Solis Frostwood || First Year || Ravenclaw

Solis inherited her mother’s last name.

Frostwood is an old magical family that has roots in the broader Mediterranean, and has been established in the UK for roughly six to seven centuries. The family’s ancestry before Britain is too old and mixed to reduce cleanly to one modern origin. Surviving traditions and records point broadly towards Greek, Italic and Celtic roots, probably intermixed over a very long period.

Frostwood is an Anglicised surname, not the family’s original name. The oldest verified record of their ancestral family name is Hylaios (Ancient Greek: Ὑλαῖος), meaning roughly “of the wood” / “of the forest.” It derives from the same root as hylē (ὕλη), “wood, timber, material,” a word that later also acquired the philosophical sense of matter or the substance from which something is made. Culturally, their original surname is closer to “metal-wood” than “winter forest.” However, somewhere over centuries of translation errors, heraldry, metaphor and family reinterpretation, metal = cold = frost became embedded in their British name. The family’s older Greek tradition was historically associated with Athena and Hephaestus. They both represent the family’s values: wisdom, disciplined craft, strategy, technical skill, research, and the intelligence behind making.

The Frostwoods are mostly Ravenclaws, and have a reputation for being overly comfortable studying dangerous or even Dark magic. Their recurring ‘flaw’ is less “ooo evil” and more “huh I wonder what would happen if I poked what I shouldn’t poke”; namely, unregulated curiosity without much situational awareness or care for bystanders. This has led to their ‘history’ of Dark witches and wizards; however, the difference is intent: their goal was never to set out to harm others; the harm was simply an unfortunate side effect of reckless curiosity pushed too far.

They are not considered poor, but are not extremely rich either. They have a very peculiar concept of what counts as expensive: ordinary luxury goods are judged harshly by their usefulness, where items such as high-end brooms are considered ‘an expensive stick that can fly faster than another stick’ and as such outrageously overpriced. A collection of rare Transfiguration manuscripts costing the equivalent of a small apartment, however, may be purchased almost without hesitation, due to their appetite for knowledge itself. (A family of researchers, really.)

Their Gringotts vault contains shelves, boxes, manuscripts, letters, research journals, failed spell designs, obsolete magical techniques, unpublished correspondence, translations, grimoires, and centuries of accumulated notes; some documents may be the only surviving copies of works thought lost. Scholars, collectors, Unspeakables, curse-breakers, Dark witches and wizards, and other researchers would pay fortunes, or considerably worse, for access to even individual pages. The family nevertheless treats much of it with such mundane familiarity that it will most likely give some Unspeakable an aneurysm; something academically priceless may have been sitting in an uncatalogued box for two hundred years because nobody has got around to that shelf yet.

Frostwoods have a recurring tendency toward unusually strong magical ability, especially in difficult, obscure, or dangerous branches of magic. This does not manifest identically in every generation; instead, the underlying inheritance manifests as different specialised talents, such as an affinity towards Ancient Magic (see Hogwarts Legacy), exceptional Transfiguration, curse work, Dark Arts, Seer abilities (of different strengths) and so on. The actual expression of said inheritance varies according to the individual.

Solis has inherited a special talent: Seer. This will not be elaborated on until it is found out in-universe.

[OOC warning]

(Disclaimer: The following is something Solis would write if she was older and had the words to explain herself.)

Being level-headed or obsessed with 'justice' does not automatically mean 'following the rules'. My obsession with justice is one of the reasons I don’t automatically respect rules.

Firstly, we need to separate three things:

{Level-headedness =/= Rule-following =/= Sense of justice}

These are very separate things and should not be collapsed into one single variable. Level-headedness does not equal compliance; it normally means something closer to "not acting rashly under emotional pressure".

Second, Rules and Justice are separate concepts. Rules are norms imposed or maintained by an institution; Justice is judgement exercised through individual agency. A Rule being authoritative does not automatically mean it should be obeyed. A moral person is not necessarily an institutionally compliant person. In fact, a study done by Weston & Turiel (1980) proposed a psychological framework called Social Domain Theory, where they gave 60 children aged 4 to 11 scenarios in which different schools had different rules (e.g., one action may be prohibited in one school but not in another), and they found that children did NOT simply infer that an action permitted by authority was necessarily acceptable. Their judgements depended on the type of act; physical harm was treated very differently from conventional matters despite authorities changing the rules. Moreover, this is not a single isolated study either; a meta-analysis done by Yoo & Smetana (2022) in the field of Social Domain Theory found that children can consistently distinguish moral transgressions from conventional ones, and that they treated moral transgressions as wrong regardless of whether authorities had made a rule against them.

For me (Solis), to decide that a Rule should be obeyed, I need to have sufficient reason to believe that the Rule is justified. It is not the same as being rebellious: someone who is deliberately rebellious may think {Authority says not to do X -> desire to do X}, while I am more inclined to think {Authority says X -> evaluate X}. My definition of fair judgement is more {Fair judgement = f(evidence, reliability, intent, context, burden of proof)} (inspired by procedural justice; Blader & Tyler, 2003), rather than {Fair judgement = f(whatever my friend/teacher/group says happened)}. That is also why, when I was younger, I would clash with some of my peers who operated more through loyalty; their reasoning might look more like {A is my friend, thus P(A is right) > P(B is right)} (P is probability), and my reasoning would be more A's testimony = E1, B's = E2, etc., and only then would I estimate {P(H|E1, E2, ..., En)} (an application of Bayes’ theorem; Bayes, 1763).

Finally, to address my argument that {Authority says X =/= X is morally justified}, legitimacy, as defined within legitimacy research, is roughly 'whether an authority is perceived as having a rightful claim to authority' (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003); they described legitimacy as one route to compliance, without equating compliance with morality itself. There is actually a paper that directly studies the circumstances in which people's moral convictions constrain their willingness to defer to legitimate authorities, titled "Limits on legitimacy: moral and religious convictions as constraints on deference to authority" (Skitka et al., 2009). Consequently, moral convictions can indeed make people more resistant to pressures to obey authority, laws and rules, or to conform to the majority, etc.


References:

Bayes, T. (1763). LII. An essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances. By the late Rev. Mr. Bayes, F. R. S. Communicated by Mr. Price, in a letter to John Canton, A. M. F. R. S. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, (53), 370–418. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1763.0053

Blader, S. L., & Tyler, T. R. (2003). A four-component model of procedural justice: Defining the meaning of a “fair” process. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(6), 747–758. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167203029006007

Skitka, L. J., Bauman, C. W., & Lytle, B. L. (2009). Limits on legitimacy: Moral and religious convictions as constraints on deference to authority. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(4), 567–578. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015998

Sunshine, J., & Tyler, T. R. (2003). The role of procedural justice and legitimacy in shaping public support for policing. Law & Society Review, 37(3), 513–547. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-5893.3703002

Weston, D. R., & Turiel, E. (1980). Act–rule relations: Children’s concepts of social rules. Developmental Psychology, 16(5), 417–424. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.16.5.417

Yoo, H. N., & Smetana, J. G. (2022). Distinctions between moral and conventional judgments from early to middle childhood: A meta-analysis of social domain theory research. Developmental Psychology, 58(5), 874–889. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001330