Thor loves Loki. A lot.
Thor has done things to hurt Loki. He’s put Loki in his place. He’s failed to condemn Odin. He’s refused to mourn over their mother. He didn’t visit Loki when he was imprisoned. He didn’t plead for Loki after the events of Avengers. The list goes on.
In every instance, he had a reason for how he behaved. He put Loki in his place because Thor was insecure, too. He was the child with all the expectations. He also learned that behavior from Odin, who we see put Loki and Thor in their places over the course of the movies. He didn’t mourn Frigga with Loki, or visit Loki, or plead on Loki’s behalf because he was justifiably upset about what Loki had done on Midgard. Because whatever Loki had become wasn’t really his brother, so he avoided the pain this… impostor would inflict.
Understandable. Still wrong. Still hurtful. Still convinces Loki that Thor doesn’t care. That no one cares after Frigga passes.
Loki loves Thor. A lot.
Loki has done things to hurt Thor. Fuck, he killed Thor once! Enough said (and yet you could say so much more).
In every instance, he had a reason for how he behaved. Even when he killed Thor, it was part of a serious breakdown (and perhaps not even well thought out). And there’s motivations for everything else Loki does, too (that’s why he’s an excellent villain–they’ve made a character you feel sympathy for, even while you must condemn his actions).
Understandable. Still wrong. Still hurtful. Still convinces Thor that Loki’s just bad. That he’s lost his brother (sometimes literally in the deceased sort of way).
My point is that it’s both true that they love each other, and true that they’ve both got a lot to apologize for and work through. And if they’re going to do that, it’s going to have to be a process that begins with them both acknowledging that neither is without motivations or lack love for the other.
Honestly, I think a big part of their problem is thinking the other cares less, or not at all. Loki’s whole “I don’t have the Tesseract” bit where he’s certain Thor’s only there for that (when obviously he’s their for Loki). Thor’s statement to Frigga that Loki’s not the boy she knew, and therefore not the brother Thor knew, either. His confusion over Loki attacking him at the end of Thor and denying their brotherhood. Jeez, they just keep feeding this assumption in one another!!!
I wish there were more people in the fandom who were willing to point out BOTH characters’ flaws and misdeeds at the same time, in the same posts. Though come to think of it… even when people do add nuance to their analyses, the stans for one character or the other will read any criticism or acknowledgment of flaws as a heinous attack and come after the person trying to admit nuance, assuming that they must be a stan for Character X and therefore hate Character Y.
I know that when talking amongst ourselves, people who are Loki fans in the first instance (I don’t consider myself a “stan” for anyone) have absolutely no problem admitting Loki’s faults. @imaginetrilobites tells me the same is true of primarily-Thor fans when they talk among themselves (I don’t know, they mostly don’t talk to me). But somehow when conversation happens between the two communities, each feels the need to present their own favorite as immaculate and the other character as a horrible person, solely responsible for all of the problems in their relationship – and this happens even when some people on both sides are Thor/Loki shippers. Like, WTF? Why would you ship your favorite character with someone you think is a horrible person?
There are probably some outlying members of both fandoms who really, truly believe their fave is completely blameless in everything: Loki stans who insist that Thor’s bullying and Odin’s bad parenting excuse everything he does in Thor 1, and that Thanos literally brainwashed him instead of just manipulating and/or torturing him; Thor stans who think that Thor was already perfect even in the first Thor movie and Odin banished him not because he had done anything wrong or needed to learn humility, but only because Thor had disobeyed him personally. But I’ve had a few discussions across party lines that lead me to believe that we don’t disagree as much as the vitriolic “debates” make it look like.
Admitting that your favorite did something wrong is not admitting defeat. If we’re good consumers of media, we love characters because they’re complicated and imperfect; because their virtues and their flaws are interestingly entangled; because they do bad things for what might, from a certain perspective, look like good reasons. Do your fellow fans and yourselves the courtesy of acknowledging the ways in which that’s true.
Loki is the Philosopher King 