He gave her a slight chance of living with the guilt of having scarified her son, which sounds more like torture than generosity to me.
If he really wanted to let Lily live, he would have stunned her, or he would moved to cast the Killing Curse on the crib without harming her.
Asking her to voluntarily stop protecting her child is sadism, not a real attempt at sparring her life.
If he really wanted to let Lily live, he would have stunned her, or he would moved to cast the Killing Curse on the crib without harming her.
That's true enough.
But I don't think keeping his deal with Snape required making sure that Lily lived, it required giving her a chance. You say it was a crappy chance. Maybe so. But this was a concession on Voldemort's part, and expecting a Dark Lord to do more than the letter of an agreement is asking a bit much.
Edit: New thread posted here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 86. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: