This is all to say that Thor was never Odin's first choice for anything, born as he was under Hela's shadow, born as he was to the purpose of replacing her, born as he was to the fact that Odin did not want her replaced in the first place and it was only bc Hela's ambition outstripped Odin's caution that he had to put her down
That is to say that Odin was always going to be disappointed in Thor, never mind the fact that he was also an anxious and sensitive child, who cried easily and was afraid of things like ghost stories and the dark. He was strongly built, bigger than his peers, and though he always won easily at sport and play, one could easily see how he held back.
(Hela never held back; Hela hurt her fellow children for sport and profit.)
And that's not even touching on the fact that he was always fussing after that Jotun foundling, tending to it and shielding it and mothering it.
By the time Thor met his father for the first time, face to face, he was 8 and Odin had already spent those years nursing his prejudices against him, and there was nothing Thor could do by then to make it up to him.
Anyway this is getting off topic, bc the thing I wanted to talk about is the fact that had Thor and Loki not been the unaccountably, inseparably, soul-bondedness kind of close as they were, they would have had to have been at each other's throats their whole lives. "There are no second princes on Asgard" is an adage that gets thrown around a lot (by me) and it means exactly that: had they not been the sort of unnatural closeness that they were, one of them would had to have killed the other in order to secure his place as heir. It is the way things are done; it is how things have to be.
(I think that this accounts for Thor's complete calm and acceptance when Loki sends the destroyer to Midgard after him in thor1. It has always been Loki's right to kill him in order to claim the throne; it has always his right to kill Loki if he'd ever thought it necessary. But he never did, and he never thought those old rights would have to be invoked between the two of them, but he's always known about them. They both have. It is simply the way things are)
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