Hannibal Has a Point

So the villain and hero are having another therapy session and begin getting on the topic of the current conflict of the story. The hero is about to mention or is already explaining why the villain fails at life. But then something happens that the band of heroes didn’t expect. The villain begins presenting an argument...and people are agreeing with him.

Usually found in more cynical works in the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, the villain is shown exchanging words with the band of heroes that cannot be ignored. He isn’t toying with them or telling them technical truths for selfish motivations. Hannibal, indeed, is trying to make a point.

This isn’t to say that Good Is Dumb. For unlike Breaking Them By Talking, this trope isn’t meant to tear down the hero to show how pathetic they are. It’s merely there to show that throughout all the encounters good and evil have with each other in a story, one exchange of dialogue from the dark side is actually reasonable. It may even make more sense than how the good guys are going about an issue.

This may even result in a Face Heel Turn from one of the heroes after hearing the villain’s side of the story. This trope is usually found in works to show that not everything is black and white in morality and will make the viewer question where the line of Moral Event Horizon begins.

In order to qualify, the character must be a designated villain. It doesn’t particularly matter when they turn to the dark side, but they must already be a villain in order to present this type of reasoning. From Anti-Villain to Complete Monster, any type of villain can qualify. But they cannot be Anti-Heroes or on a neutral side, since this would eliminate the special kind of conflict this trope invokes.

Compare with Straw Man Has a Point, its Sister Trope. Straw Man Has a Point happens when an author unintentionally sets up the villain to have more legitimate arguments for his actions than the hero makes him out to be, and thus a product of bad writing; while Hannibal Has a Point occurs when the villain is purposefully meant to be stating sensible points for his motives that take the hero by surprise. Someone might come out and say that the villain has a point, but the context of the story might allude strongly enough to this trope as well. Actions of the other characters reacting to the villains' argument must be noted if it is the latter. Related to The Extremist Was Right, which is what happens when the villain is so right, well... it works.

No real life examples, please.

Examples of Hannibal Has a Point include:

Anime and Manga

• A double subversion played with Paptimus Scirocco from Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam by stating that while he knows his methods are extreme and that his ideal world will have very few people in power, that having people freely do what ever they please has been the cause of such horrendous bloodshed. And having more gifted people in power will lead to Utopia Justifies the Means. The only two people in the room listening to this are Haman and Char. Char at the time tells him to shut up. However, Char’s ideals in Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack mimic Scirocco’s in a way that’s a little too close for comfort.
• Weiss Kreuz. Reiji Takatori is the Big Bad of the TV series, and by accounts a Complete Monster who antagonizes Weiss and their boss Persia aka his brother Shuiichi. However, in a certain confrontation, he brings up a pretty valid point in regards to their subordinates (which in Reiji's case, are his own sons Hirofumi and Masafumi), summed up as this: "You tell ME I use my sons to my advantage?! Look at the way you treat your four subordinates, you hypocrite! Specially the little guy whom you thought he was my kid... and who happens to be YOUR illegitimate son!" And then he kills Persia.

Film

• In Watchmen, Ozymandias is at first pegged as a Complete Monster for creating a weapon that will kill millions of innocent people and blaming it on Dr. Manhattan. After he explains his reasoning with Dr. Manhattan that by killing millions during such dark times, he will save billions because everyone will become united to solve this issue rather than trying to rip each other apart, Dr. Manhattan points out to the band of heroes that he’s right.
• X-Men villain Magneto makes a career of this trope.

Literature

• DC Comics villain Vandal Savage, when written by Christopher Priest, has these account for about half of his dialogue.
• Happens occasionally with White Wolf over in Priest's Black Panther run, as well.
• Sultan Mehmed of Count and Countess may be the Designated Villain who conscripts Child Soldiers and destroys Catholic churches for kicks, but he's got more common sense than the titular characters put together. Vlad realizes this at one point and gets annoyed.
• Nicodemus's crimes are so repulsive both on and offscreen they could take up an entry on their own. He also makes some very good points about the Black Council and Red Court while proposing an alliance that Harry has trouble arguing with. Harry still rejects Nicodemus, but it's not as easy as he thought it'd be.
• The Trope Namer himself pulls this off on Clarice Starling in the titular book. He sends her a letter early on in the book pointing out how she has done her best to serve the ideals of the FBI while it's leaders have done nothing by stymie her every step of the way, a lesson she finally takes to heart towards the end when she decides to enforce the law by defying her superiors wishes As most of them have been duped into stripping her of authority, while Krendler, the mastermind of the deception, plans to profit off her impotence to arrange to have Hannibal Lecter murdered bu7 Mason Verger for his own gain.

