#solomon sallow

[hogwartslegacyburnbook]

[libellule-ao3]

☕️ + your opinion on the “if not for me then for anne” line 👁️👁️

Hello, 🥰I love this question, and I may have got a little carried away with my answer! 😅 Which probably won’t surprise anyone who reads me regularly! 😂 I just hope it won’t come across as too confused. In any case, thank you for asking. (As usual, this is only my personal interpretation, and you’re completely free to have a different one.)

To me, the line “if not for me, then for Anne” is very powerful because it expresses so much in so few words.

It is, at the same time, pressure placed on MC, a way for Sebastian to escape the judgement being placed on him, and a form of self-effacement.

It is even rather unhealthy, because it turns love into leverage and blurs the line between asking, insisting, and guilt-tripping: if MC refuses, it can feel as though they are refusing to help a sick, doomed girl. That is a very hard thing to carry. 💔

But at the same time, I don’t feel that he does it in a cold or calculating way. I see it more as the words of a desperate teenager who no longer knows how to make his suffering heard otherwise.

Within his family, Sebastian doesn’t really seem to have any space where he can say: “I’ve already lost my parents, and I’m terrified of losing my sister too”, “I’m suffering”, “I can’t bear to just stand by and do nothing.” I also imagine he doesn’t want to burden Anne with his own distress when she is already suffering so much.

As for Solomon, with whom Sebastian has always had a conflicted relationship, he mostly responds with prohibition, discipline, resignation, and guilt. Solomon, whom I see as unfit to raise children because he has too many demons of his own to deal with, offers him no safe emotional framework. He does not even seem to recognise Sebastian’s distress as legitimate.

He never really shows empathy for his nephew, whom he does not see as a grieving orphan, but as “his father’s son” - the son of a man for whom he still feels animosity, even after his death. Solomon never has a single word of comfort for Sebastian. Instead, what does he tell him? That his efforts are useless, naïve, and even harmful.

And the Shrivelfig scene illustrates that perfectly, imo. To me, it was a naïve but rather sweet attempt to relieve Anne’s pain, even if only temporarily. Even if the remedy’s effectiveness was laughable, it was not dangerous. On the contrary, Anne seemed genuinely touched by the gesture, and Sebastian could, for a brief moment, feel useful in circumstances where he is mostly forced to face his own helplessness.

But Solomon completely destroys that dynamic by crushing the shrivelfig in front of them. In doing so, he does not merely destroy an ineffective remedy: he destroys a gesture of love and comfort between the twins. And their faces in that moment break my heart every time I rewatch the scene. 😭

Because of his uncle, and probably other adults to a lesser extent, Sebastian has internalised the idea that his own pain does not really have value. When he speaks on his own behalf, he is seen as impulsive, stubborn, insolent, or dangerous. So, with “if not for me”, he erases himself. It is almost as if he were saying: “Fine, don’t do it for me, if my suffering is not legitimate enough for you.”

Then, with “then for Anne”, he places his sister at the centre of everything, because Anne is the only reason others are supposed to accept. And by doing so, he also shifts the grounds of judgement: it is no longer only him, his relentlessness, his choices, or his methods being judged, but Anne’s suffering and the possibility of saving her. Any criticism of Sebastian can then be presented as a lack of compassion towards her.

I also think Anne represents everything he is in the process of losing: his family, his hope, his sense that he still has some control over things. If he fails, it is not only Anne who dies; he also has to accept his helplessness, his grief, his guilt, and probably the idea that he failed to save the last person who truly remains of his family.

And that is precisely why the dynamic with Solomon is so important. By refusing to support him emotionally through this ordeal, Solomon does not calm Sebastian down: he radicalises him. Sebastian ends up believing that if he follows the adults’ rules, Anne will die. From then on, every boundary becomes suspicious, including those drawn by Ominis, his best friend. Every prohibition, every refusal becomes proof of cowardice, ignorance, or abandonment, hence some of his bitterest and most cutting replies.

When Sebastian says that line, he is already caught in a dangerous mindset where intention justifies everything. “It’s for Anne” has become an answer to every objection, even the most justified ones. ⚠️

And that is part of what makes Sebastian so interesting to me: he is neither a monster nor an innocent victim. He is a sensitive, impulsive teenager, trapped in an unbearable situation, trying to get through it without any real support, making bad choices, and becoming increasingly unfair and guilt-tripping in the way he asks for help.

[kiwiplaetzchen]

[kay9leo]

Mr. & Mrs. Sallow vs Solomon Sallow in the Afterlife

Has anyone ever thought about how both Sebastian and Anne's parents are waiting in the afterlife to beat up Solomon Sallow for the child abuse he put their kids through?

