House-Elves

Were you guys hoping that I would stop posting about Harry Potter now that I'm done rereading it? Sorry, you were mistaken. It's my fandom. You guys will understand.  Let me begin by pointing out that Dobby and Harry Potter have the same color eyes.
(By the way, spoilers for Deathly Hallows: the paragraph in which Dobby dies, or in which characters die in general, is absolutely stunningly written. I recommend you to reread it. It is quite fantastic. The description!)
You know, it's no joke: You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat house-elves. Take Mr. Weasley. He was very kind to Winky the house-elf in The Goblet of Fire, and if I do say so myself, Mr. Weasley is a very kind person. In the very same book Amos Diggory is rather rude to Winky. I don't particularly like Mr. Diggory. At all.
As Sirius said in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire:

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

(We'll ignore the fact that he treats Kreacher so horribly.) But while we're talking about Kreacher, remember how much Kreacher used to hate Harry? Then Harry started treating Kreacher kindly, and Kreacher was kind to Harry as well! It all adds up.

And I know how much Hermione wants to free house-elves. You know, personally I think she's dead wrong. Sure, there are house-elves like Dobby who had bad masters, but really, most house-elves are quite happy with the fact that they get to work all day and serve a family. She doesn't understand that house-elves like to work and that it's in their nature to want to work. Some things about house-elves are never going to change. Even Dobby, he was afraid of getting too much payment and holidays when he started working at Hogwarts. He wants to be a house-elf because he is a house-elf. That's just what they do.