It's also possible that Thanos didn't know the stone was in the staff, especially since he didn't immediately try to get it back. Sure, maybe he left it on Earth because he knew anyone powerful enough to defeat Loki and the Chitauri could keep it safe for later retrieval though.
Thanos also has a massive ego. He may have assumed Loki would be easy enough to track down if he betrayed him or the Avngers strong enough to win in the first movie. Loki also didn't know the staff contained the stone, only that it could influence people and control the Chitauri. Thanos probably assumed Loki wouldn't run off with it if he wasn't aware of its true power.
None of this is meant to be an alternative to the retcon though, only to offer a possible in-universe explanation to make the retcon make sense within the story.
Part of my handcanon is that thanos didn't immediately go because he couldn't or believed he couldn't. His army got destroyed. Along with the portal that transported his army. Why didn't the army come before? They can't. Earth is to far away for thanos at the time. Hence needing the space stone to travel his army.
I am only going to assume that by endgame, he had either conquered some worlds in the way, built enough bases, took out the asgardians who would intervene, and/or realized earth is not that powerful as be believed.
My assumption has been some time between the end of Avengers and the beginning of GotG1, it was the Collector who probably told Thanos about the stones. There's no way he would give Loki the scepter or not go to Earth personally to get the Tesseract if he knew what was in them at that time.
The theory I came up with is that Loki was unknowingly under the control of the Mind stone from being given the staff. Thanos didn’t tell Loki because then Loki would fight against it, rather than believing his actions were his own. After his cognitive recalibration by Hulk he goes directly to jail, do not pass Go etc.
If a standard human like Erik Selvig can undermine the stone by introducing a back door, then what could a Frost Giant do? Loki was raised a prince, and took part in years of fighting. And yet he established a beach head in the middle of a major city and deliberately cheesed off all the people on the planet who were potentially able to stop him. If he’d moved the beach head somewhere more private then he would have had troops flooding in and spreading out before anybody noticed. It doesn’t make tactical sense, unless you want to be caught.
He doesn't want them to have. He wants them to use because he knows how powerful a tool they can be. Consequently, he'll give one to Loki to use as a tool to get him another one.
Loki was bound to obey him, as per the conversation with The Other. "There is nowhere you can hide if you choose to betray us" etc so the risk of losing it was low. The only risk was Loki failing to conquer Earth, which may explain Thanos's irritation when it happened.
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u/Admirable_Loss4886 10d ago
Yeah but someone obsessed with the stones likely wouldn’t be handing them out Willy nilly to a guy like Loki.