#and this is the same story with canon ptsd from HoH

[queensparklekitten]

Holy shit the game is talking about identity issues that result of being a Traveler

[rabbithaver]

i finally decided to actually write out some of my major headcanons for Silver. i like him a lot as a character and i think people overlook him too much lmao

I genuinely believe that Silver has been decoupled from the timeline completely. This means that changes to the future made in the present do not affect him. He may not remember the specific events of 06, but he absolutely remembers growing up in an apocalypse and frequently has lines that support this in the comics. Him being unaffected by changes to the timeline explains why his personal history has not changed, despite the future being saved multiple times. ALSO, Ian Flynn has confirmed that Silver is not in control of when or how he travels through time -- I believe that whatever or whoever is sending him back and forth is the same thing that separated him from the timeline.

Silver is deaf, pushing about 70% hearing loss. It's not congenital -- his hearing sucks because he's from a timeline where things blew up constantly and he had no hearing protection. He relies mostly on lip-reading and guesswork, but wants to learn ASL when he gets a chance... if he gets the chance. Time is wibbly-wobbly for him. (I should note that this one is personal to me -- I myself am HoH due to otosclerosis and I'm definitely projecting my declining hearing on him lmao)

I know Silver is canonically the exact same height and weight as Shadow and Silver, but I personally don't find that very... likely. All three of these dudes are 3'3" and 77lbs EXACTLY? Nah. Shadow and Sonic, maybe, but not Silver. I headcanon Silver as being smaller and lighter than the other hedgehogs because he grew up in a timeline where food was hard to find, and thus didn't grow as much. He's very scrawny and basically has almost no meat on his bones, but you'd never guess because he's got The Fluff.

Elaborating on the food thing: his relationship with eating is probably totally screwed. Think about it: he spent his whole youth eating whatever he could get his hands on, and he probably had to eat as quickly as he could so he could stay on the move. The idea of eating to enjoy the flavor is like, completely alien to him. He also tends to stash food away for later, as he's not used to knowing when his next meal will be. He does it entirely out of habit, even when food is abundant.

Silver's immune system probably sucks. Every time he goes back to the past, he catches some illness. This is largely because he's not used to the pathogens 200 years earlier, but I also like to imagine this is because he's got some sort of autoimmune disorder.

You cannot tell me this boy does not have asthma. I am aware that this is kind of a fandom in-joke, but it makes total sense. If he grew up in a world of smoke and flames, his lungs probably look like burnt toast. Someone get him an inhaler please.

Silver has PTSD and severe anxiety, both due to his personal history growing up in a hellscape and also because repeatedly going back to the future to find his time in disarray due to events in the present is probably traumatic as all hell. His biggest trigger is most likely building collapse, but I can't imagine he doesn't have kind of a hard time with explosions after the Eggman War. His cheerful optimism and helpful attitude is his effort to deflect from his trauma.

Expanding on the anxiety thing; Silver struggles when he doesn't have something to do. We actually see this in canon in the 2022 Annual story "Future Growth." He has no idea how to function when he doesn't have a mission to focus on. Being in the past with no clear directive is insanely triggering for him and he totally fails to cope.

While I'm talking about his mental illnesses, I want to make it explicitly clear: he is REALLY good at hiding this stuff. His friends in the Resistance/Restoration don't find out about his issues for years, and this is specifically because he instinctually hides anything that could be perceived as a weakness. He's been conditioned to hide any and all weaknesses because it was the only way to survive in the post-apocalypse. Being visibly affected by your trauma is a quick and easy way to get dead, so he simply... doesn't. This kid cannot stop masking his trauma at all until he's literally at his breaking point.

There is no way he doesn't have intense Survivors' Guilt. Going back to the Metal Virus arc in the comics, he's the only survivor of a shuttle crash in Issue #25. All of those people died. They actually died - if they were zombots, they would've survived that crash, but because they were still healthy, they didn't have the ability to recover. Silver probably feels that because he was trying so hard to get survivors to the shuttle, he led those people to their deaths. I specifically am pointing to his dialogue here as evidence of this:

He probably dreads going back to the future. Like, think about it. He's admitted to being lonely (IDW #8) in his own time -- probably because his history separates him from the average person! The only friends he really has are in the past, the vast majority of whom are likely long dead by the time he's born. And while his friends are always happy to see him, I can imagine he has a lot of anxiety thinking about the fact that they inevitably start to associate his arrival with something bad coming down the line. That's rough, buddy.

He's very proud of his ruff and he takes really good care of it. It's super thick and very soft. However, when he's having a rough time, he's not as thorough, and it tends to show. If you know him really well, you can get an idea of his current mental health just by looking at the state of his chest fur. A happy Silver is fluffy, a struggling Silver looks like he was left in the washing machine.

Silver has a really hard time with media that involves apocalyptic worlds. He knows that it's just fiction, but it reminds him of the fact that he's the only one who remembers the apocalyptic hellscape he grew up in. It reminds him that as much as his friends want to support him, they can't truly understand what he's been through; his background is only real to him. It just leaves him feeling lonely and sad, so he avoids it as much as possible.

Silver doesn't sleep well in real beds. Maybe it's just a lifetime of growing up surrounded by an apocalypse, but he has a really hard time getting comfortable in a real bed. For months during the Eggman War, he'd spend hours tossing and turning before finally giving up and curling up on the floor in a corner. It's just not what he's used to at all.

anyway i think about him a normal amount :)