I should take some of my rambling on discord over here so let me do a little dance people have probably had a million times since 2004, but what can I say, I am fashionably late. (Also keep in mind that I have only just started the second game so ssshhh if there's more there. You can do ominous smileys in the comments if you want.)
Thing is, while writing my little Revan has a meltdown one-shot I kinda made myself insane over Malak's and Revan's relationship. What we get of him in the game is pretty bog standard evil Sith dude (except for his ending bit, I respect him going 'yeah that probably was my bad oops' and then dying) but there's always the spectre hanging over everything of what was. Of Revan and Malak as best friends, Malak literally following them into a war and then into the dark. Malak always following. Arguably even when he betrayed them he was following, doing what they taught him. Twisted as it is, trying to kill Revan at this point was just another step on the same path. And the way the game frames it with only ever talking about how awesome Revan was and Malak was just kinda also there they almost set you up to think he was always jealous but I don't buy that. You don't throw your whole life away and follow someone into a war because you're jealous of them. You don't follow someone into death for that, in the context of Star Wars, you don't fall alongside and together with someone who you are not profoundly and intimately tied to. They had something going on there and I don't mean romantically (though I have already seen that before as well and I respect that, that's just not what I'm looking for), but it was something insane. I need them to be super weird about each other to the point of painful codependency. I need that break when they fell and Revan sliced his jaw off to hit like a truck. I need Malak trying to kill Revan to be an expression of horribly twisted undying loyalty that ate itself.
And that whole thought process turned into and came out of the idea that (my) Revan considers killing Malak a mercy at the point of the game. In their logic killing him is better than letting him become what they did. Risking the Jedi shattering him like they did to Revan. Killing him is not revenge nor even necessarily for the greater good, it's saving him from what Revan considers the worse fate.
Anyway yeah I need these two to be horrendously weird and loyal to each other, and that being both what saved and killed them in the end.
