To me, the biggest contrast here is T'challa appears as a grown man in his vision, while Erik appears as a child. Both reflect their inner mind, their core emotional state.
As a man, T'challa is emotionally honest about his grief and the fact that he’s not ready to let his dad go. Erik, on the other hand, says he’s accepted his father’s death, that “It’s just life around here”, but his appearance as a boy suggests that it’s a lie told from immaturity, one that comes from the belief that tears are a sign of weakness.
Their reactions after waking up from thier visions further add to this. T'challa is smiling. He’s overjoyed to have seen his father. While he still misses T'chaka, he’s truly at peace with his father’s passing. Erik is in distress when he wakes up, confused, and maybe a bit disoriented. The absence of his father was a huge blow to him, and the flood of memories that the vision brought back were too much for him. They left him emotionally wrecked.
Good points. I’d argue that for Erik, while being disconnected from the culture and home he knew so little about was a big challenge for him, I think the bigger challenge was not having someone to guide him through all his challenges. If Erik had his father - or any father figure - around to teach him, it wouldn’t have mattered as much what culture he grew up in.
T'challa faced challenges in his life too, though obviously not the same ones. But the biggest difference wasn’t that one was raised as a prince, and one was raised as a pauper, its that one was raised as a son, and the other was raised as an outcast.
Also I think just before N’Jobu died he was talking to “James” about breaking Erik’s mom out of prison? Idk what became of Erik’s mom, either she was in prison a long time or died there as seems to happen to a suspicious number of Black women. So Erik was left entirely alone thanks to T’Chaka and Zuri. He was avenging the orphan he became and could never move on from--his soul was stuck at the point it was wounded and, brilliant and ruthless though he was, he never grew up emotionally. That’s why his vision showed him as he truly was, a boy who was still mourning his father and hurting too much to even admit that he mourned.