#why are him and scar suprised that a gang war broke out once silco bit it?

[mollysunder]

In s2, Ekko receeded into his own bubble like Jinx and Viktor have, and just like the latter, instead of have him further engage with Zaun his relationship with it becomes largely symbolic. Sure, we know in Act 1 that he and the Firelights have been using their base as a safe haven for Zaunites to escape the violence of the gang war, which is good but it's evident that they don't have any plans for Zaun. They've been leading people into their base blindfolded to protect their anonymity from the greater populace of Zaun, and so they ran into capacity issues.

Instead of fighting for more space in Zaun (or Zaun on general), his story has him fight for a tree. It's fine for him to be concerned about the health of the tree, because he lives in it, but in the hierarchy of issues plaguing Zaun, which includes the fact that Caitlyn (someone he recently provided aid to) was gassing it while Ekko was still around, this shouldn't have been his absolute top priority.

But the tree, for which it's value is largely symbolic to the Firelights (they didn't even grow it they found it) is what makes Ekko move in the story. And when Ekko does confront someone with power, it's Jayce... who resigned from the Council. Then he's unceremoniously thrust into another timeline where his relationship with Jinx, Zaun, and Jinx as a metaphor for Zaun are explored through Not-Zaun and Not-Jinx, rather than engage with the former two.

I could see Ekko's story work better if it was done with the intention to contrast Zaun's other two most influential figures, Jinx and Viktor, and how they all miss the mark with Zaun in some way. Jinx refuses to actually engage with the community despite becoming a powerful symbol of rebellion, and it's nearly irrelevant to her story. Viktor believes in doing good, and was able to build a community, however his power stole the ability for any of followers to dissent in anyway and thus never actually engaged with Zaun's populace they were just puppets. Meanwhile Ekko's style has translated into addressing the symptoms (some of which are benign by act 2) of Zaun's problems rather than the root cause.

But I won't hold my breath with that one as the writers have asserted that the alt!timeline was where the correct choices were made. By that logic, Vander and Ekko's similarities in leadership means the showrunners believed Ekko was making the uncontestable right decisions as well.