Data and Lore are two sides of the same dehumanisation coin: being so functionally convenient that people excuse your natural otherness [reduced to your utility] and being viewed as so fundamentally wrong that no action can change your perceived worth [reduced to your nature]
Watching Data's inability to take Lore's side against their creator in Brothers, I felt like their misunderstanding largely comes from this difference.
A deep guilt over not being as functional as they could be runs through both characters. Data's desire to be human stems from pondering whether he is good enough at being someone a person should be, some gold standard at being human. His arc ultimately proves he doesn't have to exist in a certain way to deserve life and respect — but the insecurity remains, buried deep, and is constantly revived by others' bigotry. I might even argue that one of the reasons he was deemed worthy of the Academy and starship was his usefulness, which laid the foundation for the "I have to be fully functional to be deserving" mindset. That's why "I'm not less perfect than Lore" cuts so deeply.
The same foundation exists for Lore (from longer exposure to humanity pre Dr. Soong's disappearance, constant evaluation with negative public opinion), but he strikes me as someone who pitied the question "Why didn't he just fix me?" for so long that he finally understood: no amount of functionality would earn him the respect he wanted. The lie about being a newer version feels like a last, desperate attempt at it anyway.
And these two positions colliding feels like being in and out of the illusion of close acceptability. Data was willing to listen to their inventor, and hung onto every word—even after the revelation about his functionality. But Lore? He just saw how obviously he was being ignored and belittled, and how nothing Lore could have done or said would have changed the old man's mind about the impossibility of fixing him.
Lore had clearly abandoned the idea of trying to earn humanity's love long before Data brought him to the Enterprise. But having to look his creator in the eye and know—beyond any doubt—that who he was, at his core, was the thing they couldn't accept? That was its own kind of wound, I'm sure.
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Anyway, let me know if I'm wrong about any of these characterizations.....I've only been into star trek for about two months now.....and I'm still working my way through it........
