#lily for staying friends with someone she knew was shady and prejudiced against people like her

[gh-0-stcup]

Shame would be my guess. Neither of them are particularly open about their treatment of Snape back in the day. When they do discuss it, they focus on justifying their actions. Snape was vicious too, Snape loved Dark magic, Snape was a bigot who became a Death Eater, etc.

Bringing up Lily's childhood friendship with Snape makes things more complicated and probably just wasn't something Sirius or Remus wanted to get into.

Additionally, Snape and Lily's friendship did not exactly end amicably. She cut ties with him because he was a bigot getting increasingly involved with some very bad people. He went on to become a part of a group that advocated for genocide of people like Lily.

It's a very heavy, complicated conversation to have with a 15 year old. Especially considering of the two people actually involved, one isn't around to talk about it and the other has zero desire to. It probably didn't seem worth dragging up, given the friendship had been very over 6 years prior to Lily's death.

Now that I’m thinking of it, how was it never mentioned to Harry by Sirius or Remus that Snape and Lily were friends??? I mean with how much attention James spent on Lily and Sirius spent on Snape there was no way they didn’t know they were close friends. So either they weren’t as close as Snape thought they were, they weren’t friendly in public (lily with shame from snape, snape with shame from lily being a muggleborn, or slytheirn vs gryffindor issues) or they deliberately kept this fact from Harry.