It was a good year to be bad. And not just bad, positively villainous.

In November, when Kendrick Lamar surprise-released GNX—his sixth album and, it must be said, a perfectly ferocious climax in his year-long feud with Drake—it dawned on me that maybe being a hater was just plain fun (and also a smart business strategy).

I wasn’t alone in my assessment. By the first week of December, Lamar secured eight of the top 10 Billboard Hot 100 songs. “Kendrick really an Arkham Asylum patient that can rap his ass OFF,” @nellychillinn posted on X. However inspired Lamar’s malice was—and, boy oh boy, was it—he was only one of several villains, both real and fictional, who dictated the terms of the year. It was a year of blockbuster, comic book mythos—only, in our version, the bad guys won.

A new cultural mood took hold in 2024, the steady climate of a disordered age. In a year that rocketed Moo Deng, the influencer baby hippo, and Brat summer into the zeitgeist, many of its tentpole moments shared a common thread: they gave villainy the main stage, made it cool to be bad.

In The Penguin, the Max supervillain drama, Colin Farrell plays Oz, a low-level criminal with kingpin dreams. It’s among the year’s best shows, much of it owed to twin performances by Farrell and Cristin Milioti, chilling in their symmetry. What captivated me about the series was its unwillingness to sugarcoat the immorality of man. By season’s end and without spoiling it, Oz makes a fatal choice. Real friendship has no place in his world of blood and vice, he reasons. Yet viewers admire Oz’s aptitude to survive, his unmerciful resolve. We tell ourselves that he is one of us. On Industry, the anxiety-riddled Gen Z banking drama, stock trader Harper Stern lies to advance her career and you secretly hate that you love it. (Myha’la is as ruthless as she is cunning in the role.)

Of course, not all villainy was created equal this year. Arms dealer Macrinus—played with cool guile by Denzel Washington in Gladiator II, regrettably nowhere near as poetically compelling as the original—is drunk on self-greed as he plots to overthrow Rome, and still we wonder, Maybe he’s got a point. The popularity of films like Joker: Folie à Deux, Challengers, Megalopolis, and The Substance also reaffirmed a shared desire to live outside the rules of play.

What was it that drew us to those characters? They were blinded by purpose. Consumed by ego. Some were more morally bankrupt than others. Still, they were human in the most human way there is, driven by conviction and beset by contradiction. They were gloriously flawed. And maybe you—like me—wanted a little bit of what they possessed, what they wielded with such originality: total and complete belief in yourself, no matter the outcome.

Irrational self-belief is one of the reasons villains deeply resonate across culture, says Kevin Wynter, a professor of media studies at Pomona College. “In a repressive society such as ours that champions conformity to better cultivate consumers, characters who actively reject the trappings of capitalist fantasia or who operate by the codes of a self-fashioned morality in opposition to the dominant society will inevitably be appealing in ways we may not all wish to openly admit,” he says.

Today, traditional notions of villainy have been replaced by complex, sometimes paradoxical, standards of what different groups find acceptable or threatening. Wynter believes this has led to a “post-villain world.” Tech moguls (Elon Musk), politicians (New York City Mayor Eric Adams), podcasters (Joe Rogan)—for many people, they are the primary transgressors of our time (and heroes, to others). They are anti-establishment. They want to subvert “the system.”

“There are few, if any, villains who so deftly combine clownery, wealth, and power like Donald Trump,” Wynter adds. “Even his newest parasitic attachment, Elon Musk—who, again, for some is a figure of perfect villainy is for others a swashbuckling futurist cowboy.”

That’s the thing about the future, you never know exactly how it’s going to unravel, or who it’s going to favor. For some, artificial intelligence was the cardinal antagonist of 2024. Across Hollywood and the gaming industry, AI revealed itself as more than an existential threat, as many workers fretted over the loss of jobs.

Others, feeling lost as social media undergoes a sharp transition, have rightly pointed the finger at digital gentrifiers. “I’m mad that everything about the internet that was fun & useful 10 years ago is broken now. this site, obviously,” Tracy Chou, an app developer, posted on X. “Reviews are astroturf lies. search is ai hallucination. no place to share with friends & family without influencer / meme / polarized content overrunning the feed.”

In times as unprecedented as ours, all angst and agitation, a reorientation toward the truly transgressive reads less shocking when you consider it part of a larger societal reframing. Villainy has long permeated the cultural imagination—American lore, after all, was built on the sensibilities of mavericks, vigilantes, and underdogs—but in 2024 it went full-on main character.

Why? It could be that villainy, more than heroism, offers a different texture of purpose, one closer to reality, one that sees our world for what it is right now—profoundly fucked—and responds accordingly.

What I can say for certain is that villainy has no particular allegiance. Eventually it consumes everyone. In December, it was announced that Warner Bros. Discovery had canned Sesame Street, the long-running children’s program. Understandably, the decision did not go over well. On Bluesky, the social media app of the moment, @valhallabackgirl shot back with a fury many people had also experienced this year. “I guess this is my villain origin story,” she wrote.