fourhouseunion application progress / test drive
Name: Kher
Age: 17
AIM Screename: kherezae
Who referred you here - username and house, if possible: hogwarts_elite? No one in particular, I think.
1. Which of the Harry Potter books have you read? Which did you enjoy most?
I’ve read all six books. My favorite, or the one I enjoy most, is a close race-an extremely close race-between Goblet of Fire and Prisoner of Azkaban. I love PoA for the Marauders backstory, the introduction of dark elements like the dementors and lighter ones like the patronus… but generally I say that my favorite is Goblet of Fire.
For me, GoF is where the series really begins to pick up. PoA prefaces the turning point in Goblet of Fire, but Harry’s fourth year is when the story truly begins in full force. More of the wizarding world is introduced in the form of the Quidditch World Cup and the different wizarding nations present both at the Cup and in the form of Durmstrang and Beauxbatons. Harry’s school year routine was set in the first three books, but the routine is turned upside down in GoF by the replacement of Quidditch with the Triwizard Tournament. The plot is very tightly woven; I didn’t see the twist of Moody being Barty Crouch, Jr., at all, and Barty made a very effective, intriguing villain. To think that he was Moody the entire time and remember how he behaved around Harry… it makes me think. Plus, Goblet of Fire is Harry’s first real, conscious brush with death. He didn’t know Cedric that well, but he got a chance to see what a good kid Cedric was and then he had to see Cedric die.
But the real thing that marks Goblet of Fire as a turning point in my mind is Voldemort’s rebirth, his second rise to power. It gives this feeling that the first four books were a cakewalk and that JKR’s about to get down to the real business. The second war is born in that cemetery.
2. How do you feel about Voldemort as a character?
I think he’s an effective villain. I want to know more about him, though… why was he the one to go after immortality? Why was he the one to organize wizards with similar views against Muggles and Muggleborns? JK Rowling’s slowly giving us more and more pieces of the puzzle, and I’m impatient to see the finished result. But for now, Voldemort is easy to despise, which is a good quality in a villain, and he’s certainly dark and evil enough to be feared. That does tend to make him seem a little stereotypical or even flat from time to time, particularly to people like me who prefer human villains that you can sympathize with while still disagreeing with them, but then again… Voldemort is really only a seventh of a soul, and that has a predictably dehumanizing effect on him. And JK Rowling certainly has more up her sleeve for him, that much is clear. I can’t wait to learn it.
3. Which Harry Potter character can you most relate to?
I wish I knew more about characters in other Houses, but we really have the widest selection of Gryffindors in the way of fleshed out characters… and among all those given in the story, I think I’d have to say I identify with Remus most of all. Maybe not adult Remus, but what we know of Remus in his school years… granted, I have no furry little problems to worry about, but while the idea of mischief is attractive to me, among the Marauders I would be more like Moony: I would act as the one that tempered the mischief a bit to make sure we didn’t get into any serious trouble. I’d get dragged along for the ride and enjoy it in an anxious, exhilarated sort of way once I’d gotten into the thick of the mischief.
I’d also like to think that I would mature as gracefully as Remus. As an adult he shows a lot of strength of character despite all he’s been through, and although he has his faults, he’s always willing to admit them and try to improve them. He treats everyone in his Defense Against the Dark Arts classes fairly and respectfully. He isn’t biased, like some teachers, but he doesn’t have to be as strict as McGonagall either. He knows how to make his classroom environment and his lessons fun and relaxed.
4. Who is your favorite Harry Potter character? Least favorite?
My favorite is… I suppose Remus. I used to say Snape, but past the intrigue of what’s really going on with his character beneath the surface, he really isn’t likeable at all. I really like Remus, though, both as a character and as the sort of person he would be if he was real-that is, the sort of person I’d get along with and look up to. I suppose I already gave most, if not all, of my reasons for liking Remus above.
My least favorite is …well, I don’t really know. Up until HBP, it was Draco Malfoy because he wasn’t developed at all as a character. He just seemed static all through the first five books. He didn’t grow or mature. But HBP gave a little more insight into his character, fleshed him out a bit, so I’m not so displeased with him anymore. There are a few characters I’ve started to dislike based on reading others’ opinions that happen to ring true with me… like Ginny, for being such a twat in book six but not seeing any consequences for things like casting a Bat-Bogey Hex on Zacharias Smith. But I’m not sure if I can say I actually have a least favorite. For the most part, all the characters are either alright or despicable but quite interesting.
