Name: Shiloh Adlar Year: 6th Any Positions: Prefect, Student Teacher, Class Assistant, Quidditch Referee, Quidditch Co-Captain HOL House: Ravenclaw
Why did you join HOL? I joined HOL because I was going through a rough time in my life, and Harry Potter held very good memories for me. It helped pick me back up after a specific event. When I found HOL, I realized that I wanted to dive into the Harry Potter world more and hopefully meet others who would accept me because of our mutual love for this universe.
What is your definition of a role model? My definition of a role model is someone who stands up and fights for what they believe in. It is someone that I can look up to that inspires me to live up to my full potential. A role model is someone who treats others with respect, kindness, and love and radiates light wherever they go. They are not perfect and make mistakes, but they strive to be the best person that they can be without the need for perfection or being fake.
What challenges, if any, have you had to overcome in your time at HOL? I think my biggest challenge has always been socializing with others. I was bullied throughout my years of school and never thought anyone could like me. When I started making friends on HOL, I began to question if the friendship was real or if they only felt sorry for me or were pretending to be my friend because they had to for whatever reason. When people told me that if I ever needed anything to come to them, I didn't want to because "they're just saying that because they have to." Over time, I had to realize that these people were not just saying things. They really did mean it and care about me, and I had to learn to accept something that was unusual for me to understand. Since then, I have made even more friends and have begun reaching out to others that I want to get to know and even new HOLers. It's made HOL a second home.
With twenty years passing since the first book was published, what keeps you interested in Harry Potter and participating in activities like HOL? My interest in Harry Potter started with my brother. He would read the books to me when I was still just a baby, and as I grew older, we watched the movies together, dressed up for special events together, and pretended together. Harry Potter reminds me of him because we shared it, and my first vivid memories of my brother are of him reading the books to me. I joined HOL almost a year after the accident, and what keeps me coming back is his memory but also that of all the friends I have made on here. If it wasn't for my brother, I never would have met so many wonderful and beautiful people. It is another home and a place that is often stress reducing. I don't know what life would be like without it.
Of the categories listed that you will be judged on, which do you think is the most important, and why? I think character is the most important because while a person can be extremely confident, be majorly talented or even have a nice personality, without a good character, none of the other things amount to much in the grand scheme. People can often tell when someone is honest and trustworthy or not. One can have a fun personality but lack compassion for others. One could be ambitious but not responsible. A person's character is what makes them and all of these other things can strengthen them as a person, but their character is their building block.
Which category will be the hardest for you? I think my hardest category will probably be confidence. It is something I have been working on this past year to increase, but it does take time. I find it easier to believe in other people than I do in myself, but as long as I continue working towards it, I know I'll get there eventually.
Do you agree Mx HOL should be a gender-neutral contest and that contestants should be judged on the same requirements? Why or why not? I do agree it should be a gender neutral contest. There are different reasons for this. One reason is that some people do not identify with a particular gender at all while others may identify better with both. I also think that while men and women are not physically created equal, the way we present ourselves to others should all be judged exactly the same. A woman should not be judged as weaker than a man specifically because our bodies are not designed like theirs or we have a tendency to be more emotional than men. I don't think men should be called crybabies or weak because they show more emotion than what society says they should show. Why is ballet a "woman's" thing and why is football a "man's" thing? The fact is that we are all human beings learning to live on this world together. We all have character and personality traits. We all have hopes and dreams. We all struggle. I believe this is what this contest is meant to show. We all have our own individual thing going on, but we should not be judged on what we choose to do or act like based on what gender we were born or identify with.
Is there any other information you would like to give the judges and your fans? I am grateful for this opportunity to be able to share myself with the rest of the HOL community as well as getting to know others in the community who will be participating in this competition with me. It's not the competition aspect that excites me, no matter how competitive I may be when it comes to quidditch, it's the fact that we have many amazing people on HOL, and this contest will hopefully be able to help bring them out in the open to let their natural abilities and personalities shine.
Talent: Posted on music tab.
Task 2 Submission
House Pride Song on music tab. <---Ravenclaw Bracelet
Platform
An issue that I have seen or heard come up on HOL quite often deals with acceptance of others. For me, HOL has become a second family and a home away from home. I was bullied all throughout school, and I was going into the 11th grade when I joined this site. I wanted to join HOL because I loved Harry Potter and it was what helped keep me going after my brother was killed, but I had an overwhelming fear that it would be exactly the same as real life school. I would be the outcast, the loser that was so socially awkward that no one wanted to talk to her because she was annoying or boring or too crazy. But I was wrong.
