Lily had a chance to live thanks to Snape WAS :Re: Did Harry Notice?

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 182880

Carol earlier:
> >> Just where she's supposed to run with no wand and no Invisibility
Cloak, I don't know. She, too, has trusted to the Fidelius Charm and
Peter. At least, thanks to Snape, she has a chance to live, giving her
sacrifice meaning. 
> <SNIP of the whole post>
> 
> 
> Alla:
> 
> I just want to say that I am deliberately snipping your whole post
since I choose to comment only upon small part of it.
> 
> But when I see "thanks to Snape Lily has a chance to live " this 
picture always strikes me as, how to put it, well incomplete. So I 
will just add that I think she had a chance to die thanks to Snape
first and foremost.
> 
> Alla,
> 
> who thinks that nobody who suffered in GH during that horrible night 
> owes Snape anything, since what happened there in my opinion cannot 
> be changed by any good deeds that Snape attempted to make.


Carol responds:

I see your point, and I agree that the picture here is incomplete. But
it was a remark made in passing amid the discussion of James's (to me)
disappointing failure to fight Voldemort.

All I meant was that, thanks to Wormtail's betrayal, James had no
chance of survival. Voldemort intended to kill him whether he put up a
fight or not, and he did exactly that. Nor was Harry supposed to have
 a chance of survival since he was the primary intended victim. But
Lily *did* have a chance to live, and was told several times to stand
aside. In the unlikely event that she had done so, Voldemort would not
have killed her. He would have left her to her grief and remorse and
Severus Snape. (Had she raised a wand, however, I think that he would
have killed her on the spot. Snape or no Snape, promise or no promise.
But then there would have been no chance to live and no
self-sacrifice, and Harry, too, would have died.) As Dumbledore and
Voldemort repeatedly tell Harry, Lily had a chance to live and chose
to die in place of her son. (Voldemort, once he had killed her,
thought that she would die along with her son, but it didn't work that
way. The choice that he gave her activated the ancient magic and
caused his attempt to kill Harry to deflect onto himself.) That
chance, given her by Snape's love and repentance, and that *choice* to
die, was not offered to James. Lily's death, not James', made possible
the ancient love magic that saved Harry and gave him the power to
defeat Voldemort.

I wasn't thinking of the earlier eavesdropping and the reporting of
the partial Prophecy to Voldmemort, which Snape repented. I was only
thinking that Lily's self-sacrifice--and Harry's subsequent survival,
along with the vaporization of Voldemort--were made possible because
Snape asked Voldemort to spare Lily and Voldemort actually came close
to honoring that request. He gave Lily a chance to live (which, of
course, she refused because she wanted to save her son instead of
herself).

Take Snape out of the equation if you like. Lily had a chance to live
and James didn't. Lily chose to die; James would have been killed
regardless.

Even though I knew that it was Lily's sacrifice that saved Harry (and
vaporized Voldemort and all the rest), I didn't want James's death to
be the meaningless murder that it was depicted in this scene. I wanted
him to show the heroism that we'd been led to expect of him. I thought
that you felt the same way.

Carol, who was not focusing here on either Snape's mistake or his
repentance, central though both are to the entire HP saga, only on
Lily's choice vs. James's sadly pointless death, which was not what I
was hoping for or expecting