I love this hang-dog expression Silco has while looking down the table at all these Chem-Barons he has to call peers.

“Now I’m forced to share the air with parasites like you who leach off their (Brothers and Sisters) legacy…”

It makes me think that this is not what Silco as a young revolutionary initially dreamed of for Zaun (This, plus the way his sneers “enterprise” in s1ep9).

Silco is a twisted and warped person because of a lifetime of abandonment and cruelty. We know that before the bridge, he was already relatively closed off with an acerbic, sarcastic sense of humor. We know that when Vander tried to kill him, a mad scientist at the fringes of society was the one who saved him from dying of infection, most likely through a series of painful experiments. When we saw him in the cannery, his only allies were aforementioned mad scientist and the chembarons that he openly loathed.

All of this to say, we never saw Silco with a genuine friend other than Vander and Felicia. If he had other family or friends at one point, they all abandoned him after the man he called his brother tried to kill him. Can you imagine how he felt, early on after that happened? The only person he’d ever really trusted left him permanently disfigured. And then that person dismantled and crushed every inch of progress Silco had made towards his lifelong dream, Zaun. And THEN this person was embraced by and treated as a beloved pillar of the community for his efforts. Silco could not have been rejected by society in a more literal or total way. The damage that this did to his sense of self worth and trust in others was irreversible.

Sevika was loyal to his cause, and I think there was genuine respect and admiration between them, but it was a business relationship. At that point in his life, I think he was already too emotionally stunted to form any kind of real attachment to another adult.

What we see with Jinx is that he desperately craved a family but was unable to create a healthy one. He absolutely loved Jinx, but he was far too traumatized to effectively parent her. I personally disagree with the characterization of Silco as a cold manipulator that saw Jinx as a weapon, because in his lived experience it was completely rational to assume that no one was trustworthy and everyone would abandon her. The parallel to his falling out with Vander when Vi yelled at her for throwing the hex crystal could not be more on the nose. 

Silco had a tendency to re-open his old wounds again and again until they were so scarred over that he could tell himself nothing hurt anymore. That worked for him because he’d never had anyone he could trust, but it splintered Jinx’s reality because she did grow up with people who loved her. The paranoia that drove her insane was actually pretty sane for his worldview.

Silco, to be clear, absolutely did evil things. He mutated and tortured Deckard, a child who was probably just another undercity castoff (and that in particular kills me, because I think he re-enacted some of his own traumas on Deckard). He also pumped shimmer into the streets of his own community to accelerate his revolutionary plans. He even told a grieving mother that he would have had her child killed in retaliation for her actions. And although he grew to love Jinx, he could only understand her insofar as he saw a mirror of himself. 

Ultimately, he was capable of compartmentalizing the suffering that he caused because he believed it was for the greater good of his nation. There’s a streak of narcissism in that logic; he felt he had the right to sacrifice his own people for his ideals, and he didn’t care if they believed in his mission or not. In fact, he knew in no uncertain terms that the community whose independence he was fighting for by and large did not think that his cause was worth the price he forced them to pay. That makes his actions paternalistic at best, and retributive at worst. Of course, he would never say that he wanted to punish his community for what they did to him, but I think it leaked out subconsciously through his actions.

But what makes him pathetic and not just evil is that underneath those twisted, gnarled feelings, was a broken man who just wanted to be accepted. When Vander tried to kill him and the community rallied behind him, Silco could have easily written the Undercity off as a whole. It would have been much easier for him to join the chembarons in enriching himself with no regard for the people who left him for dead. And if all he wanted was to get back at Piltover, there were much more direct ways to do that as well. But there was something inside of him that refused to give up on Zaun.

Silco’s emotional maturity is stunted, but he has an inherent sense of justice, and I respect him for that because the world did its damndest to beat it out of him. Beyond that, his loyalty to the cause of Zaun speaks to a deep desire to be re-welcomed into his community. He really is the perfect example of the old saying, a child who is cast out from his village will burn it down to feel its warmth.

When I refer to Silco as a control freak, I am not implying a recurring fetish expressed through bondage. His need for control — as a man who was betrayed and who built an empire from nothing, on ruins — runs far deeper than any pursuit of physical pleasure.

While working with this character — reshaping him without tearing apart the fabric of who he already is — I began to notice multiple layers. I chose three of them, layers that can be stripped away like clothing until nothing remains but flesh and bone.

one more question, whats your opinion on timebomb (jinx x ekko)? i personally think its a very bland ship and i dont think they have any chemistry, but i know its very popular in the fandom.