I spent my first year keeping a low profile but working extremely hard to earn points for my house because I wanted people to like me. I logged on IRC a few times and talked when someone talked to me, and eventually, by the end of my first year, I was getting to know members on the Ravenclaw Quidditch Team and tried out that summer. I made quick friends, but it still crossed my mind, "What if they're pretending? What if they don't really like me? What if I'm still too weird for them?"
Even to this day, I have a tendency to question this about myself because of all the bullying I experienced growing up. It is often hard to believe that I have found true and very real friends on HOL. What has helped the most is that even though, yes, I have had my very awkward moments of not knowing what to say or saying things that maybe no one really wants to hear about, or maybe I have jumped all around IRC screaming about something exciting, people have been accepting of it. It is that acceptance of my differences that has made me love HOL and stay on HOL for almost five and a half years.
None of us know anything about each other except for what we choose to tell. None of us have any idea if a person who seems really cool on this site is actually bullied in school or at work. None of us know if that person who is always rambling about random stuff has some sort of learning or mental disability or perhaps they are also socially awkward like I am and just don't know what else to say. We all come from different lives and backgrounds, and that's the beauty of this site. Despite our differences, we come together for the love of Harry Potter.
I think it is sad that we allow petty differences to get in the way of what could be incredible friendships. When we stop judging one another, when we stop blaming one another for "he said, she said," and we really begin to accept that we're not going to agree on everything and that "Yes, I'm weird, but I own it! *z snaps*," that is when the real magic begins.
I would like to promote this goal and idea of acceptance throughout the site, and I hope that I have been doing so already. I like to live by the golden rule that one should "treat others the way you would like to be treated." My goal in life is to spread love, joy and light into other people's lives, and it's okay if that's too "kumbaya for you" (looks at Kyrie). You don't have to go around talking to everyone or putting hearts everywhere. All I ask is that we try to make this site a safe place for everyone, newbies and oldbies alike. Drama only pulls us further apart and more often than not, drags people into it that were never apart of the issue to begin with. Bullying only hurts us by causing people to leave. I promise, it's not that hard to treat someone with the respect and kindness that we all deserve.
And we do ALL deserve it.
Audience Questions
Which Harry Potter character do you relate to most, and why? I have always related to Luna Lovegood because she was the odd one out, just like me. She never quite fit in, had her own quirky way of doing things, and she had a difficult time making friends. There is a scene in the 7th book where Harry, Hermione, and Ron go into Luna's bedroom and see the word "friends" as a chain linking together their faces that Luna painted on the ceiling along with Ginny's and Neville's. This was a pivotal moment for me because it is something I can relate to immensely. When you haven't fit in your whole life and suddenly there are people that come around that like you just for being you, it feels as if the whole world has opened up, and I never want to lose that.
Luna always sees the best in people, which is something I also try to do. I try to make bad situations, when possible, into good ones. Maybe this is something that we both learned after experiencing a situation that seemed impossible to turn around into good. But life keeps going on. It's a learning experience to always appreciate what and who you have around you. It made us both strong and resilient to future disappointments and trauma. More than that, we both learned empathy, and empathy and understanding is what has allowed us to accept and to love, the one thing the Dark Lord would never be able to do.
Where is your favorite place in HOL, and why? My favorite place in HOL is The Roost. The Roost has been my home away from home for 5.5 years now. It is where I began making my first friends on the site, where I ran my first activity, where I began to learn to trust my own writing skills and creativity in forming that activity, and where I now chill out with my beautiful teammates from the Ravenclaw Quidditch Team. I found myself constantly checking The Roost when I took an HOL break a couple of months ago. It was the only place that I had an urge to check because I didn't want to miss anything. Our activities are always fun, the members of my house are incredible, and I know how to make my name pink (if Kyrie wouldn't get mad at me for doing so).
In your opinion, what are the advantages and disadvantages to ambition? I think ambition, overall, is a positive thing to possess. Like anything, however, it can be twisted. In a general sense, ambition is a strong desire to do something which is very important in achieving goals. My ambitions in life include spreading love, joy and light to all people and ridding the world of disease. While these two goals are a bit extreme and probably not 100% possible if we're being realistic here, my desire to achieve them is what will help me get as close as humanly possible to doing so.
