Well this took ice ages to get back to, and I apologize for that. (Also, this got long.)
It’s mainly the “I’ll tell him he has a chance to make me proud and be king (implying it’ll be here) if he’s good enough, but he doesn’t, and nothing he does can change that so the efforts he makes are pointless; also, I’ll allow racism against Jotuns to the point of considering them monsters to pervade Asgard (I’ll even confirm it for my sons) while knowing that he’s Jotun” aspect of Odin’s plan for Loki that I take issue with. Strategic, maybe, but really cold. Also, that plan basically assumed that an infant he knows very little about would not have certain traits—such as being curious, highly intelligent, and independent-minded—that could seriously mess things up. Which happened. Loki turned out far too smart and independent to be an obedient puppet. I get what Odin wanted, but this was…not the best way to go about it.
Odin and Loki do have some similarities, like the ones you listed. I suspect Loki actually learned some of those traits from Odin in an attempt to please him. But in other ways they’re very different.
Odin is the orchestrator of the system that holds Asgard on top of the Nine Realms, whereas Loki is the outsider who the system grinds down to keep everything working smoothly and maintain the status quo. As the one most harshly affected (of those on Asgard), he’s the one who’s faced with the system’s deep flaws, so he’s the one who points them out. He’s the agent of change. Odin is in the opposite position—he benefits by keeping things the way they have been. Their society’s different perception of them works in a similar way: no one mentions or seems to be aware of Odin’s wrongdoings, but they vilify Loki for actions that pale in comparison.
Also, Loki has the capacity to be self-sacrificing, while Odin’s never shown that (that we’ve seen). And Odin is more cruel—he smirks right after ‘your birthright was to die’—where Loki doesn’t visibly take pleasure causing people pain unless he’s under the Scepter’s influence (when he was ranting at Natasha). The difference in how they handle Thor’s feelings for Jane—Odin basically saying ‘you shouldn’t be with her because she’s mortal and not worth you’, with Loki going towards ‘you probably shouldn’t be with her because she’ll die and break your heart’—is pretty striking as well; Loki seems to understand emotions better. (Not that it’d be hard with Odin as the point of comparison, lol.)
Odin isn’t seen questioning what Bor told him about the Dark Elves until he can’t ignore it, but Loki’s been asking questions and finding his own answers for a while, as demonstrated in the earlier gifs. Odin can’t seem to consider another way of thinking (he refuses to discuss alternative options in TDW, and in both Thor 1 he’s outraged when Thor goes against his orders), where Loki appears to understand others’ thoughts and feelings well enough to predict them (he knew Sif/Heimdall/the W3 were going to betray him in advance). Odin is more violent; he conquered and held down the entire Nine Realms, while Loki needed to undergo a psychological breakdown (or get tortured/coerced/mind-warped) to go for large-scale bloodshed, and that didn’t get nearly as bad as Odin’s did.
I think Tom Hiddleston talked about it in the interviews from TDW—he said something about how Odin couldn’t understand Loki in part because they were so different, while Odin and Thor were more similar. Unfortunately I can’t find that interview just now I started looking but was too lazy to check more than the first few articles.
I definitely see where that’s coming from: Thor, like Odin, is at the top of Asgard’s system and to some degree blind to its flaws (though I think he was beginning to see them mid-TDW); they’re both extremely stubborn with their goals; they both have issues with controlling their temper (Odin gets shouty, Thor starts getting violent); they both tend towards self-righteousness (that I recall, we never see Odin doubt himself, and Thor only does during his banishment). They can also both be verbally harsh, especially with Loki (for Thor, see his conversation with Loki in the prison cell in TDW; I don’t think Odin needs an example). Their society generally overlooks both their flaws as well.
Obviously Thor does have his differences, in that he displays far more kindness than Odin (when he brings a mug to that coffee shop owner in the first movie), and he makes friends and allies very easily, but the similarities are there.