Live Action TV

• In season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Mayor (while anything but Jerkassy, was definitely a vicious villain) provided frank and accurate advice on why Buffy and Angel's relationship was doomed to fail. While he was trying to kill the both of them. Nice guy.
  • In the same season, Spike (who at that time was still an antagonist) interrupts his attempt at murdering several of the Scooby Gang to explain to Buffy at length why her efforts to remain 'just friends' with Angel are futile - there's simply too much history between them to keep things at an emotional low-intensity state such as friendly acquaintance. Indeed, season 3 is pretty much 'the season where Buffy and Angel get relationship counseling from pretty much everyone trying to kill them'.
    • Including the First Evil and Faith.

Theatre

• The Witch of Into the Woods has this effect on the characters; regardless of whether they say so aloud, they are visibly humbled by the Hannibal Lecture that is "Last Midnight", in which she calls them out on the fact that their wishes and carelessness got them in the trouble they're in now.

Web Original

• Achilles, leader of the titular superhero team in the Global Guardians PBEM Universe, goes to his father for advice on his personal life all the time. His father, by the way, is Lord Doom, one of the setting's world-conquering master villains. This is a slightly inverted example, though, because usually Achilles is the blunt antagonistic one (for a hero), and Lord Doom is generally urbane and polite (for a villain).
• The Nostalgia Chick's Dark Nella Saga coupled this with What Measure Is a Non-Human?. The titular Big Bad (formerly an abused BFF) lets every one of the Jerkass characters have it, the Chick herself getting the most tearing down, but it turns out Dark Nella was a clone and the original Nella trapped under the sea, so the show can carry on being a Played for Laughs Dysfunction Junction.

Western Animation

• Justice League:
  • First, the episode "A Better World". We have the Justice Lords,the Evil/Totalitarian Counterpart to the Justice League, who took over the world and turned it into a totalitarian state after their President Lex Luthor murdered the Flash. They deal with crime by lobotomizing their villains. When the two versions of Batman confront each other, they have a discussion on the virtues of democracy:

Lord Batman: Think about it. A world where there's no crime, no victims, no pain.
League Batman: And no choice. Who elected you, anyway?
Lord Batman: Who elected you? The problem with democracy is it doesn't keep you very safe.
League Batman: It has other virtues, but you seem to have forgotten them.
Lord Batman: I didn't forget. I just chose peace and security instead.
League Batman: You grabbed power!
Lord Batman: 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.
League Batman: [emerges from the shadows, dropping his batarang] You win.

Notable in that this effect happened to the writers. Originally, League Batman was supposed to win the argument and the fight, but when they wrote that last line for Lord Batman, they couldn't come up with a response, so rewrote the scene accordingly. However, League Batman does successfully think of an answer to Lord Batman's point about fifteen minutes later, when he points out that while the elder Waynes might have been safer in this world they would also have been completely horrified at the measures used to enforce that safety. Lord Batman ends up changing sides in acknowledgement of League Batman's reasoning.

• • Later, in Justice League Unlimited, this happens to Bats again. He confronts Amanda Waller, the head of Project Cadmus, a secret government agency that had been opposing the League. Batman tells Waller that the League will take down Cadmus if they pose a threat to the world. Waller shoots him down, telling him Cadmus exists as a way to stop the League from threatening the world—after all, an alternate League dethroned the world's government with only seven members, and the Unlimited League has a whole army of supers, as well as a giant fusion cannon hovering over the world and pointing down.
  • That said, Waller doesn't say what would prevent Cadmus from doing the same thing. If anything, from practical stand-point, Cadmus is more of a threat, comparing the fact that the Justice League saved the Earth several times, and Cadmus had at that point violated more laws it had enforced, despite the idea of them being government appointed making them more trustworthy. At the worst we have one of Waller's subordinates attempt to use a nuclear missile to kill Superman and Doomsday, and the collateral damage from it he considered another benefit due it stopping drug trafficking in the area the above to were fighting in. Even Waller felt that this was going too far.