Y'know, I like the new, true version of Ch. 85, the one where Harry fails to get a phoenix -- but I also really liked the original version (which, remember, Eliezer wrote as a stand-in because he couldn't get the true version finished in time), where Harry, compromising with himself, made a resolution that for now he would try to win without killing people -- but if anybody died [by his opponent's hands], not just a PC, but any arbitrary bystander (he'd been thinking about how Batman's ethics only come off as good if you don't care about all the NPCs the Joker kills), the gloves would come off.

I'd kind of hoped that Harry would be able to actually go through without a death, and failing that I kind of expected that it would be some random NPC's death that would change things -- but I don't think that would actually have worked to justify Harry's future actions to the reader. [ETA: I guess buybuydavis is right too that, even more importantly, it wouldn't have worked as a statement against death.] It really does need to be somebody we (the readers) care about in order to carry even a fraction of the emotional impact that death should carry.

(Tangent: As a preteen, I read 2001 up to the point where HAL kills Poole, and then had to stop and had some bad nights because that was so terrible. [Actually there was a similar thing a couple of years before that with The Neverending Story and the point where Atreyu's horse Artax dies.] And around that time, possibly a bit later, I decided that feeling that death was this bad was the appropriate emotion, and grownups and other kids who not only didn't have that reaction but who felt that it was childish exaggeration were wrong. And when, much later, my own emotional reaction to death in fiction -- and, more deplorably, reality -- started to subside, I still found myself in agreement with my earlier self on the question on appropriateness.)