Would you mind expanding on the "Revan and Carth are force-bonded" idea? I really like it, and I was just wondering what bits of evidence made you think of it?
Be happy to! *knuckle crack* I think I had an extended conversation about this one about a year and a half ago here, so lemme do my best to condense that.
That thought process started from out-of-universe mechanical considerations- it would likely need to be true so that F!Revan/Carth has an equivalent/symmetrical experience to Bastila/M!Revan- Both pairings already have an underpinning of mutual interdependence and redemption through love. I get myself into trouble by thinking that way a lot, but it’s the good kind of trouble.
In her explanation of what Force-bonds are and how, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, they’re formed, Bastila describes…exactly the circumstances of Revan’s escape from the Endar Spire and crash landing onto Taris with Carth: a couple of people are thrown together into a situation with significant danger of death, where they need to depend on each other to survive. The implicit assumption is that both people have to be Force-sensitive…and if you ask me (though that’s another headcanon hoedown in the making) Carth is. In KotOR II, we’re told that the canonical Revan, like the Exile, largely succeeded on the strength of an unusual capacity for recruiting and empowering allies by forging Force-bonds.
Three of your crew substantially foreshadow the reveal before it occurs. Bastila and Jolee both are known Force-sensitives, both are in on the secret from the beginning, and both probably knew Revan before Revan’s fall. Carth is none of those things, but he responds as if he had that kind of insight. I’d say it’s at least plausible that he was intuitively plugged into what was going on with Revan to an extent greater than what he, or anyone else consciously realized.
The “rhythm” of Revan and Carth’s conversations through most of KotOR, where you hear him fighting with himself about whether to trust her and how much self-disclosure is safe? You can interpret that as the emotional lability and paranoia that’s one feature of classic PTSD presentation, but you can also interpret it as someone who feels like he’s caught in the emotional equivalent of a tractor beam and, regardless of his comfort level or lack thereof, doesn’t have the choice to disengage. Bastila describes the same thing in a later conversation with Revan. This is where a Carth/DS!Revan relationship potentially gets incredibly squicky.
The clincher is when, if you’ve specified a LS!FRevan, the Exile meets with Carth on Citadel Station in KotOR II and insists that Revan is still alive, that if she wasn’t, he would know, and more or less quotes Master Zez-Kai Ell’s description of what a denied/deferred Force bond feels like from the inside, again, presumably without the academic background to have encountered that information before.
