Snape fans somehow manage to make Snape seem worse then he was

OK, so Severus Snape is one of the most controversial characters in Harry Potter, in some ways, intentionally, in other ways, not so much. He's very much meant to be hard to figure out. Seemingly a jackass and an obvious bad guy, as the story goes into his backstory (short version: Among other thins, he was relentlessly bullied by Harry's father and fell in love with Harry's mother, both of which heavily recontextualize their relationship), he becomes more sympathetic, but we are kept guessing as to his actual allegenecience up to the end. Throughout the 2000s, after the final book, it was pretty common to paint him as a tragic hero. And one common manifestation was to have him be pissed off that James "stole" his beloved Lily. And a lot of people have criticized this, and often projected it onto canon Snape, saying he was an obsessive entitled stalker.

Onto my main point: What I find funny is that this characterization, this idea that Snape thought of James as someone who stole Lilly from him, and himself as this wronged Nice Guy, is actually not something SNAPE himself believed. For context, we know how Snape and Lily's friendship ended, and it was because Snape called her a racial slur. But my point is that Snape, for all his faults, seems to have recognized that it was his own damn fault she stopped being friends with him in the end, that he only had himself to blame for that part of things. That's the whole joke of the chapter title: The chapter where we see that moment, of him getting bullied and then calling Lilly a racial slur, is called "Snape's Worst Memory", and we're meant to assume that it's referring to the bullying, but later events make it clear that it's because that was his greatest regret, the moment he lost her forever. Snape in canon ultimately had the maturity to accept what a lot of his fans don't, which is that it was his own damm fault he lost Lilly as a friend.