I suppose I’ll go with Pansy Parkinson for her behavior in the beginning of HBP. Fawning over Draco and lying in his lap… She’s rather underdeveloped herself as a character. She just seems shallow and without redeeming qualities. I hate that Slytherins are portrayed without redeeming qualities, and while it makes sense because the story is told from Harry’s perspective, it still aggravates me. I’d like to see a representative Slytherin who isn’t evil or snotty or purist.
5. What thing, event, or person has had the most impact in your life?
I don’t think anyone can know the answer to this question for sure since there are so many factors that contribute to making a person who she is… but if I’m perfectly honest, I probably have to say my parents. My parents have raised me and shaped me. While I don’t always agree with their opinions, they obviously raised me in an unbiased enough environment that I could form my own opinions to begin with. They can get on my nerves a lot and they have their faults, but I really wouldn’t trade them for any other parents in the world. They’ve always been fair to me on a whole, and they’ve raised me to respect other people and have a sound moral code. They have never let me believe I wasn’t loved. And even their faults have their values. My dad’s temper has taught me the value of patience and knowing when to say something and when to hold my tongue.
I’d love to be able to say that something else, something less ordinary, has had the most impact on my life… but really, a person’s parents (or at least families) have huge influence on her life. They’re there from childhood onward, through thick and thin, even when you want to strangle them. You can’t not be greatly influenced by people you grow up around, learn from, look up to.
6. What makes a friendship valuable to you?
Having someone you can count on even when you’re angry with one another. Having someone who’ll be honest with you when your family won’t-my parents won’t be completely honest about whether my outfit looks ridiculous, and my bratty younger sibling will exaggerate to the opposite end of whatever my parents tell me. A friend is someone you can be yourself around completely; a true friend, at least. Around my parents, I have to bite my tongue for language or when I want to say something that’ll get me in trouble. But I don’t have to feel restrained around true friends, around my best friend, and that’s what makes our friendship so valuable. We can be comfortable around one another, just hang out and talk or go out and do something exciting. I like to be able to trust my friends like that… trust that they’ll be honest with me and that I can be honest with them without getting hell for it.
7. If you had a hero (real or literary) who would it be?
Um. This is a difficult question because I’ve never put much thought into heroes or idols. I suppose a hero would be someone I respect and admire. I’d have to choose… it may sound silly, but the only person I can come up with is Ender. I’m not a history buff, particularly for anything past the middle ages, so I can’t pick someone from history. And no one person I know or have heard of in real life strikes me as a hero, though everyone who’s been helping with the hurricane victims and so many other recent disasters is a hero in my book.
So that leaves literary characters, and the only one I can say that I truly respect and admire like a hero is Ender from Orson Scott Card’s books. As a child he went through so much, and he really couldn’t be faulted for any of it, yet as an adult he still took responsibility and spent thousands of years-or perhaps just several decades to him-searching for a way to make amends and helping others along the way. His empathy, his ability to learn facts about a person’s life and string together the person’s emotional story and journey in his position as a speaker for the dead is astounding. He understands people in a way I wish I could. He’s fair and honest with them, not the sort of person to lash out and do something stupid in anger or out of spite. I know he’s just a character… but he’s the only character for which I’ve been able to keep my disbelief suspended long enough to consider him a hero. Which is a credit to Orson Scott Card, I suppose.
8. What are your personal aspirations for your future?
I want most to be a writer. Writing fantasy novels has been my goal since the seventh or eighth grade. I want to be able to create a story, a world, with as profound an effect as George R.R. Martin, Orson Scott Card, or J.K. Rowling’s books. Everything in my life goes toward my writing in one form or another; everything is a lesson about characters or realism or cause and effect.
Aside from writing, I want to finish highschool on time and go to college, hopefully on a scholarship. I want to study something that interests me rather than getting stuck in a field I hate. Lately I’ve been thinking about going into video game design, because wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to say you were a part of building something like Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy? I’ve never been interested in more stable careers like accounting, but writing or something like web design alone wouldn’t work as a career. I think going into video game design would be a bit more stable, but wouldn’t box me into a career that would make me unhappy.
On a more cliché note, I’d like to fall in love and be happy in my future. I never want to lose touch with my best friend; we laugh and talk about our future together in a duplex / mansion / RV when we spend the night at one another’s house. I want to see the world, adventure, but not be afraid to settle down when the right opportunity comes around.
9. What are your most prominent personality traits, good or bad? Which one do you feel best defines who you are as a person?
10. What house combination do you feel you're most like? Least like? (This is not pushing. It shows whether or not you are self-aware and may not have an influence on the voting process.)
