and more fragile, until the turning point comes and he’s willing to give it up entirely. Give up being Anakin. Give up being a person. Give up having a moral code or a community or personal connections or hope. He falls abruptly from desperation into despair and stays trapped in it for over two decades.

What saves him—or shows him how to save himself—is Luke and his love and his insistence on Anakin’s identity. Through that and his love for Luke, he reclaims himself, saves both of them at once, and dies not as a tool but a person named Anakin.