The "in the spirit of friendship" thing makes no sense if Lucius was imperioused. It's incongruous with cliche villainy, but I think it makes sense in context, as a way of saying "I do not bear a grudge against you for leading me into that disastrous war, but I will not be your follower anymore" (because a friend is not a follower). It's almost a subtle insult.
And Lucius is a bit sympathetic, but he's not THAT sympathetic. It's pretty clear that he's a power-hungry bigot. "Dumbledore is destroying the wizarding race by promoting Mudbloods" is probably closer to his real motivation for joining Voldemort, but "save us from Dumbledore" is a better message to broadcast publicly, since it has a chance of swaying non-blood purists.
This may, in fact, be partly a matter of what Draco chose to emphasize when talking to Harry. At one point, he thinks to himself that fear of the magic going away (because of those damn mudbloods!) is the reason people become Death Eaters, but he doesn't say that to Harry, presumably because he knew Harry wouldn't find that convincing.
The "in the spirit of friendship" thing makes no sense if Lucius was imperioused.
A person without context would find Harry's continued friendship with Draco after Draco tortured him unfathomable, and yet it was true. Dumbledore announced to Harry that he would be a well kept prisoner in Hogwarts. That too, requires context to appreciate. A great many things that Dumbledore has done require a lot of context for justification.
We don't have the context of Malfoy's and Voldemort's relationship in the same way, and the friendship comment is hard to...
The new discussion thread (part 15) is 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 82. The previous thread passed 1000 comments as of the time of this writing, and so has long passed 500. Comment in the 13th thread until you read chapter 82.
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.
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