#listen I've seen the posts extolling lalo as some romantic figure and if that's how you like him then sure

[iorekbyrinson]

lalo salamanca headcanons

He's a black-hearted asshole. It's an important core aspect of his character and it can't be ignored.

He has a dead sibling. My HC is a dead sister who got married and then her husband killed her. Death lives cheek by jowl in the Salamanca family. There's a reason for those empty spaces.

He wasn't born with severe antisocial tendencies, and a naturally extroverted personality made him more open to experiences than some of his more rigid relatives. The rot set in to the idealism early, maybe 7 or 8 years old. I actually see the twins grappling with suppressing their feelings more than Lalo - he's the perfect adaptable boy-Prince that adapts to suit the family, and never really took the time to build anything under that veneer. He takes information in purely to benefit himself or benefit his family. The emotionality and empathy has been stripped away. This is a DARK character.

One of the roles he's tried on that he's put a little more into is the benefactor role to the peasants that live on/or near his estate, in fact most of the underlings associated with the Salamanca holdings. It reinforces to Lalo a sense of benevolence, which at its core is still basically transactional. The people under him have no choice to do what they do. It's the performance of helping them out that makes Lalo feel good about himself.

He was absolutely going to murder Kim when Jimmy left. That whole speech about the people the assassins killed at his hacienda reeked of a tit-for-tat situation. He no longer trusted Jimmy at all so he had no further utility to him as a lawyer. He was going to kill Jimmy's wife as punishment for that, torture the truth out of Jimmy when he returned from the laundrette, and then kill him.

Lalo's blue shoes tie into what I mentioned about him having an attachment to being seen as perfect/a benefactor/on the "right" side of things. Blue = personal law in BCS. Lalo never does anything that doesn't benefit himself or his family, so he always sees himself as following the correct path. He feels 100% justified in his sabotage mission against Gus, and then in the atrocities he commits in attempting to come back and bring him up in front of Eladio. He would actually feel morally angry at the implication any of that wasn't right - you protect yourself and you protect your family. In his eyes, he's bringing a liar and a traitor to justice, a snake who is attempting to bring down their cartel from the inside. In that respect, Lalo has a parallel with the most unlikeliest of BCS characters - Chuck McGill.

The insomnia is the barest of brush strokes that imply Lalo's possible ambivalence about the life he was born into. Gilligould have notoriously not given the characters of colour much contextual depth at all outside of roles that serve the cartel story, and Lalo is no exception, but I still think it was the barest of indicators of another story being played out there. Like Howard Hamlin dissuaded early on from putting up his own shingle and making an identity for himself outside of what his father expected of him, Lalo, neck deep in the lifetime role of cartel Prince, may have felt the twingings of his own destiny being held away from him. TDalton's comments about Lalo believing he could die at any point has an interesting, nihilistic extension here - so why bother?

He's a Hufflepuff. His people, his group, and himself above all. Duty, discipline, and "fairness" - all Puff traits. His contempt for Slytherin Gus is for Gus's refusal to accept his position and bend the knee - he sees Gus's strident individualism as selfish, in comparison to his own lifelong commitment to his family and the cartel. On the positive side, he can do a surface level cohesion with groups, some performative actions of good on behalf of the group(s) he identifies with, and skilfully takes Nacho and sends him up to the boss. There's a reason old ladies seem to adore Lalo - he, in an entirely selfish sense, works within the group.