Sandbox / Villain Has a Point

TRS sandbox for Villain Has a Point. Original thread.

"A clever argument is not what makes a good or bad person. Anyone can make a clever argument, whether they believe it or not. You see someone being a cruel piece of shit? That's a bad person no matter what they fucking believe, and I've seen some cruel pieces of shit around this thing."

— Ashton Greymoore, "Night at the Ligament Manor", Critical Role

Whether good or bad, almost everyone has a reason for the things that they do. That doesn't necessarily mean that their actions and reactions are valid.

In this trope, a villainous character's reasoning for what they do is at least partially, well, reasonable: that is, they make some good points about their motivations for their actions and/or the present situation. However, the mere fact that they can score some rhetorical points, even deliver a Breaking Speech good enough to cause a Heroic BSoD, doesn't excuse what they've done: at the end of the day, they're still doing bad things and they still need to be stopped.

For this trope to apply, the work has to directly acknowledge in some way, often via the protagonists' reactions, that the antagonists raise some legitimate points about the situation they and the protagonists find themselves in, without portraying them as ultimately justified in behaving as they do. If you want to argue that a character was justified when they weren't intended to be, see Alternative Character Interpretation, Informed Wrongness, Strawman Has a Point, and Unintentionally Sympathetic among others.

Supertrope of Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse and Freudian Excuse Denial, where it is argued that a character's Dark and Troubled Past doesn't excuse their current action. Compare and contrast with:

• Anti-Villain, where a character possesses a lot of good traits but is still ultimately the villain.
• At Least I Admit It, where a character admits to their flaws and argues that's better than pretending.
• The Extremist Was Right, where the work ultimately validates the arguments made by a character doing terrible things.
• "Not So Different" Remark, where a character argues that they and another character are more similar than the other character wants to admit.
• Jerkass Has a Point for cases where the argument isn't wrong but the character was rude in the way they got it across (or is habitually rude in general).
• Well-Intentioned Extremist, where a character commits horrible acts out of what they at least believe is a good cause.