another thing that's really uncomfortable about the comics backstory is that it's very often like. 1. loki was adopted as a ~10 year old, not a baby, and therefore 2. his heritage was never even remotely a secret. and in this circumstance i feel like thor being abusive (esp from the start) is... so much worse?
like, in the mcu with its secrecy and early adoption, you can say that if thor mistreats loki, it's at least partly because he's semi-consciously picking up on their parents not treating loki as equal, but he doesn't know why, so it's just How Things Are (and always have been, literally as long as he can remember!). like, loki being abused is normalised at a fundamental level for thor. and if odin and frigga don't intervene, well, they've already proven their willingness to treat loki as inferior by lying to him his whole life. the mcu is definitely its own kind of horrifying, but it's a quiet and insidious kind, and you can see how the characters could be gradually led into worse and worse actions over time.
whereas in comics canon, where everything is out in the open from the start... thor mistreating loki just looks like straightforward, conscious prejudice. even if he claims otherwise, it's really hard to believe that space racism ISN'T a factor. sure, you just decided your adopted-brother-from-a-completely-dehumanised-enemy-species is your inferior for... no reason. convincing! and the parents not intervening is like... they don't even have anything to hide??? why would you even be hands-off about this unless you literally, consciously want it to happen? it's literally just like. "hey 'dad' you know the boy you told to treat me like a brother last week? well he isn't doing that. he's using me as a punchbag instead" "oh. how sad, my son." "are you going to tell him to stop???" "no."
like, when mcu thor calls loki his brother i believe him. i really do think that mcu thor truly and deeply sees loki as his brother, and himself and loki as fundamentally tied together (to a potentially unhealthy extent), etc etc. but sometimes when comics thor calls loki his brother it's like... okay, but you've never treated him like a brother. you have spent your whole life punishing him for being different at every opportunity. but now that you want to scold him, you're brothers? this is not love! this is an excuse!!!
like. i may not be being entirely fair to the comics here; there may be far better and more complex versions i haven't found yet. but just based on my experience so far... in the mcu, "they hurt you but they're your family" is this elaborate manipulative mind game where everyone involved really does love each but finds ways to justify the abuse anyway, so love and abuse are inseparable and often expressed by the exact same act, and this causes fundamental damage to the sons' concept of what love even is, whether love without abuse is *possible*, whether ceasing to love "family" is *possible*, etc etc... whereas in many of the comics, "they hurt you but they're your family" is like. those are literally the only two things they do. they hurt you, and then they SAY you're their family to stake ownership while doing absolutely nothing to prove their alleged love, not even the barest scraps of affection, ever. like come on??? i would cause the apocalypse over and over too!!!
(and as i said before - the situation being bad doesn't make the writing bad. but this continuous hand-wringing and pretending that thor's part in it is more complicated and more sympathetic than they ever actually show... does.)
