Sorry for the late reply! I’ve read yours and I’m just a little confused so… are you saying that characters like silver should not exist because they are bad examples for the audience (or the readers?)

No – I’m not saying that at all. Silver is a brilliant character, actually. He’s morally ambiguous shading into villainous the longer the show goes on. He goes through one hell of a journey to become the character from a book many of us read as children, and he’s actually an excellent example of a character being relatable or sympathetic – but absolutely, completely not right. The phrase I’m looking for is “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” and I think that somewhere in a book of phrases, there should probably be a picture of Silver’s face next to that phrase. He’s a great character – I’m saying that as a fandom there’s a tendency to paint a character as one thing in s1 and then refuse to allow that character to grow and change, yes, even for the worse, as far as our portrayal of him outside the original medium he came from. S1 Silver was stumbling his way through life, getting into messes and getting out again with a grin and a few glib words and maybe a murder or two, but was certainly not a monster or a villain. S4 Silver has moved on apace into being a genuinely scary, certainly manipulative individual who is very short-sighted when it comes to the difference between his needs and wants as regards other people and what those other people have envisioned for their lives and why those things are important to them. Silver’s not a bad character by any means, but our reaction to him and understanding of him as a fandom has proven to be problematic, to say the least in that it’s static and actually sometimes harmful to people who see clearly what he became and have quite rightly said we’re not fond of him as a result.