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Time and time again a story is told with the classic hero vs. villain setup with the villain committing acts deemed evil by good, neutral, and the normally apathetic. The villain usually commits said acts for their own personal reasons. But wait, they have a justified reason for their actions? They may not be so much evil as they are anti. He may end up sending the hero into a depression after his motives come to light? Here my friends is a villain who actually has a justified reason for being what he is. Due to the nature of their villainy if they become too excessive in their methods it may fall under Strawman Has a Point and they can easily fall under as a Well-Intentioned Extremist. In-universe they can also easily fall under Designated Villain. Compare Anti-Villain and Ambiguously Evil.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL has this with Kaito Tenjo. He believes the Numbers' cards are evil and from what has been seen the Numbers can easily make the good bad, (Ukyo, Fuya to a lesser extent) and the bad worse, (Jin, Rikuo, Kaio). Also, his claim that the Numbers want to destroy the world seems plausible seeing the evil from Black Mist who was able to capture Astral and control Yuma's body against his will. In fact, the only issue with him capturing Numbers is that he takes the soul of the person who possessed it.
- In Bitter Virgin, maybe he doesn't exactly earn the title of "villain", but when Yamamoto grabs Hinako in the final chapter, setting himself up pretty nicely as one more in a long line of abusive bastards, he makes her realise that, without intending to, understandable though her reaction was, she has truly hurt the feelings of some of the guys in her class, most of whom wouldn't even dream of harming her the way her rapist did.
Comics
- In ElfQuest, Rayek realizes that the accident that brought the High Ones to the World of Two Moons is going to happen in the future, and the Palace is capable of time travel. He brings up the idea of going to that exact moment and prevent the High Ones from being sent into the past and driven from their home, and preempt centuries of struggle and suffering on their part. When Cutter objects, Rayek makes a point: the presence of elves has always negatively affected the World of Two Moons (going back to the first volume, when a human tribe caused a forest fire to drive the Wolfriders out), but they're literally aliens; the world had its own path before they arrived by accident, and it has a right to its own destiny. Of course, that point gets quickly lost in Rayek's otherwise power-hungry, elitist motivations.
- In Death Of The Family, The Joker tells Batman that having an network of allies has made Batman soft and weak, that they are only holding Batman back, and that Joker would be doing Batman a favour by getting rid of them. Judging from what he's pulling on Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, Batgirl, and Jason Todd, he might actually have a point there.
Fan Works
Films
- Combined with Strawman Has a Point, here's a cracked list of
 "villains" with a strong point.
- In Jet Li's The One, his character Yulaw is wanted for murdering alternate versions of himself in parallel dimensions. In doing so the life force of the duplicates he kills divides among the remaining survivors making them stronger. When placed on trial early in the film for 123 counts of murder, Yulaw points out how can he possibly be guilty of murdering himself? He then goes on to say all their energy will simply go into a single individual. When one looks at the troubling implications of the multiverse regarding freewill, Yulaw's goal seems more like a subversion of predestination. Of course it's made clear he's lost all compassion due to his obsession.
Yulaw: "You call it murder. How could I murder myself, a hundred and twenty three times? I just took those wasted energies and put them into one container...me. It made me faster, smarter, stronger. What if that is our fate? To unite with our other selves. To be unified forever. To be one. I will be The One."
Literature
Video Games
- Dr. M from Sly 3 may be a terrible person to work with, a lab nut, and an overall Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain but he DID buy the island legally so everything is technically his and he could've claimed his right to kill Sly seeing that Sly invaded his land.
- Diablo III has your main character as his allies forced to negotiate with the ghost of Zoltum Kulle, an Obviously Evil villain who makes no attempt to hide the fact he is using you to be revived. During your cooperation, he passes most of the time explaining your character that he actually is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who want to awake Humans' true power, and that your own allies are manipulating you for their own purpose. At the end of Act III, it turns out one of your allies, Adria, was indeed using you to prepare Diablo's resurrection.