But this is also where ambition can take a wrong turn. Ambition can also drive a person into doing whatever is possible to achieve success. This could potentially include lying or cheating such as someone claiming credit for what someone else did. Lord Voldemort was very ambitious. From my own understanding, Lord Voldemort's conquest for power was not simply because he wanted to rid the world of muggles, he was searching for something that he had never had. He never had the ability to form bonds in relationships. All he knew was power over others. He was afraid to die, but perhaps he was afraid to die alone. He wanted to know love but had no means available to him to find it except fear. He probably didn't even know the meaning of the word, and this quest led him to the darkest of arts and murder instead of turning to those who would have otherwise helped him learn what love was.
As Dumbledore said, "It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." Though we may be capable through our ambition to achieve success, it is how we choose to use those capabilities that say whether ambition was an advantage or a disadvantage to our overall goal.
What is the most important lesson you have learned in life? I have learned many important lessons in life, and all of them have been significantly important. There is one lesson, however, that stands out over the others, and that is to never take for granted that a person knows I love them. My brother and I were always very close, but like most siblings, we fought every now and then. The night he was killed, he was dropping me off at the academy and we had gotten into an argument about something. I didn't tell him that I loved him when he pulled off. When he picked me up hours later, I got in the car and refused to talk to him because I was still mad. The last thing I expected was for a drunk driver to run a light and for my brother to die on impact. I've regretted every day not telling him I loved him before getting out of the car, and I constantly ask myself if he died thinking that I hated him because we were arguing about me refusing to go to the counselor at school about some guy stealing my books and tossing them in the cafeteria trash.
We never know what could happen from one minute to the next, even one second to the next. Sure, someone may know that you love them because you give them gifts or a hug or you listen to them complain when you absolutely wouldn't have to, but it also never hurts to say it. You never know when you'll never be able to say it to that person again.
If you can't be MX HOL, who do you think should, and why? This is probably the hardest yet easiest question for me to answer. I say this for two reasons. It's the hardest because I imagine the person asking is wanting a single name, and it is the easiest because I want to give every name. I read back through all of the round one submissions to try to answer this question, and what I have discovered is that each of us brings a uniqueness to HOL through our talents as well as our beliefs. It is very hard to take all of that and single out one person, which is why I am grateful to not be one of the judges, and I feel for them for having to do just that.
There are quite a few names that I recognize but have yet had the pleasure to actually converse with which does make more sense in my mind to choose one of the people that I know well, not out of popularity, but simply because I know them to embody what I believe HOL is all about. If had the extremely hard job of being a judge for this competition, and considering what I know from the handful of people I know personally who have submitted for this competition, my choice would probably be Vanessa Tilley. I say this because this girl works so hard all over HOL, and even as a first year, she has embraced the site and the people on the site with so much enthusiasm. She puts her best foot forward and also isn't afraid to say no to something. She is accepting and compassionate to everyone I've seen her talk to, which is very important to me on a site like this.
I could say so many other good things about the people I have had the pleasure of good conversation with over my time here at HOL: Gail Allen, Kendra Givens, Prof. Zenix James, Pavel Lagrange, Will Lestrange, Katelin Ross, Alexander Brighton, Blade J. Johnson, and Shadow Gaunt. I could give reasons why each of them deserve to be Mx HOL. And for those I've yet to get to know, I'm sure once I do, I'll have just as many good reasons for them when and if Mx HOL is run again. That's what's so great. We all bring something different, and it's amazing.
If you were a fruit what would you be and why? This is another difficult question being asked to a girl who loves her fruit. How could I possibly single out only one fruit? However, after some thought and careful consideration, I have decided that I would be a strawberry. I think I would be a strawberry because they look somewhat like a heart. Spreading love to the people I meet is very important to me, so I often draw hearts as symbolism for that.
Strawberries are also different from their peers in that there is a lot of controversy about whether they are actually a fruit or not. In fact, they're not even actually berries. They are made differently than other fruit by their so called "seeds" being on the outside rather than on the inside. I have often felt like I don't fit in with people or in certain places. I've been the outsider more often than not. However, due to this difference, as a strawberry plant grows, they send out little strings that begin to cultivate new strawberry plants rather than having to wait for a seed to be planted. I relate to this because I feel like the more I grow as a person, the more light I can send out to help people around me grow stronger as well.