I have this thing with Silco: I love him. I mean, I really love him. And because of the fandom, I ended up resenting him. Because of the fandom, his fandom. And he’s a character I genuinely liked a lot in the first season. I think he’s a brilliant character because he very clearly embodies the corruption of revolutionary politics as an idea.

Silco is a revolutionary, someone involved in politics in favor of class rights and in reclaiming his political and social place in the world as a worker, someone who has been incredibly exploited by an economic and social elite. And what’s interesting is how the violence surrounding him ends up turning him into the very thing he swore to destroy. Because in the end, it’s not just that he becomes a crime lord. Silco becomes the boss of Zaun, the guy who controls the money and uses violence to subjugate the very people he originally wanted to protect through his political struggle.

And I don’t think he necessarily believes he’s doing the right thing, but he does believe that the path he’s chosen is the correct one to achieve his goals without realizing that he’s actually stepped into the exact same cycle of abuse and exploitation as the people of Piltover. And that’s really interesting, because it happens a lot, how violence corrupts you, how feeling powerless pushes you to respond in violent and aggressive ways to social problems, and how you lose the collective vision. Because that’s what happens to Silco: he loses that collective vision and replaces it with an individualistic one that he thinks will somehow lead to collective success, which it never does.

So yeah, he’s a very well-constructed character. The problem is that his fandom is awful, honestly, it’s unbearable. And part of what makes him so well-written is how he projects his own trauma onto Jinx. He projects what happened with Vander onto her, and he does that by sabotaging her relationship with Vi. Because he sees Vi not only as a threat, but also as someone who will obviously come between him and Jinx, which she absolutely will, because at the end of the day, they’re sisters. And we see that in the second season: despite everything that’s happened, despite all the trauma and Jinx’s mental state, they’re still sisters. Jinx is someone who deeply needs attachment and affection. So the idea of being in a kind of “paradise” with Vander—even if Vander has become a complete monster—with her sister and the little girl, for her, that’s wonderful. Despite everything that’s happened.

So to me, Silco represents corruption, and that’s something we see all the time. Drug cartel leaders or criminal gangs that come from the slums don’t usually start out wanting to harm their neighbors or the micro-society they’ll later control. They often have this internal narrative where they believe they’re doing something good for their community. Take Pablo Escobar, for example, he thought he was helping his community because he funded a lot of so-called “social projects,” which weren’t really social projects at all, but ways to launder money and enrich himself. Still, people in poorer areas loved him for it. But at the same time, he exploited children, sent them to traffic drugs, and basically sent them to die at the hands of the DEA.

And Silco does the same thing. So excusing that? I just can’t. We can explain why he does it, we can understand it, but you can’t excuse a man who exploits children and is essentially poisoning an entire population with drugs. That’s just not okay.

And then, obviously, his relationship with Jinx is a mess, it’s deeply dysfunctional. He’s not a good father figure. Vander was a good father figure who actually cared about the girls. Silco has unresolved trauma that he projects onto Jinx, and Jinx becomes what she becomes because he never gives her the support she needs to overcome that trauma. Instead, he feeds it, uses it for his own benefit, until it eventually blows up in his face because you can’t keep feeding a ticking time bomb and expect it not to explode on you.

And that’s also what makes the character so interesting. The problem with Silco isn’t Silco himself or how he’s written, he’s an incredibly well-written character. The problem is his fandom, which is honestly terrible. I was around during the first season of Arcane, on Twitter and Tumblr with another account, and it was unbearable. You start to resent the character just because of his fans.

That said, I love the pairing of Ekko and Jinx. I absolutely adore them. Ever since the first season, when they’re kids in the flashbacks, I love them, I’m sorry. I think they have great chemistry, but also because Ekko seems like one of the kindest, most genuinely good characters.

From our take of his introduction Silco is a character built upon striking contrasts, stuck between the two worlds of Piltover and Zaun. A handsome man with horrifically scared face. A crimelord with a silver tongue. A loving father and a master manipulator. His type of intelligence isn’t associated with science but with the human nature- he reads people like an open book, always one step ahead. And he isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty- either by wielding a knife or a gun (even brute force).

THAT'S THE SAME MAN, RIGHT???

