Re: Unanswered Questions

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 03:24:19 -0500, Ron Hunter <rphunter@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

I will grant that he may have wanted to save Lily, but only for his own
purposes, and to expect Riddle to acquiesce to this if it didn't match
his own desires is to not understand Riddle. IF Lily had allowed Riddle
to kill Harry, then she would have been as bereft of humanity as Riddle,
and thus a potential servant for him. In either case, Snape wasn't
going to get her, and I can't imagine that he wouldn't understand that.


He did. He went to Dumbledore to convince him to hide her. If Snape
had genuinely trusted Voldemort to spare Lily, he wouldn't have
defected. But if Voldemort was trying to do Snape a favor, you can
bet that he only did so because he had a selfish reason to do so - the
old carrot & stick method, reward & punish. Snape had done LV a major
service, telling him about the deadly prophecy, and had also then
turned spy against Dumbledore and been smart enough to pull that off.
The sort of man you'd want to keep around. If Voldemort knew that
Snape wanted him to let Lily live, he would have far more to gain by
sparing her (insuring Snape's gratitude and loyalty, avoiding a making
him an enemy, keeping her as a bargaining chip for the future...) than
by killing her. But even then, being the heartless thing that he is,
Voldemort really didn't put much effort into doing the favor, and
decided against it entirely when she disobeyed him.

Bear in mind, by the way, that this is a minor part of the overall
Snape/Lily theory. While I'm completely convinced that Snape wanted
to keep Lily alive (which is why he defected), I'm far less certain
that he asked Voldemort to spare her. That is just a bonus, another
neat twist in the plot, that still seems more likely than anything
else I've been able to come up with so far. But Voldemort could have
had another reason that we don't know about...



.

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