More Arcane Meta: Silco Is a Scrooge
Mar. 15th, 2025 07:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiOkay, in my belated Arcane thing, I’m going to jump in with some character analysis, specifically arguing that Silco is the same basic character type as Scrooge, not in terms of their ultimate arcs but in terms of their psychological dynamics. Spoilers for S1 and maybe tiny bit of S2 under the cut
In a nutshell, Scrooge and Silco are both people who know how to be decent human beings, then make themselves forget, and then remember (though Scrooge is more successful at the remembering part).
Both of them have a mixed bag of formative experiences. Scrooge had the misfortune of an unloving father (and dead mother) and the loneliness of being left alone at school over the holidays. On the other hand, he had the fortune of a loving sister and also seems to remember his school days fondly, minus the lonely holidays. His father softened over the years, and as a young man, he found a good spot as an apprentice with nice friends and a nice fiancée.
Silco had the misfortune of being born into the oppressed masses, which his fervent dedication to Zaun’s freedom suggests wounded him deeply early on. On the other hand, by the time he’s a young adult, he also has a good circle of close friends, as well as a community with a social justice mission that accepts him as one of their leaders. Based on the series, I don’t know anything about his childhood, but I’d hazard a guess he was reasonably well parented in his early formative years or he probably wouldn’t be so well adjusted with his friends or have the parenting skills he later shows with Jinx.
Both Scrooge and Silco, however, undergo traumatic psychological changes as young men. For Scrooge, this comes in two fell swoops, one pervasive and one acute. The pervasive one is advancing capitalism, which puts kind, old Fezziwig out of business and leaves Scrooge with a choice: be poor or be cut-throat, and he chooses the latter; this leads to his fiancée leaving him. The acute trauma is his sister’s death, which marks the loss of the one person whose love he wholeheartedly trusted and depended on. So devastating is his grief at losing her that he shuts himself off from her entire family rather than process the pain. He is still stuck in this indignant emotional withdrawal twenty-odd years later, rebuffing his nephew’s attempts at friendship because he cannot revisit that loss.
Silco, of course, had a bad day when his best friend tried to kill him. His loss, though, is surprisingly analogous to Scrooge’s, albeit under different circumstances. Scrooge loses his sister; Silco loses his (emotional) brother. Both also lose their entire family unit as part of that loss. Vander attacks Silco over what he perceives as Silco’s responsibility for the deaths of their other two best friends in a riot (rebellion? émeute?). A sad irony of this is that the same sequence of events also separates Silco from Felicia and Connol’s kids. Felicia had previously assigned both Vander and Silco to be co-parents to her kids, but right when they are most needed in that role, they are also separated from each other, and the kids go with Vander, and Silco (understandably) perceives himself to be ousted from their community. And while that is understandable at first, he makes a long-term decision not to attempt any repair but rather to turn radically away from his former life and self and embrace only victory through the ruthless assertion of power. Somewhat more dramatically but similarly to Scrooge, he commits to cutting himself off from the whole family and humanity, in general, and it stays that way for years.
Scrooge gets broken out of this stasis by visitations by three spirits—four, if you count Marley. Having no equivalent intercession from God, perhaps it’s not surprising that Silco never reaches the full redemption phase (though the alternative universe in S2 suggests that if events had fallen out differently, he might have reached it).
The closest he gets to it comes from adopting Jinx. Being able to connect with her over their similar betrayal and abandonment issues reawakens his latent abilities to behave (more or less) as a normal, caring person—towards her. From that point on, Silco’s ethics operate according to a radical compartmentalization: he has a bucket in which he puts people he treats with conventional morality and a bucket for those he feels no such duty toward. Jinx is, by and large, the only thing in bucket 1. Sevika is an interesting case, here, because he clearly respects her and, I think, is not terribly far from considering a friend. But he can’t bring himself to move her out of bucket 2 because his “reborn” worldview relies on an abandonment of conventional morals. Thus, unless I missed something, he never really softens toward her; he never shows direct concern for her well-being; I don’t think he even ever says “thank you”? Scrooge, in contrast, learns to put everybody back in bucket 1.
The “redemption” phases of Scrooge and Silco both entail reunification with the child who represents their family. For Scrooge, this represents being able to reintegrate the memory of his sister into a positive place in this life. Silco does not have an equivalent reunification with Vander, which is not surprising, given that Vander stands in the role of a betrayer in a way Fan never did for Scrooge. But he does mentally move toward repair with Vander, as we see in the scene where he chats with Vander’s statue. I think this movement is based on a lot of factors, not all of which have Scrooge analog, but part of it comes from recognizing their similarity as parents, which also points toward a kind of reconciliation of their larger found family, a tentative step toward the positive reintegration of his past.
And then he dies. He dies with a lot of harm left unacknowledged and unaddressed, but least he doesn’t die, like Scrooge in the visions of the Christmas Yet to Be, alone and uncared for. And that is because of his ability to (re)connect with Jinx. It is a highly circumscribed redemption, but it follows the same basic pattern of Scrooge’s reawakening to his better, wiser self.