Someone mentioned before how strange it was for Silco to exchange his old clothes for that expensive tree piece suit, that has more value in gold than the yearly salary of someone from the Undercity (he HATES pilties, right???). Even in the AU (where he was indeed a councilor), his choice of clothing is still elegant and speaks of his status, but is not nearly as posh. And I think it served his character in a very particular way- “…we need to scare them…”. It was more of a façade, a power and control situation. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was an answer to his slipping control (with Marcus, with the Chem-Barons, with Jinx, with the Firelights), a desperate need to remind of his status when other measures failed to do so. And especially his coat. He always wears it when he wants to intimidate. Just like some species of animals trying to scare off predators (imagine a porcupine spreading its quills or a horned owl). I am also thinking of this outfit as more of mimicry- imitating the predator(pilties) in hopes to trick it (okay, okay, that's enough biology stuff).

That’s what made me consider the Act 1 outfit as the “true” Silco outfit that falls perfectly in line with the narrative that he will never be a piltie, but he is neither a “true zauinite” as we might expect. The outfit itself is a perfect blend of contradictions. An expensive looking vest worn over a simple cotton, red striped shirt. Trousers tailored in the way Piltover men wear them, falling at the seams and held together at multiple places (belt, bandages?). Perfectly clean and pressed clothes (the strking white of his tie) paired with mismatched boots. And the cunty wristband?

Something more I want you to take into consideration is the LANGUAGE Silco uses. I went through the transcripts of the first few episodes. Every single zaunite character that you encounter (even children) don’t seem bothered to slip out curses or profanities (shit, fuck-up, son of a bitch, trencher trash, piss off, STUFF THEM IN THE OLD BABY MAKER). And guess who is the only one that breaks this rule? Silco has a very rich and distinctive vocabulary; his lines seem perfectly arranged (imagine a debate between him and Mel or Cassandra).

Silco and Progressive Rock

I know that it’s widely accepted that Silco listens to classical music (and he probably does), but I am BEGGING people to consider him actually being a huge PROG ROCK fan. Look at him and tell me he doesn’t put on Pink Floyd when he’s absolutely sure nobody’s close enough to hear.

Again, while I agree with the idea of him listening to classical music, I don’t emphasize it as much, and I try to focus on progressive rock specifically for several reasons

First of all, I think that in his youth he’d be more into punk/post-punk, goth, and maybe even some metal (nothing too heavy, though, as I don’t think that was ever his thing). I won’t go into too much detail about his possible ties to these genres, but the connection comes naturally, keeping in mind his earlier days of being a revolutionary and fighting against oppression (themes that are very prevalent in these particular genres).

Additionally, I think it would make even more sense for him to listen to progressive rock, as the shift would feel a bit “smoother” — as if he couldn’t fully let go. Silco completely abandoning his previous tastes in favor of only listening to classical music not only makes no sense in terms of the evolution of his musical tastes, but also doesn’t fit his character. He is a man who has a hard time letting things go, clinging to his past, so naturally, the same sentiment would extend to things like music.

Just think about it. Progressive rock thrives on intricate structures, shifting time signatures, long builds, and elaborate compositions. Silco operates the same way. His strategies aren’t impulsive: they’re deliberate and multi-layered. He doesn’t just push with brute force (clearly that’s not his style) — he builds a movement, orchestrates the shifts from the shadows, and bends it to his will. The genre mirrors his need for precision and mastery.

Progressive rock is all about patience and payoff, but fortunately, Silco is a long-game thinker. He waits, schemes, sacrifices. Prog rock often delays gratification (yes, you can insert an edging joke here). That parallels how Silco builds his empire: carefully, with moments of explosive release.

Seriously, some songs take minutes to resolve, weaving through tension before arriving at something transcendent. Most people can’t handle that. They see how long the song is and immediately turn it off if they don’t “sense the theme” within the first minute or two. They don’t (or maybe simply can’t) wait for the final reward. But Silco? Silco is all about the end result. A few extra minutes won’t faze him, he’s spent long enough working in the shadows to learn patience. He’s willing to see it through, to the very last note.

Most importantly, he’d only listen to prog rock when he knows he’s alone. This isn’t just some idea connected to sentimentality, or him trying to enjoy his favorite song in peace. When it comes to Silco, it’s, once again, all about survival.

Classical music is expected of him: safe. But songs with lyrics he’d connect to? That would let others peek into his mind. Words carry meaning that would be easier to pick up, and that’s dangerous — he knows it. Something as simple as song lyrics can become a weapon in the hands of those who seek to understand and dissect him. He would never risk it, and he’d keep that side of himself hidden.

Imagine this: every single time, without fail, he gets to the middle part of Echoes by Pink Floyd, where the music shifts (around 11 or 12 minutes in, I think) as the guitar starts mimicking seagulls, and suddenly he’s back in the water, being drowned again. He’d sit there, frozen, until the vocals come back in.

an arcane analysis

[This post contains spoilers for Season 2]