Mugglenet.com's Harry Potter Should Have Died - Emerson Spartz [48]
Unfortunately, Hermione goes about things the wrong way in OotP when she knits hundreds of little hats and leaves them around the castle. This plan to free the house-elves of Hogwarts backfires and infuriates everyone. She is trying to establish equal rights for the house-elves, but she doesn’t see that the house-elves aren’t ready for such a change.
Hermione achieves greater success with her pro-elf mission by simply talking to people than by trying to manipulate the elves to free themselves. She convinces Harry to have sympathy for Kreacher, who has a hand in Sirius Black’s death. Harry takes Hermione’s advice and believes that Kreacher is a victim of cruel circumstances. Instead of having him thrown into Azkaban, Harry takes Kreacher on as his new servant. That is the real key to S.P.E.W.: to treat house-elves with understanding. While her initial plan doesn’t work, Hermione has one thing right: With good treatment over time, perhaps house-elves can be retaught to live independent lives—they just need to get used to the idea. Revolutions don’t really happen overnight.
Bad
Hermione has the best intentions, but she completely misunderstands the very house-elves she is committed to freeing. Not only does Hermione make an idiot of herself when she forces Harry, Ron, and Neville to join her schoolgirl crusade, but there are major flaws in her plan. For one thing, the elves at Hogwarts don’t belong to Hermione, so how can she free them? No matter how much knitting she puts around the Common Room, she has no jurisdiction over those elves. Hermione is completely ignorant about house-elves and their lives until she lives at Grimmauld Place in OotP, and it shows. She is a Muggle-born who has never seen an elf until she meets Dobby and Winky, and then suddenly she thinks she is an expert. Hermione arrogantly refuses to listen to the chorus of voices urging her to drop the issue—she writes off their protests as the predictable resistance to change every revolutionary must overcome.
House-elves have carved out a cozy mutually beneficial existence for themselves, not altogether different from the relationship between dogs and their owners. Dogs provide unconditional love and loyalty, and their owners respond by providing them life’s essentials. And so it is with the house-elves, who cook and clean for their owners and in return receive safety, food, and shelter. The house-elves are happy with this relationship and their place in society.
Verdict
There’s no doubt that Hermione means well when she tries to railroad the house-elves into a new way of life. She does, however, stubbornly ignore the elves’ wishes and she fails to appreciate the beauty in the relationships they have with humans. Her inability to listen to conflicting evidence stand in the way of her understanding and result in her personal shock when the elves aren’t grateful for being pushed aboard the Freedom Train. Verdict: No, S.P.E.W. was not good for the house-elves.
Which character is more underestimated by others: Kreacher or Peter Pettigrew?
Kreacher
House-elves don’t get much respect in the wizarding world, so it’s not surprising that bat-eared old Kreacher, the family servant from Grimmauld Place, would be the most underestimated character. Maybe it’s the fact that he has a creepy lair under the boiler at Grimmauld Place in OotP and walks around muttering racist slurs as if he has elf-dementia. For whatever the reason, people expect nothing from him, but Kreacher is full of surprises, bad and good.
Sirius Black treats Kreacher with contempt because the elf reminds him of his unhappy family life, and in return, Kreacher hates Sirius for breaking Mrs. Black’s heart (if that was really possible). Yet Sirius takes it totally for granted