Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix question

I don't understand why everyone loves Snape. He bullied kids that to me negates the sympathy I would have felt for him due to being bullied by James going up. "Hurt people, hurt people," is a stupid phrase for people who can't take accountability. I think it's unfair to compare them morally since James died so young. We'll never know who he could have become whether that would have been a good person or not. I do think that in terms of maturity the case can be made that James grew to be a more mature adult than Snape was as their is no evidence that he continued bullying past adolescence. I could write pages on how Snape doesn't deserve the world's sympathy for doing one right thing out of the several evil things he did but that is not the question or discussion at hand haha.

i dont know, by the end of the movie i really started to like severus. he was treated badly by harry's father and in the end he turned out to be a "seceret spy" for dumbeldore. he was the one that dumbeldore trusted the most. also it broke my heart when i found out he loved harry's mother ):

severus fs

I feel like Snape is better. James was super mean to him, and I really started to like him at the end of the series.

I’m going with James. And not because he was perfect… he was a teenage show-off with way too much confidence and not enough sense. But he grew. He stopped being a bully, he matured, he loved fiercely, and when it counted, he stepped up without hesitation.

Snape, meanwhile, is complicated in that “I want to shake you and hug you at the same time but mostly shake you” way. He had a tragic past and did brave things, but he never let go of his bitterness. He saved Harry, yes, but he also hurt him. A lot. And he stayed cruel to kids who had nothing to do with his trauma.

So if we’re talking who turned out to be the better person, not just the more interesting character, James wins for me too. He did the hard thing: he changed.

While we can all agree that Snape was not a great person, he shouldn’t be entirely to blame. The people in his life made him this way. His father was abusive and James sexually assaulted him in his formative years, James wasn’t a saint, he bullied people for fun, because he was bored.