I love Silver the Hedgehog.
I love his story. I love how many different layers of tragedy he's on. I love every single aspect of his lore we have for him. I love the depth to his personality and growth. He's interesting and powerful and complex. He is a good character in his own right.
He has a wall of tally marks for every time he's killed Iblis, and above those tally marks, he has a scratched out doodle of Iblis he drew to mark that death count and kept that up well into the thousands for years of his life while he was sustaining himself on garbage and scraps. That's raw.
He has a high-rise futuristic apartment and a recipe he held onto from Amy Rose, and he's learning how to bake pies, and he's so serious about it, he's locking in as hard as he does when he's about to fucking kill somebody. That's adorable.
Fighting for his future and protecting its peace and rewriting its tragedies is a role he took up all on his own volition, just because he was born in Hell and always dared to imagine what the Heavens would be like. He struggled to survive, but he didn't inherit the duty to protect the world from any lineage or prophecy, he just decided it all on his own when he was small and the world was cruel. That's an incredible basis for a character. The fact that Silver was born and raised in actual Hell is more formative for his character and its themes than the fact that he is from the future.
He's kind and sweet and protective and yet he was still determined enough and far enough removed from any kind of peace that he didn't think twice about accepting a hit job mission if there was even the slightest chance that it could change his future. And none of that is contradictory. He is sweet and he is caring and he is kind and he is ruthless and he is violent and he is desensitized to killing.
I love his friendships with Blaze and with Espio and with Sonic. They are all really great for very different reasons. A friendship that survives through space and time even when the memories themselves are gone. A friendship forged between two wary assassins who find it in themselves to trust each other in a deeper level than they remember ever trusting almost anyone else they've ever met. A friendship between someone who's implied to remember the other person trying to murder them but is actually way more chill about it and way more eager to be friends than the person who forgot trying to merk his ass.
His dynamic with Shadow is really interesting too, especially with Mephiles factored in. And that interesting-ness continues in Rivals 1, feels like a perfect continuation from their 06 story they both forgot.
And it's not talked about much but I even like the dynamic Silver has with Elise. It's a bittersweet and beautiful story of two kids who were alone in the world and struggled against demons who stole their chance at a childhood away from them. They barely know each other, but they know each other's pain, and that alone makes them feel this deep empathy and awe for each other.
Great dynamic with Amy too, every interaction between those two is golden. And with Vector too, they've got fun moments and contrast. Villain-wise, love what Silver's got going on with Iblis, Mephiles, and Eggman Nega.
And how even with all that, Silver is still fundamentally alone in a way that no other character in the series will ever fully understand. And he takes that so optimistically that it makes it even more heart-breaking.
I like the throughline across his appearances as Silver grows and changes and develops more and more. He's a dynamic character who has had a very complicated life and is only barely beginning to learn how to live at the very end of 06 (vs spending infancy learning how to "survive") and he's continued gradually learning how to live every time we see him. I love how innocently vicious and ruthlessly hopeful he is in 06. I love how hostile and desperate and unsocialized he is in Rivals. I love how chill but serious he is in Colors. I love everything about the implications from the things Silver says in Generations. I love how focused and awkward he is in TSR. I love how determined and unbreakable he is in Forces. I love the vegetable garden he started after that war. I love how even in the chibi kid series Sonic & Friends, Silver's plotline still starts out depressing as Hell. I love what great chemistry is on display between Sonic and Silver on Sonic Channel.
I love how Silver's very existence is a miraculous anomaly. I love how many hobbies and side-hustles Silver has, I hope he continues to amass a Testament level of hobbies and interests in his freetime.
Everything about him is such an interesting web and his character and its circumstances are really fascinating and unique. He's become his own thing, there's nothing else quite like him anywhere, and no one else in this series come close to scratching that same itch. From 06 to his current iteration, I love Silver the Hedgehog.
And I haven't even mentioned how awesome all his powers are. He can make knives with his brain! He can casually teleport and fly! He lowkey has a spidey sense! He can magically give people migraines! He can tear apart a whole mountain range without breaking a sweat! I can create a shield that can stop a point-blank chaos-energy-fueled detonation or a blast from a weakened Eclipse canon! He can feed a chao a apple! HE CAN STOP A METEOR DEAD IN ITS TRACKS!