#harry literally goes through this entire thing in his inner monologue in the chapter after SWM

[seriousbrat]

But how ? Snape was the one who started their first fight at 11, and we don’t know what Snape could’ve done to James before SWM. By your logic James could’ve been the bullied one as well and he was just reacting to it and defending himself in a bad way, even Dumbledore calls it a rivalry. Snape was hanging around with soon-to-be Death Eaters, bullied muggleborns by calling them mudbloods, and had a list of spells for his enemies. 🤷‍♀️ he had friends ( Avery, Mulciber, Wilkes ) they were simply not present at the moment.

what do you mean Snape started their first fight? He and Lily were minding their own business when James jumped in and said "Who wants to be in Slytherin? I think I'd leave, wouldn't you?"

"We don't know what Snape could've done to James before SWM" actually we do know what happened before SWM: Sirius tried to kill him by sending him down the Whomping Willow. We also know that James attacked Sev simply because Sirius said he was bored. Sev wasn't the instigator- he was, again, minding his own business. When Lily asked James what Sev had ever done to him, he replied "it's more the fact that he exists." How can that even remotely be interpreted as self-defence lol.

We're only shown that ONE scene, and we're shown it for a reason. That's how fiction works. If the reality had been that Snape was secretly the main instigator and that SWM was just reactive violence, that's what we would have been shown. Amazing how many times I have to say this but these aren't real people who actually did things, so when analysing the characters and their dynamics we have to work from what's shown in the text, not baseless speculation about what we would have liked to have been the case. SWM was clearly meant to show that James and Sirius bullied Snape at school. Sirius and Remus don't deny this when Harry confronts them later.

Snape doing other bad things is not mutually exclusive with his having been bullied. It's not even relevant. I think the problem here is you're thinking in terms that are too black and white, as if there can only be one "good" side to every situation and the "good" characters have to be faultless and pure, while the "bad" characters can never be sympathetic or have suffered. That's not how reality works and it's not how well-written fiction should work. Even if Snape had been pure evil and gone on a murder spree it still wouldn't change the objective fact that he was bullied, like it's not relevant to the question at hand.

As for Dumbledore saying it was a rivalry, I wrote recently about how I don't think he was totally wrong to do so. Honestly, I don't think a rivalry is mutually exclusive with a bullying situation either, necessarily. Like I said in that post, I personally feel that Draco bullied Harry, so the comparison is accurate enough even though Harry (and the reader) automatically assume that Harry and James are equivalent in the situation, rather than James's role being much more like Draco's. Obviously Dumbledore did not reveal the full truth of the situation but here's my hot take: Snape literally would not have wanted him to. Also, there's arguably no need to tell a traumatised 11 year old about how his father who was murdered was a dick at school but maybe that's just me.