- Metro 2033 has the Nazis, a post-nuclear holocaust army at war with the Reds. You can overhear a Nazi soldier at the Black Station rationalizing the atrocities committed by his faction as an acceptable evil that will eventually lead to prosperity of the whole Metro. He's actually got a point, as despite the heavy-handedness of their rule, Nazi-controlled stations are some of the safest, wealthiest, and most prosperous ones in the Metro, but are facing impending doom due to an aging population. Conversely, the rest of the Metro is falling into a conflict that threatens to wipe out the survivors of humanity due to a lack of cohesion.
- Mundus in DMC Devil May Cry mocks Dante's desire to free humanity by pointing out that humans had freedom before Mundus arrived, and "They fought. They killed. They starved." Vergil shares Mundus' opinion of humanity, to the point that he wants to rule humanity with Dante after Mundus' defeat.
- Darth Traya, from Knights of the Old Republic II, justifies her actions by proclaiming that the Force uses people as tools and that she wants to break free from the cycle of massive galactic wars by destroying it. Though she's the villain, she has a point: the wars between Jedi and Sith rage on for millennia afterward, with countless innocents in the crossfire and no end in sight.
- There's also the matter of a single Jedi or Sith being able to influence the entire galaxy. Is that sort of power something any one person should have when individuals will lay waste to everything just to obtain it?
- William Johnson in Assassins Creed III in his Hannibal Lecture before his death claims that if the British control on the colonies was broken the colonists will encroach on the Native American lands and displace the inhabitants...something that obviously occurred in Real Life and is even later touched on in universe.
Web Original
- Skitter from Worm when talking to almost any hero or their bosses. To the frustration of readers, her low self-esteem means she doesn't call them out to the extent she could.
Western Animation
- Justice League Unlimited: Project Cadmus created several threats to the world, but they do have considerable ground to stand on for their actions: the League didn't tell anyone about their big Kill Sat, they themselves have made questionable decisions in the past, and the Justice Lords were able to take over their world with only six of the founding members.
- On the other hand Cadmus makes rather terrible solutions that tend to turn from bad to worse. Such as creating Volcana, Doomsday, Ace...just about every solution they come up with always goes rogue, and creates more harm than they hope to prevent.
- The Justice Lord Batman pulled one of these on the League one in a scene that even got the writers unable to directly respond to.
"And with that power we've made a world where no eight year old boy will EVER lose his parents! Because of some punk with a gun..."
- One from Batman: Under the Red Hood, from the titular character. No matter how many times Joker may get slammed into Arkham, being the Cardboard Prison it is, he always returns at some point to wreak more havoc. While Batman does think about killing Joker, he fears about never coming back. However, among Batman's rogues gallery, Joker DOES have a higher kill count alone than most and will most likely never stop killing as long as he is able, so putting him behind bars or a padded room does no good. Yet because he's Batman, he won't take that step. Some people find it easy to side with Red Hood here, even though he is a bit demented.
- The Equalists in The Legend of Korra claims that benders are forcing non-benders to live as second class citizens. This belief carries some weight since the city is governed entirely by benders, the military and the police force mostly (if not entirely) consists of benders, the biggest sport in town is one that only benders can play, and benders get more job opportunities. (such as firebenders who power the generators with lightning) than non-benders.
- Amon in particular mixes this with a What the Hell, Hero? speech after the Wolf-bats win the probending tournament through very, very obvious cheating. He shames the entire crowd for rewarding those who don't deserve it and he points out that benders who don't use their powers responsibly don't deserve to have them at all, before swiftly relieving them of that burden.
- In The Batman Francis Grey's complaint about his 17 year sentence for just stealing minor item.:
Francis: I took a watch! Everything else was just an accident.
- In the Wonder Woman film Persephone's arguments about the wrongness of Hippolyta's hiding the Amazons away from Man's World:
Hippolyta: "You were given a life of peace and beauty!"
Persephone: "And denied one of families and children. Yes Hippolyta, the Amazons are warriors, but we are women too."
- In the second season finale of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Queen Chrysalis brags to the cast that she managed to carry out her plan to take over Equestria even when Twilight Sparkle thinks something is wrong with Princess Cadence (who was actually Queen Chrysalis in disguise) thanks to all of Twilight Sparkle's friends for not believing her and coldly calling her out.
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