Because I think about it sometimes.

Mr. Sallow: Like sure, my son killed you, should've done it sooner brother. *shrugs*

Meanwhile Mrs. Sallow is probably like:

Like those are her babies; she was in labor for 3 days with them. She raised them till she died and they were good kids until her brother in law got custody.

Mrs. Sallow has been waiting since the first abusive hand/spat Solomon had on her babies after their deaths to beat him up. Especially with how he treated her son, she's going to beat him up once he's dead.

SHE SAW EVERYTHING.

Heck, I bet they were glad Sebastian killed them, especially his mom; while he looks more like his father, Sebastian is his mother's son when it comes to the people they love in my mind.

So while the people in the land of the living are horrified, Mr. and Mrs. Sallow are probably pleased to finally get their ghostly hands on Solomon Sallow.

if anything I can be convinced that Mrs. Sallow's anger possessed her son in that one moment so she can beat up Solomon in the afterlife.

[mooncalfwaltz]

Teodoro is very much tied when it comes to forming an opinion about Solomon Sallow.

On one hand, at a glance, his reactions feel so needlessly cruel and brutally reactive to Sebastian. On the other, his brother has died from something so incredibly easy to prevent, the accident that took his life almost feels needless. In the wake of that, Solomon is shouldered with caring for two children he never asked for, and when Ominis eventually flees his family, takes him as well.

If it's to be believed that he HAS taken Anne to every professional within reach and exhausted every modern academic avenue trying to find a means to help her, Teodoro can reasonably see how frustrating it must feel to have a teenage boy with a history of trouble-making start insisting he knows better than actual medical professionals. It’s like finding a street peddler who claims to have a cure-all and asks you to trust him on where he found the recipe, without telling you a thing.

To stay home and watch a young girl’s health ebb away bit by bit, knowing you have no means to help must be torturous. Add to that the frustration of what Solomon sees as snake oil… Again, Teodoro can understand how infuriating that must be.

That’s not to say his reactions aren’t cruel. They are. But while Sebastian’s goals are noble, he doesn’t have the knowledge to do anything but blindly chase shadows—and he proves that repeatedly by not only endangering himself, but Ominis, and Teodoro as well. And that's only in the search for this hypothetical cue.

When Solomon and Sebastian draw wands against one another, Teodoro feels frozen. He cannot defend Sebastian’s position, nor can he abandon him. Instead, he focuses on driving back the Inferi, clinging to the hope that once the space is safe again, cooler heads can prevail and some measure of compromise or peace can be found. Instead, he is struck several times across his back—from both the confusion of battle, as well as directly from Solomon, who believes him to be siding with Sebastian.

In the end, with Ominis and Gwyn rushing to Anne, and Sebastian sinking off in despair of what he's done ("I'm fine. Just a bit scraped up."), Teodoro swallows down the last of his wiggenweld ("A full supply doesn't last very long when you're splitting three ways…"). With the bleeding stemmed, he's able to limp back to Hogsmeade, sneaking into the Three Broomsticks, where he collapses from the pain.

Later, too exhausted from caring for the boy to stay properly angry, Sirona admonishes him, but in a gift of levity, teases him with: "With you in that state, I'd hate to see what the other man looked like."

The witticism misses its mark. Teodoro responds: "I really don't know. He's dead."

For Lodgok, she owes him. So she keeps it to herself and allows him to stay the night. When he returns to school the next day, unwilling to explain himself, he receives several days detention for missing curfew. His healing injuries scar, leaving him with a gnarled map of raised skin across his back. He tells no one.

More than content to kick him when he's down, no one has caused him more mental anguish than the Ministry of Magic, but no one has caused him more physical pain than Sebastian Sallow.

[Artist chooses to interpret the shed in-game as Sebastian's "we had a fight and I stormed out and needed a place to cool down" place, that he's used to many time, he's just started moving shit in so he can be productive in the meantime. I feel like if Solomon was physically locking him up, Ominis, heavily implied to be living with them, would have at least something to say on the matter, having come from a brutally abusive background.]

[snakechat]

Crack ship Idea: Tom Buchanan (Great Gatsby) X Solomon Sallow (Hogwarts legacy)

Reasons: They’re both controlling A grade assholes

[shiftereris]

Love you Sebastian, but no fucking wonder your uncle hates you. He's watching the boy he raised become the type of wizards he puts into Azkaban.

[accio-bagel]

poor kid