Silco is not a villain you can dismiss, and that is the whole difficulty. He is the crime lord of Zaun, the undercity beneath Piltover in Arcane (the Netflix series drawn from the world of League of Legends), and he did not invent the misery he presides over. Piltover, the gleaming city of progress above, built its wealth on the labor and the poisoned air of the undercity, and then locked its own prosperity behind a border its enforcers police as if Zaun's very existence were a crime. Silco grew up in that arrangement, was betrayed inside it, and drew from it a conviction that is not, on its face, wrong: that Zaun will never be free while it depends on Piltover, and that the powerful above will never grant that freedom, so it must be taken. To win it he builds a criminal empire, floods the streets with the drug Shimmer, and rules by violence and fear—and he does it, genuinely, in the name of an abused people, with a fierce paternal love for the girl, Jinx, he raises as his own. For conflict criminology, Silco is the hardest and most honest kind of case: the one where the grievance is real, and the answer to it becomes its own atrocity.
// The theoryWho gets to decide what counts as a crime
Where consensus theories treat the law as a neutral reflection of shared values, conflict—or critical— criminology starts from the opposite premise: that society is structured by conflict over power and resources, and that crime and law are products of that conflict. In the radical tradition of Richard Quinney, William Chambliss and the authors of The New Criminology (Taylor, Walton and Young), "crime" is not a fixed natural category but a definition—and the power to impose that definition belongs to those who control the state. The powerful criminalize the behavior of the subordinate, police the resistance of the exploited, and leave the far greater harms of inequality itself—poverty, disease, poisoned air, ruined lives—outside the reach of the criminal law entirely. Quinney's formula is blunt: crime is a definition of human conduct created by authorized agents in a politically organized society. Ask who wrote the law, and who it falls on, and you find not a neutral order but a map of who holds power over whom.
Read through that lens, Zaun snaps into focus. Piltover extracts the undercity's labor and dumps the cost of its industry into the undercity's lungs, then defines the undercity's response—its smuggling, its gangs, its refusal to stay contained—as the crime, and sends its enforcers down to suppress it. The "criminality" of Zaun is inseparable from Piltover's domination: it is what an exploited, unrepresented, walled-in population does when the legitimate channels are closed to it by design. This is the honest core of Silco's case, and the series refuses to let the viewer look away from it. The harm done to Zaun is not a metaphor and not an excuse invented after the fact—it is the structural condition that produces the very disorder Piltover then points to as proof that Zaun must be controlled. Conflict criminology names that circle exactly, and names it correctly.
Structural harm: the violence that never appears in the crime statistics
The sharpest instrument conflict criminology offers is the idea of structural—or institutional—harm: the suffering produced not by an individual's criminal act but by the ordinary, lawful workings of an unequal order. Piltover breaks no law by letting Zaun breathe its runoff, by walling off opportunity, by treating a whole population as a labor supply to be managed. And yet the damage—measured in shortened lives, sickness, despair—dwarfs anything in the undercity's own crime ledger. The radical criminologists insisted that a discipline which counts only the offenses of the poor and ignores the harms of the powerful is not doing science but doing politics; that the mugging is called crime and the poisoning is called industry, and the difference is written by whoever holds the pen. Silco understands this in his bones—he has seen the ledger from below, and he is right that it is rigged. His tragedy is not that he misreads the injustice. It is what he decides the injustice licenses him to do. Naming the structural harm of Piltover is where his case is strongest; it is also, exactly, where he stops thinking and starts building a machine that inflicts a structural harm of its own.
// The subjectThe liberator who became the machine
What makes Silco a genuine tragedy rather than a simple hypocrite is that his cause never becomes a lie. To the end he believes in a free Zaun, and to the end he loves Jinx with a devotion that is not performed. But watch what the fight does to him. To arm the revolution he manufactures and distributes Shimmer, a drug that hollows out the very people he claims to be liberating—addicting them, deforming them, spending their bodies as fuel for his war. To hold the undercity together he rules it the way Piltover ruled it: by fear, by the disappearance of rivals, by a violence that answers only to him. The oppressed man builds an apparatus of oppression and points it at the oppressed, and tells himself, plausibly, that it is all for their freedom. This is the revolutionary who becomes the tyrant he set out to destroy—not because his grievance was false, but because he let the grievance justify anything. Conflict criminology can explain, better than any rival, why Zaun's crime exists and why Silco was made. What it cannot do—what it explicitly refuses to do—is turn that explanation into a permission slip. Silco poisons Zaun to save it, and the saving is indistinguishable from the harm.
