User blog comment:Rayn Larusse/bad redwallers/@comment-1153441-20100616013046

The way BJ wrote the series most of the vermin do not change. This just goes back to the age old line of BJ's that "goodies are good and baddies are bad." The reason that Captain Snow and Gingevere killed the vermin that were escaping is two-fold.

1. They probably didn't know that the battle was over. All they knew was that Redwall was getting invaded by evil vermin and that they couldn't let them take over the Abbey. So, they might have just thought that the vermin fleeing from Redwall were going to get reinforcements or something like that. (though why Cluny would need reinforcements is beyond me. But I guess that Cap Snow and Ginge didn't know that.)

2. They knew that as people have said in above comments if the vermin escaped they would just join up with another horde, or terrorize innocent woodlanders. So they killed them to protect other creatures from the vermin.

One other thing is that we're treating the vermin and Redwallers to much like real people. In the Redwall world, there is a set line of good and evil (with a few exceptions). In the real world, you can't define whether someone is good or evil just by the way they appear, or who they fight for. (Although some cases are very easy to figure out, such as terrorists, Nazis, or people like that.)

Take the American Civil War for example. You can't rightfully say that one side was good and one side was bad. There was a mix of people on both sides so there was a mix of both good and evil. Some people on the Southern side were just fighting to protect their home state (Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson etc.), while others were fighting to have the right to own slaves. Not everyone on the Northern side was either good or bad. There were the people that wanted to put an end to slavery in the U.S. because they cared for the slaves and they didn't want their country torn apart. But there were others that fought just because they wanted to teach those "Southern Rebels" a lesson. Or for monetary or industrial reasons.

So you see, the Redwall world does not have to be completely parallel to the real world. It's fictional so BJ can create it however he wants. Sure there are some allusions to the real world in the Redwall world. But that doesn't mean that everything in the Redwall world has to be parallel to the real world.