Bad Kingdom - Moderat

artwork by wonderful @/Darkroastdreams (x)

Another week, another angst SOTW! This song holds a lot of memory for me — I always go back to it when I go through major changes in life.

There’s something unbearably tragic about Bad Kingdom. It’s the sound of realization: looking back at everything you built and finally understanding it wasn’t worth it. For Silco, this is that final moment after the gunshot.

Silco — truly one of the best villains, or anti-villains, ever written. Characters like him fall not because they’re weak, but because they climb too high. They chase something impossible — and in doing so, they show us every shade of grey that most people only see in black and white. Every decision we make sets the path of our life.

So listening to this song gave me the thought that it could be his last inner monologue — life flashing before his eyes. He would see Vander, Felicia, his youth, and the good times; then the regrets for choices he didn’t undo.

“Here it ends. No one’s gonna shed a tear.”

Silco’s story closes quietly. No statue, like the one Vander got after his death. No legacy carved in marble. Just the river — the same one that almost killed him, now taking him for good. Zaun will move on. The world will remember him as a villain. Leaving Jinx by herself, the only person who saw him as more than the monster he became.

He dies not fighting, but comforting her. In that moment, he’s no revolutionary, no tyrant — just a father telling his daughter she’s perfect.

There’s peace in those words, too. Because for all his sins, Silco’s end was strangely serene. He didn’t beg. He didn’t rage. He looked at the one person he couldn’t control and told her she was enough.

Maybe that was his redemption: not the city, not the empire, but that one small act of love before the silence.

“a well spent time in the early morning’s haze. You sit and wait, watching full glasses through blank eyes.”

That verse is the once-naive part of him looking back. Youth is the “early morning haze” — confusion, fog, hope that’s half-formed.

Calling it a “well spent time” is almost sardonic: the memories are sweet, but they’re also of wasted potential.

“Watching full glasses through blank eyes” is brutal: full glasses = the images of wealth, comfort, things he thought would matter. Seeing them through blank eyes says his privilege and the heavy cost of his path left him numb. He chased the full glass, stacked his wealth into an empire, but it never brought him fulfillment.

“This is not what you wanted. Not what you had in mind.”

It’s regret distilled into a single line. Silco wanted to save Zaun, to give his people dignity. But he built his dream on death and violence, turning himself into the very monster Piltover said he was.

He won the city, but lost everything human in the process: His friends, family, the cause and ultimately himself. Even his wealth meant nothing. The full glass he chased was never meant to be filled.

There’s a bitter irony in it all: the man who dreamed of freedom lived a life in chains, forged not by anyone else, but by his own obsession.

“Too tough to fall, but not strong enough to turn.”

Silco is the following: Unbreakable, unyielding, but too proud to change course. He’d rather drown with his vision than admit he might have been wrong. I mean remember the conversation he had with Vander in S1E3? Two men, too stubborn to admit they fucked up.

It’s that kind of conviction that makes him terrifying and deeply human. Because who among us hasn’t clung too tightly to something we believed in, long after it started destroying us?

He became a “worn out version” of the idealist he once was. The young man who once stood beside Vander, dreaming of freedom, disappeared somewhere along the way to achieve independency, no matter the costs.

“Bad Kingdom” is a song about realizing that the empire you built is rotting from within — and that you’re the one who made it that way. It’s not about failure; it’s about disillusionment. The cover art of Moderat's album "II" shows a man tearing off his own mask which is a perfect mirror to Silco’s arc.

At first glance, it looks like release, like someone finally freeing themselves. But look closer: his expression isn’t peace. It’s strain. The mask is part of his skin now. Removing it hurts.

That’s Silco.

A man who built a persona so powerful, so absolute, that he could never take it off again. The revolutionary, the tyrant, the “eye” of Zaun — all masks layered over the frightened man who is clinging to a long lost dream.

Bad Kingdom’s art, like the song, isn’t about villainy. It’s about what happens when you mistake your armor for your identity — and how hard it is to strip it off once the world believes in the mask more than the man.

Silco’s life was a tragedy of purpose. Every move came from love for Zaun — but love twisted by pain becomes control. And when control becomes your god, you forget what you were fighting for in the first place.

In the end, Zaun’s king didn’t die a monster. He died a man who finally understood what it means to lose everything — and still love what’s left.