And may that be truly said of us, and all of us!
In a nutshell, Scrooge and Silco are both people who know how to be decent human beings, then make themselves forget, and then remember (though Scrooge is more successful at the remembering part).
Both of them have a mixed bag of formative experiences. Scrooge had the misfortune of an unloving father (and dead mother) and the loneliness of being left alone at school over the holidays. On the other hand, he had the fortune of a loving sister and also seems to remember his school days fondly, minus the lonely holidays. His father softened over the years, and as a young man, he found a good spot as an apprentice with nice friends and a nice fiancée.
Silco had the misfortune of being born into the oppressed masses, which his fervent dedication to Zaun’s freedom suggests wounded him deeply early on. On the other hand, by the time he’s a young adult, he also has a good circle of close friends, as well as a community with a social justice mission that accepts him as one of their leaders. Based on the series, I don’t know anything about his childhood, but I’d hazard a guess he was reasonably well parented in his early formative years or he probably wouldn’t be so well adjusted with his friends or have the parenting skills he later shows with Jinx.
Both Scrooge and Silco, however, undergo traumatic psychological changes as young men. For Scrooge, this comes in two fell swoops, one pervasive and one acute. The pervasive one is advancing capitalism, which puts kind, old Fezziwig out of business and leaves Scrooge with a choice: be poor or be cut-throat, and he chooses the latter; this leads to his fiancée leaving him. The acute trauma is his sister’s death, which marks the loss of the one person whose love he wholeheartedly trusted and depended on. So devastating is his grief at losing her that he shuts himself off from her entire family rather than process the pain. He is still stuck in this indignant emotional withdrawal twenty-odd years later, rebuffing his nephew’s attempts at friendship because he cannot revisit that loss.
Silco, of course, had a bad day when his best friend tried to kill him. His loss, though, is surprisingly analogous to Scrooge’s, albeit under different circumstances. Scrooge loses his sister; Silco loses his (emotional) brother. Both also lose their entire family unit as part of that loss. Vander attacks Silco over what he perceives as Silco’s responsibility for the deaths of their other two best friends in a riot (rebellion? émeute?). A sad irony of this is that the same sequence of events also separates Silco from Felicia and Connol’s kids. Felicia had previously assigned both Vander and Silco to be co-parents to her kids, but right when they are most needed in that role, they are also separated from each other, and the kids go with Vander, and Silco (understandably) perceives himself to be ousted from their community. And while that is understandable at first, he makes a long-term decision not to attempt any repair but rather to turn radically away from his former life and self and embrace only victory through the ruthless assertion of power. Somewhat more dramatically but similarly to Scrooge, he commits to cutting himself off from the whole family and humanity, in general, and it stays that way for years.
Scrooge gets broken out of this stasis by visitations by three spirits—four, if you count Marley. Having no equivalent intercession from God, perhaps it’s not surprising that Silco never reaches the full redemption phase (though the alternative universe in S2 suggests that if events had fallen out differently, he might have reached it).
The closest he gets to it comes from adopting Jinx. Being able to connect with her over their similar betrayal and abandonment issues reawakens his latent abilities to behave (more or less) as a normal, caring person—towards her. From that point on, Silco’s ethics operate according to a radical compartmentalization: he has a bucket in which he puts people he treats with conventional morality and a bucket for those he feels no such duty toward. Jinx is, by and large, the only thing in bucket 1. Sevika is an interesting case, here, because he clearly respects her and, I think, is not terribly far from considering a friend. But he can’t bring himself to move her out of bucket 2 because his “reborn” worldview relies on an abandonment of conventional morals. Thus, unless I missed something, he never really softens toward her; he never shows direct concern for her well-being; I don’t think he even ever says “thank you”? Scrooge, in contrast, learns to put everybody back in bucket 1.
The “redemption” phases of Scrooge and Silco both entail reunification with the child who represents their family. For Scrooge, this represents being able to reintegrate the memory of his sister into a positive place in this life. Silco does not have an equivalent reunification with Vander, which is not surprising, given that Vander stands in the role of a betrayer in a way Fan never did for Scrooge. But he does mentally move toward repair with Vander, as we see in the scene where he chats with Vander’s statue. I think this movement is based on a lot of factors, not all of which have Scrooge analog, but part of it comes from recognizing their similarity as parents, which also points toward a kind of reconciliation of their larger found family, a tentative step toward the positive reintegration of his past.
And then he dies. He dies with a lot of harm left unacknowledged and unaddressed, but least he doesn’t die, like Scrooge in the visions of the Christmas Yet to Be, alone and uncared for. And that is because of his ability to (re)connect with Jinx. It is a highly circumscribed redemption, but it follows the same basic pattern of Scrooge’s reawakening to his better, wiser self.
And may that be truly said of us, and all of us!