11. Why should we not squib you?
Mmkay. Next are my personality traits, oh joy. I’ll get to that tomorrow or the next day depending on how school goes… =)
Age: 17
AIM Screename: kherezae
Who referred you here - username and house, if possible: hogwarts_elite? No one in particular, I think.
1. Which of the Harry Potter books have you read? Which did you enjoy most?
I’ve read all six books. My favorite, or the one I enjoy most, is a close race-an extremely close race-between Goblet of Fire and Prisoner of Azkaban. I love PoA for the Marauders backstory, the introduction of dark elements like the dementors and lighter ones like the patronus… but generally I say that my favorite is Goblet of Fire.
For me, GoF is where the series really begins to pick up. PoA prefaces the turning point in Goblet of Fire, but Harry’s fourth year is when the story truly begins in full force. More of the wizarding world is introduced in the form of the Quidditch World Cup and the different wizarding nations present both at the Cup and in the form of Durmstrang and Beauxbatons. Harry’s school year routine was set in the first three books, but the routine is turned upside down in GoF by the replacement of Quidditch with the Triwizard Tournament. The plot is very tightly woven; I didn’t see the twist of Moody being Barty Crouch, Jr., at all, and Barty made a very effective, intriguing villain. To think that he was Moody the entire time and remember how he behaved around Harry… it makes me think. Plus, Goblet of Fire is Harry’s first real, conscious brush with death. He didn’t know Cedric that well, but he got a chance to see what a good kid Cedric was and then he had to see Cedric die.
But the real thing that marks Goblet of Fire as a turning point in my mind is Voldemort’s rebirth, his second rise to power. It gives this feeling that the first four books were a cakewalk and that JKR’s about to get down to the real business. The second war is born in that cemetery.
2. How do you feel about Voldemort as a character?
I think he’s an effective villain. I want to know more about him, though… why was he the one to go after immortality? Why was he the one to organize wizards with similar views against Muggles and Muggleborns? JK Rowling’s slowly giving us more and more pieces of the puzzle, and I’m impatient to see the finished result. But for now, Voldemort is easy to despise, which is a good quality in a villain, and he’s certainly dark and evil enough to be feared. That does tend to make him seem a little stereotypical or even flat from time to time, particularly to people like me who prefer human villains that you can sympathize with while still disagreeing with them, but then again… Voldemort is really only a seventh of a soul, and that has a predictably dehumanizing effect on him. And JK Rowling certainly has more up her sleeve for him, that much is clear. I can’t wait to learn it.
3. Which Harry Potter character can you most relate to?
I wish I knew more about characters in other Houses, but we really have the widest selection of Gryffindors in the way of fleshed out characters… and among all those given in the story, I think I’d have to say I identify with Remus most of all. Maybe not adult Remus, but what we know of Remus in his school years… granted, I have no furry little problems to worry about, but while the idea of mischief is attractive to me, among the Marauders I would be more like Moony: I would act as the one that tempered the mischief a bit to make sure we didn’t get into any serious trouble. I’d get dragged along for the ride and enjoy it in an anxious, exhilarated sort of way once I’d gotten into the thick of the mischief.
I’d also like to think that I would mature as gracefully as Remus. As an adult he shows a lot of strength of character despite all he’s been through, and although he has his faults, he’s always willing to admit them and try to improve them. He treats everyone in his Defense Against the Dark Arts classes fairly and respectfully. He isn’t biased, like some teachers, but he doesn’t have to be as strict as McGonagall either. He knows how to make his classroom environment and his lessons fun and relaxed.
4. Who is your favorite Harry Potter character? Least favorite?
My favorite is… I suppose Remus. I used to say Snape, but past the intrigue of what’s really going on with his character beneath the surface, he really isn’t likeable at all. I really like Remus, though, both as a character and as the sort of person he would be if he was real-that is, the sort of person I’d get along with and look up to. I suppose I already gave most, if not all, of my reasons for liking Remus above.
My least favorite is …well, I don’t really know. Up until HBP, it was Draco Malfoy because he wasn’t developed at all as a character. He just seemed static all through the first five books. He didn’t grow or mature. But HBP gave a little more insight into his character, fleshed him out a bit, so I’m not so displeased with him anymore. There are a few characters I’ve started to dislike based on reading others’ opinions that happen to ring true with me… like Ginny, for being such a twat in book six but not seeing any consequences for things like casting a Bat-Bogey Hex on Zacharias Smith. But I’m not sure if I can say I actually have a least favorite. For the most part, all the characters are either alright or despicable but quite interesting.
