User blog comment:LucidPigeons/Category Cleanup/@comment-961279-20160401134104

These categories aren't ones that should be deleted or replaced, they just need better enforcement of their use: reformed and redeemed.

If a character happens to help one of the good guys as part of their normal activities, that's a coincidence that gives the good guys a lucky break. For example, in the movie A Bug's Life, the bird is shown throughout the movie as doing normal bird activities like searching for food. At the end, she captures Hopper and feeds him to her chicks. Hopper is killed (off screen) and that happens to help Flik and the rest of the ants.

In order for the bird to have reformed or been redeemed, it would have had to have made a conscious decision to change its behavior from evil to good. It does not. At no time does it go beyond its normal animal behavior.

But, people are adding characters like this to "reformed" and "redeemed" categories simply because it's a coincidence that they happen to do something that helps the hero. Going a little further under that line of thought, if a villain falls off a cliff, they might say the cliff reformed, even though as an inanimate object, it cannot have any behavior to begin with.

The number of villains that truly reform or are redeemed may be small, but make sure if they're tagged with those kinds of categories, they really did and it's not a case of happenstance that helped someone else.