what were silco’s plans for shimmer
people dismiss silco’s plans for shimmer, and i get it since a lot of what he built is not explicitly shown to us before Act 1 ends or the timeskip, but if you take a second, all the info for having the upperhand on piltover is there before powder’s monkey bomb derailed everything.
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in act 1, silco is visibly running an industrial arms manufacturing operation out of the cannery. he has people producing shimmer en masse and his rhetoric towards Vander makes it clear he has a specific goal to scare piltover while they still had leverage.
he wants to arm the undercity through raw shimmer and weaponry to scare piltover and seize the nation of zaun’s freedom immediately. if vander had agreed to fight, the revolution would have likely happened that very night, with the acting sheriff dead and the council distracted by jayce and viktor. it could have been ideal timing.
when powder’s monkey bomb goes off, he loses pretty much his entire industrial arms manufacturing operation along with his stockpile of shimmer. that material loss is a huge setback and he spends the duration of timeskip rebuilding his position all over again. except now, with the arrival of hextech, zaun has fallen even further behind than it already was. so instead, silco pivots his original strategy towards industrializing zaun into a legitimate competitor, all while attempting to rebuild his shimmer position.
creating zaun’s economy requires compromises though. so he installs several industrial figureheads to lead these operations, which overtime led to the chembarons: zaunites angry and envious of piltover, but notably not motivated by anything more than enriching themselves through power and greed alone. they were not part of his plan originally and silco despises this.
he was never able to achieve as strong of a military position as what he’d had prior to the monkey bomb incident though, and instead continues to leverage his control over marcus, the sheriff, to undermine piltover while he stalls for time trying to rebuild in the shadows instead.
then he finds himself fighting more set backs left and right, with the firelights, jayce, and the caitvi gang targeting the shimmer exports and his operations directly.
even though Jinx’s talent with explosives & weapons helped give teeth to the plan, it still wasn’t enough to make him sure of their success. which is why, during the scene on the bridge, he was fully bluffing in the negotiations with jayce (who saw right through that). silco knew he still needed more direct force to win an inevitable conflict for independence, since piltover had dominance in the use of force throughout the entire show.
his methods for industrializing zaun did still get them to a point of parlay, but he wasn’t able to make the final decision when it meant losing his own daughter. that said, he still would have kept fighting for it twice as hard if he didn’t die. he was never going to give up there.
