On December 4th, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead. The brilliant wits and expert planning of his killer, Luigi Mangione, is what led to his fate. Mangione performed the perfect act of bravery and liberation, and boy is he handsome!

This is the story that TikTok will likely tell you. Social media narratives have created a hero whose admirability stems from the very fact that he shouldn’t be one, celebrating a murderer who escapes our condemnation because he’s got an Ivy League education and a mugshot that pleases the eye.

In truth, ‘escaping condemnation’ is putting it far too lightly. University students and young adults in New York, Texas, Florida, and Brazil have each held Luigi Mangione look-alike contests, something usually reserved for more traditionally likeable, mainstream celebrities rather than suspected murderers. Social media feeds have been flooded with confessions of love and idealisation of Mangione, with some young adults not just forgiving but emphasising his criminality to feed their crush.

It’s important to realise just how much this response is age dependent. An Emerson College poll showed that 41 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 found the shooting to either be "somewhat" or "completely" acceptable, a percentage far greater than any other age group (this percentage plummeted down to just 8 percent for those in their 50’s).

“All it takes is a good-looking actor and some clever screenwriting for people to crave cold-blooded criminals”

While I was initially shocked at the uncanny response to this murder, I later realised that I had no reason to be surprised at all. This is a fairly standard part of a phenomenon that has plagued Gen Z for years – the sexualisation and romanticisation of bad people.

Media and film has identified and manipulated an almost inexplicable psychological drive within young people to ‘want what is bad for us’. Apparently, all it takes is a good-looking actor and some clever screenwriting for people to not only sympathise with, but crave cold-blooded criminals.

Consider, for example, the portrayal of Jeffrey Dahmer by Evan Peters and Ross Lynch in 2022 and 2017 respectively. Sure, a normal response to these shows was to be disturbed by Dahmer’s horrifying actions onscreen. Yet, an equally prominent and far more concerning response from young audiences was to, bafflingly, take the side of the troubled protagonist.

While I take cases of this kind to be both peculiar and a gross disservice to the victims of awful crimes, there is a sense in which they have remained fairly harmless up to this point. After all, when young people watch disturbing shows, they have disturbing fetish-like responses to it, and that’s that. The case of Luigi Mangione, however, has symbolised the point at which this issue has left the realm of fantasy and entered that of real life.

Mangione is Gen Z’s very own real-life troubled protagonist. Dazzling conspiracy theories run wild as young supporters of the murderer insist that getting caught was a sign of a master plan awaiting a big reveal. They can’t help but view this story from the scope of a Netflix series, anticipating a heroic rebellion against the status quo in the episodes to come.

“Perhaps by no fault of our own, we have become utterly unhinged”

Now that this strange generational guilty pleasure has surpassed the confines of fiction and manifested itself in a real detachment from otherwise obvious moral values, its consequences are bound to become equally ‘real’. We ought to expect Gen Z to become ever more plagued by movie-like conspiracy and passion, and for the generational war to grow ever stronger.

Social cohesion between generations is rare, yet up until now I doubt that anyone would have placed condemnation of murderers as a point of contention between the ages. Granted, it would be a stretch to claim Gen Z are a generation of murderer apologists, and the reaction to this case isn’t beyond social or political explanation. The death of a health-insurance CEO changes ideas of justice for some. The point, nonetheless, still stands. It becomes increasingly hard to reject the labels placed by older people onto a generation blinded by a culture of obsessive sexualisation and romanticisation so freakishly twisted.

The bottom line is that the Mangione ‘fan club’ ought to act as a wake-up call for young people. Seemingly harmless or ironic glamorisation has created a culture that calls for far more embarrassment than it does pride. Perhaps by no fault of our own, we have become utterly unhinged. I suspect that older voices of reason will no longer put up with so-called Gen Z ‘nonsense’ - at the risk of generational alienation, neither will I.