Well, Eren is most definitely not on any kind of redemption arc at the moment! Instead he’s taking the fast train to SpiralTown. But with Sasha’s death, he was indeed very grieved. So I do think he very much does not want his loved ones to get hurt, but he’s making absolutely terrible choices. 

As for whether or not you have to show remorse to be redeemed… that’s a larger discussion! Let’s ditch real life and discuss how redemption arcs work in fiction. As I was saying in my original post, it would look differently for everyone considering this is such, such, such a gray story. Reiner will never be able to make anything up to the people of Paradis. Annie might be able to. Eren’s probably wouldn’t look like being able to do much at all but be instead an internal shift. 

Like, most people consider Darth Vader in Star Wars the classic redeemed villain. He never once showed remorse for a single one of his actions. He just ended the empire to save his son, and expressed his love for his son. In Tokyo Ghoul, characters like Tsukiyama are considered redeemed, when Tsukiyama never expressed any kind of regret for his hunting tactics. Most characters who are redeemed in TG, actually, don’t show remorse.

All that to say, what counts as redemption in a story is often more catered to how the audience sees the end of the character’s arc. Do they see it purely as a tragedy (Bertolt in SnK, Furuta, Rize in Tokyo Ghoul:re) or do they see the end of the character’s arc as something hopeful, a different choice from the destruction they were heading down? Like Darth Vader doesn’t survive. If he had, would he have expressed remorse? Could he even have? We really don’t know. All he expressed was love for his son that outweighed his devotion to the Empire, when he had previously put the Empire before any semblance of human decency and personal relationships.  

Eren expressing care or love, or an understanding of how much he’s hurt his loved ones, would count from the perspective of shifting the audience, and that’s something I do expect. I don’t expect him to think a whole lot of “what have I done” or anything like that, though, or to earn his redemption in the eyes of the world within the story. 😦