Please forgive the lack of pictures, but I offer links to videos and transcripts:
Before Thor’s coronation, Loki trying to calm down Thor’s nerves and reassure him:
Loki: “I’ve looked forward to this day as long as you have. You are my brother, my friend, sometimes I’m envious, but never doubt that I love you.”
“I love you, too, brother?” Nah. “Thank you.” Okay, Thor prefers to show affection through actions, given how he clasps Loki’s neck and looks at him fondly, but it clearly never occurs to him that Loki might want to hear the words said to him, if he is willing to say them so readily to Thor.
Thor smashes Loki onto a rocky floor on a mountain, dust flew when Loki landed and he moans in pain, even laughs a little desperately:
Thor: “Where is the Tesseract?”
Loki: “I missed you too.”
And only then bothers to express any concern for Loki, only asks him once who is controlling him, and never ever again, on-screen, asks Loki about who was controlling him nor asks him what happened to him after he let go at the Bifrost to die, just follows Odin’s lead in assuming Loki was pitching a fit.
In Thor’s favor, Loki was not very forthcoming, but in Thor’s disfavor, he admitted to Nick Fury and the Avengers that Loki was not himself, and never tried to follow up on that once they were back in Asgard???
When Thor catches Frigga using a spell to communicate with Loki in his dungeon cell in Thor: The Dark World:
Thor: “Still seeing good in him, don’t you?”
Frigga: “Welcome home, son.”
Thor: “Why indulge him with gifts, with visits?”
Frigga: “I think if you ask the guards, they will tell you I was never there.”
Thor: “Mother, Loki is not the boy you once knew.”
Frigga: “Nor are you, and I loved you no less when your Father banished you to us.”
Thor: “Do you ever regret sharing your magic with him?”
Frigga: “No, you and your father cast large shadows, I’d hoped by sharing my gifts with Loki that he could find some sun(light?) for himself.“
Thor: “I admire your optimism, love and passion. I wish I could still share it.”
Frigga: “Now, am I to take it by your presence that the Nine Realms still stand?”
Thor: “Yes, they do, I came to tell Father the good news.”
And the conversation moves on to other subjects.
Bonus context: Thor was not present for Loki’s sentence, never heard Odin saying that Loki’s birthright was to die as a child, nor his spiteful rubbing in that he would never see Frigga again and was only spared his life because of her holy fuck.
Thor never asks Frigga if she knew what happened to his brother (*), how he really was faring, etc. Anything other than condeming Loki’s fall from grace and questioning why she wasn’t shunning him too.
(*) Could he have asked Frigga or even Loki off-screen? Possibly, but why ommit that from the movie or any of the released-to-the-public deleted scenes? And if Thor was trying, but failing, to find out what happened to Loki, would he be trying to discourage Frigga’s visits and gifts to win his trust back?
I also firmly believe that Loki never told Thor and/or Frigga of Thanos, because they never mentioned him as a possible threat, they were both too chill pre-Convergence.
Thor would have, at a bare minimum, told Odin/his Asgardian friends, told S.H.I.E.L.D., told the Avengers, told Jane, told all their allies in all the realms to prepare against another possible invasion on their side of the universe, because the Mad Titan is angry and will want his magic stones back.
tl;dr: I think that, outside of Thor: Ragnarok, which is its own retconny thing, Thor does love Loki, but it’s a child’s understanding of love, its development and maturity stiffled at least partially by Odin’s A+ parenting of the two of them, but mostly by a lifetime of being indulged as the crown prince.
Even as adults, Thor sees Loki as his old playmate, a lifelong companion in his adventures (see the kind of arguments he tries to use with Loki to make him stop in the Avengers), but not as his own person with his own dreams, hopes, fears and thoughts.
Thor expresses at best, humor, and at worst, condescencion, confusion, hurt, disapointment and sometimes out and out violence whenever Loki shows individual agency that happens to not align with what Thor wants or expects of him.
I love their relationship! I love how it was progressing! I wish they had forged a genuine understanding of each other, and grown together and individually; that potential for change and self-actualization was so interesting and what drew me to them in the first place! Overcoming tension to find each other, their real selves, not what Odin nor anyone else thought of them.
I hate how Thor’s character, Loki’s character, and their complex relationship was upended in Thor: Ragnarok just for shit and giggles, and how then Loki was made to die a weird, drawn-out, unnecessary, violent and graphic death because Thanos is the shiny new complex villain, everyone be in awe of Thanos!
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