"It will be nice working with proper villains again."
villain (n.) — from Latin villanus: villager. A word the powerful invented to demonize those who won't comply.
The word villain comes from the Latin villanus. It meant villager. A common person.
The landed aristocracy took a word that just meant "someone who isn't us" and made it mean morally inferior. This wasn't slang that drifted — it was a class judgment welded into the language by the people who owned the language. A thousand years later, it still works. You hear villain and think evil. They hear villain and think them.
We think it's a fine word. We're taking it back.
Proper as the British use it: genuine, real, the actual thing. Not playing at something. Not performing a role. The real deal, full stop.
Proper as everyone uses it: correct, principled, done right.
A Proper Villain is both.
In 2017, Patrick McKenzie wrote an essay about fighting Equifax after his identity was stolen. It's a masterclass in what happens when a competent person decides to win.
He called this operating mode a Dangerous Professional. It looks like this:
You keep meticulous records and you never bluff. You say "I require" instead of "I demand," because angry people demand and demands can be ignored — professionals require, and requirements have consequences. You know every rule the system wrote, and you use them with precision. You are a credible threat because you follow through. Every time. Not sometimes. Not when you feel like it. Every time.
A Dangerous Professional is dangerous within the system. Competent. High-agency. Prepared. The most effective person the bureaucracy has ever encountered, and entirely within the lines.
That's the base class.
A Proper Villain extends it.
Where the Dangerous Professional knows the rules, the Proper Villain has decided which ones don't apply. Not all of them. Not arbitrarily. Specific rules — the ones that reinforce unjust hierarchy, that discriminate, that oppress, that exist because someone with power needed them to exist and no one with power needed them not to.
Those rules get broken. Deliberately, with craft, with a clear conscience.
But — and this is the load-bearing word — a Proper Villain has a strict personal code. Principles no external force can corrupt. Not authority, not money, not social pressure, not fear. The villainy is principled. The defiance has form. You wrote your own rules. You answer to them.
In Ocean's Eleven, Basher Tarr is a British demolitions expert recruited by Danny Ocean after a job with amateurs goes sideways. Basher's response:
"It will be nice working with proper villains again."
That line is the whole brand.
It's the relief of finally being in a room where everyone operates at your level, with your values, with the same unspoken understanding of what matters. You've been in rooms full of amateurs. Rooms full of people who follow rules they've never read. Rooms where doing the right thing is a fireable offense. You know what those rooms feel like.
Now imagine the other room.
That's Proper Villains. The signal you put out. The shibboleth. The way you find your people.
A brand you adopt for yourself. Not a club. Not a movement with leaders. Not invite-only. Not performative rebellion. Not edgelord nihilism dressed up in vocabulary.
It's a community of recognition, not membership. An identity that rewards discovery — the more layers you find, the more it means.
Dangerous Professional │ Knows the rules. Uses them with precision. │ Competent. High-agency. Wins. │ └── extends → Proper Villain │ Has decided which rules do not apply. │ Breaks unjust rules deliberately. │ Has an incorruptible personal code. │ Reclaims a word the powerful invented │ to demonize those who won't comply. │ └── "It will be nice working with proper villains again."
Coming soon. The kind you put on a laptop to signal to the person across the coffee shop that you're one of them.