I suppose I’ll go with Pansy Parkinson for her behavior in the beginning of HBP. Fawning over Draco and lying in his lap… She’s rather underdeveloped herself as a character. She just seems shallow and without redeeming qualities. I hate that Slytherins are portrayed without redeeming qualities, and while it makes sense because the story is told from Harry’s perspective, it still aggravates me. I’d like to see a representative Slytherin who isn’t evil or snotty or purist.
5. What thing, event, or person has had the most impact in your life?
I don’t think anyone can know the answer to this question for sure since there are so many factors that contribute to making a person who she is… but if I’m perfectly honest, I probably have to say my parents. My parents have raised me and shaped me. While I don’t always agree with their opinions, they obviously raised me in an unbiased enough environment that I could form my own opinions to begin with. They can get on my nerves a lot and they have their faults, but I really wouldn’t trade them for any other parents in the world. They’ve always been fair to me on a whole, and they’ve raised me to respect other people and have a sound moral code. They have never let me believe I wasn’t loved. And even their faults have their values. My dad’s temper has taught me the value of patience and knowing when to say something and when to hold my tongue.
I’d love to be able to say that something else, something less ordinary, has had the most impact on my life… but really, a person’s parents (or at least families) have huge influence on her life. They’re there from childhood onward, through thick and thin, even when you want to strangle them. You can’t not be greatly influenced by people you grow up around, learn from, look up to.
6. What makes a friendship valuable to you?
Having someone you can count on even when you’re angry with one another. Having someone who’ll be honest with you when your family won’t-my parents won’t be completely honest about whether my outfit looks ridiculous, and my bratty younger sibling will exaggerate to the opposite end of whatever my parents tell me. A friend is someone you can be yourself around completely; a true friend, at least. Around my parents, I have to bite my tongue for language or when I want to say something that’ll get me in trouble. But I don’t have to feel restrained around true friends, around my best friend, and that’s what makes our friendship so valuable. We can be comfortable around one another, just hang out and talk or go out and do something exciting. I like to be able to trust my friends like that… trust that they’ll be honest with me and that I can be honest with them without getting hell for it.
7. If you had a hero (real or literary) who would it be?
Um. This is a difficult question because I’ve never put much thought into heroes or idols. I suppose a hero would be someone I respect and admire. I’d have to choose… it may sound silly, but the only person I can come up with is Ender. I’m not a history buff, particularly for anything past the middle ages, so I can’t pick someone from history. And no one person I know or have heard of in real life strikes me as a hero, though everyone who’s been helping with the hurricane victims and so many other recent disasters is a hero in my book.
So that leaves literary characters, and the only one I can say that I truly respect and admire like a hero is Ender from Orson Scott Card’s books. As a child he went through so much, and he really couldn’t be faulted for any of it, yet as an adult he still took responsibility and spent thousands of years-or perhaps just several decades to him-searching for a way to make amends and helping others along the way. His empathy, his ability to learn facts about a person’s life and string together the person’s emotional story and journey in his position as a speaker for the dead is astounding. He understands people in a way I wish I could. He’s fair and honest with them, not the sort of person to lash out and do something stupid in anger or out of spite. I know he’s just a character… but he’s the only character for which I’ve been able to keep my disbelief suspended long enough to consider him a hero. Which is a credit to Orson Scott Card, I suppose.
8. What are your personal aspirations for your future?
I want most to be a writer. Writing fantasy novels has been my goal since the seventh or eighth grade. I want to be able to create a story, a world, with as profound an effect as George R.R. Martin, Orson Scott Card, or J.K. Rowling’s books. Everything in my life goes toward my writing in one form or another; everything is a lesson about characters or realism or cause and effect.
Aside from writing, I want to finish highschool on time and go to college, hopefully on a scholarship. I want to study something that interests me rather than getting stuck in a field I hate. Lately I’ve been thinking about going into video game design, because wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to say you were a part of building something like Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy? I’ve never been interested in more stable careers like accounting, but writing or something like web design alone wouldn’t work as a career. I think going into video game design would be a bit more stable, but wouldn’t box me into a career that would make me unhappy.
On a more cliché note, I’d like to fall in love and be happy in my future. I never want to lose touch with my best friend; we laugh and talk about our future together in a duplex / mansion / RV when we spend the night at one another’s house. I want to see the world, adventure, but not be afraid to settle down when the right opportunity comes around.
9. What are your most prominent personality traits, good or bad? Which one do you feel best defines who you are as a person?
10. What house combination do you feel you're most like? Least like? (This is not pushing. It shows whether or not you are self-aware and may not have an influence on the voting process.)
11. Why should we not squib you?
Mmkay. Next are my personality traits, oh joy. I’ll get to that tomorrow or the next day depending on how school goes… =)