House Elf Question

[Zara]

No: HPFGUIDX 178781

> Magpie:
> Kreacher, too, was not made miserable by being 
> a slave. He was made miserable by a bad master. So if a House Elf 
> doesn't want to be freed (which would be almost all of them), being 
> a slave to a worthy master is a perfectly good solution-the one 
> Harry and Kreacher agree on.

zgirnius:
I do not think we are supposed to consider Regulus Black a bad or 
unworthy master. Yet he is the master who contributed most greatly to 
Kreacher's misery, not through conscious choices to do so, but by not 
understanding the effect his actions and his orders would have over 
the years. This is why I think Kreacher is the best example of why 
the enslavement is wrong. He is the one illustration that what you 
claim is the solution (a kind master who cares for the welfare of his 
house-elf) isn't. 

I don't agree that the Hogwarts house-elves would naturally have 
joined the fight without orders to do so, and I don't see why this 
should be my default assumption. We've only seen Dobby fight, and 
only after he was freed, before DH. I expected it to happen in the 
event we did have a "Battle of Hogwarts", but only because I expected 
it to be one of the pay-offs of the SPEW and other house-elf 
storylines. I expected the text to present me with some explanation 
for why this happened in DH, and the presence of Kreacher leading the 
charge, is an explanation I find more palatable than the ones I had 
imagined in my head (like, say, Hermione or Dumbledore or 
Headmistress McGonagall talking them into it). Instead, I got a house-
elf leading other house-elves in the fight, and I thought it a fine 
conlusion to the storyline.