Silco
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// The flawA real grievance does not sanctify the means
Here is the crack, and it runs straight through the middle of the case. Conflict criminology explains, with real force, why the undercity's crime is inseparable from Piltover's oppression—but explaining the origin of a harm is not the same as excusing the harm a man does in response to it. This is the temptation the theory itself has always had to guard against: that once you have shown the injustice is real, you slide into treating whatever the injured party does as justified, until the oppressed become incapable of wrongdoing by definition. Silco is the refutation of that slide. His grievance is legitimate and his means are not, and the one does not launder the other. Flooding your own people with a devastating drug is not resistance; ruling them by terror is not liberation; spending Zaun's bodies to win Zaun's freedom empties the word "freedom" of any meaning. That Piltover is guilty of structural harm (see the file on the powerful who write the law) does not subtract an ounce from Silco's guilt for the harm he chooses to inflict. To explain a man—even to sympathize with the wound that made him—is not to excuse what he builds on it. Zaun's oppression is real. So is what Silco does to Zaun. Both are true, and the truth of the first does not cancel the second.
Holding two truths at once
Silco matters because he forces the mind to do the hardest thing: to hold two truths at once without letting either erase the other. The first truth is that Piltover's domination of Zaun is real, that the undercity's "crime" is the predictable product of exploitation and exclusion, and that a criminology which sees only the offenses of the poor is a criminology in the service of power. Conflict theory is right about all of this, and Silco's case would be dishonest without it. The second truth is that none of it sanctifies what Silco does—that a just cause pursued through Shimmer and terror becomes its own injustice, and that the people he claims to free are, concretely, the people he poisons. The lazy readings collapse one truth into the other: either Silco is a monster and Zaun's suffering is erased, or Zaun's suffering is real and Silco is therefore justified. Both collapses are false. The discipline of thinking clearly here—the refusal to let a genuine grievance become a blank check, and the equal refusal to let a villain's crimes bury the injustice that produced him—is a discipline, not a slogan, and Silco is the case that proves it.
Three key takeaways
- Silco embodies conflict, or critical, criminology (Quinney, Chambliss): crime and law are products of social conflict over power, and Zaun's "criminality" is inseparable from Piltover's exploitation—the powerful define the crime and criminalize the resistance of the people they poison. The grievance is real.
- And then the tragedy: Silco weaponizes a just cause into an empire of Shimmer and terror that hollows out the very undercity he claims to liberate. The revolutionary becomes the tyrant he fought—oppressing the oppressed in the name of their freedom, with a genuine cause and a genuine love for Jinx intact.
- The flaw: a real grievance does not sanctify the means. Conflict criminology explains why Zaun's crime exists; it does not excuse what Silco does to Zaun in its name. Two truths held at once—Piltover's oppression is real, and so is Silco's harm.
Sources · further reading
- Quinney, R. (1977). Class, State and Crime. Longman.
- Chambliss, W. J. (1975). “Toward a Political Economy of Crime”. Theory and Society, 2(2), 149–170.
- Taylor, I., Walton, P. & Young, J. (1973). The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Reiman, J. & Leighton, P. (2017). The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (11th ed.). Routledge.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Silco?
Silco is a villain from Arcane, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. Zaun is real: an exploited, poisoned underclass that Piltover criminalizes even as it profits from it.
Why does Silco become a villain?
Silco and conflict criminology (Quinney): why the undercity's crime is inseparable from the city that oppresses it — and why a real grievance still does not sanctify an empire of drugs and terror.
Which criminological theory explains Silco?
Silco's case is analysed through Class conflict. Conflict, or critical, criminology (Richard Quinney; William Chambliss; the radical tradition) argues that crime and law are products of social conflict over power and inequality: the powerful define what counts as "crime" and criminalize the resistance of the exploited, while the structural inequality they impose is itself a source of harm. Silco, the crime lord of the undercity Zaun in Arcane, is the case read honestly—the oppression of Zaun by the wealthy topside city of Piltover is real, and the "crime" of the undercity is inseparable from that domination—. And then the tragedy: Silco weaponizes a just grievance into an empire of Shimmer and blood that poisons the very people he claims to liberate. The flaw is decisive: explaining why the undercity's crime exists is not excusing what Silco does to Zaun in its name.
