Alternate title: linkin_park_numb.mp3

IMAGE CONTENT WARNING: BODY HORROR (LOTS OF EYES), GRAPHIC DEPICTION OF PHYSICAL CHILD ABUSE, BLOOD, MENTION OF SUICIDE

Sidebar before we begin: Malik never refers to Rishid as his brother, but he basically his brother and guardian, so I lump him in as a sibling to refer to him and Malik's sister Isis together. Rishid is an Ishtar and canon cannot change my mind about that. ANYWAY--

Setting the foundation:



Malik was born into an isolated funerary cult. He grew up inside the tomb system that ran underneath the abandoned village of Kul Elna. From all canon indications, his clan was actually split from another faction of the tombkeeper cult, and the Ishtars were more rigid and traditionalist. Malik's father was the head of the clan, and the eldest son of the leader was to be the heir of the Tombkeepers and keep the clan perpetuating until the return of the Pharaoh's soul.

Per his own words, Malik's life has been full of humiliation and misery. He shows signs of depression from a young age. Since he is the heir to the cult, he is forbidden from leaving the tombs. He isn't shown interacting with anyone outside of his immediate family, and can be assumed to be poorly socialized due to his lack of healthy, varied relationships. It's implied that his father is abusive in both a physical and emotional context.

The thing about Malik is that his lack of emotional support and regular abuse was normalized. When he is forced to undergo the horrific Tombkeeper Initiation on his tenth birthday, he was so thoroughly traumatized by it that he developed a split personality solely so he could cope. His trauma presented itself with emotional disturbances and externalizing behavior - but all of that was also reinforced within his dysfunctional family.




pictured: a very normal reaction to have after undergoing immense psychological and physical trauma

Approximately a year after the initiation, Malik finally convinced Rishid and Isis to let him go outside. They reminded him that this would be breaking the law, and Malik knew this, but he still wanted to go. He is still utterly miserable at this point because how do you recover from your father carving arcane secrets into your back for hours and then sending you off to your room that is essentially a prison. You just can't come back from that. Still, Malik's siblings do pity their miserable brother and help him trick dear ol' dad so Malik can go outside for a couple of hours. HAHA OH!! BUT THINGS GET WORSE!! BECAUSE OF COURSE IT DOES, BECAUSE EVERYTHING DOESN'T SUCK ENOUGH.

So of course Malik is very excited about the outside world. He has no idea how even rural Egypt has progressed in the tender year 1991, with magazines and TVs and generally seeing more than two people at a time. He is happy for like the first time in his entire life.
Then Shadi, that fucker, shows up with an ominous message about a family tragedy, which spooks Isis enough into telling Malik it's time to go back home. Malik is sad and confused because he liked going outside :( He also develops a fascination for motorcycles, as they symbolize freedom.



They go home. Turns out, to keep this secret isolated cult secret and isolated, there is an alarm system! Which was tripped when Isis and Malik left! So for probably two whole hours, Rishid had been abused by the Patriach, which Isis and Malik walk in to see. Needless to say, Malik loses his mind. Rishid is more of a protector and guardian than his dad ever was, and the poor kid was at his limit. He snaps. More accurately, he dissociates and Dark Malik takes over and murders his father in a very gruesome manner. Once Rishid regains consciousness, he is able to calm Malik down. Malik has no idea about his split personality or what he did.

THEN SHADI SHOWS UP AGAIN AND VAGUES ABOUT HOW, OH, THIS IS THE WILL OF THE PHARAOH LMAO and just ollies outtie without giving context to this grieving child. This plants the seeds of revenge in his tiny, damaged mind, as he believes that Shadi is the Pharaoh and killed Dad Ishtar. Despite the abuse, Malik is still very deep in his filial piety. More on that later.

He and Rishid run away. There's a five year gap that isn't expanded on, but within those five years, Malik uses the Millennium Rod - which he stole before he ran off - to establish a crime syndicate and steal two of the three God Cards. It's implied that he spends his time searching for the Pharaoh, as he is only focused on revenge for his family.

Then Battle City happens which is just a painfully boring arc to read because it's has multi-chapter card games, but the point of that was Isis trying to entrap Malik so she could bring him home, because he just abandoned her in the tomb when he ran away five years prior. The Ishtars are incredibly relevant in this arc and yet all their important lore exists outside card games, like so:


tmw you have a murder-suicide pact with your brother figure because you only have two options: do or die

His canon point is the Rishid vs. Jounouchi duel, when he dissociates. I picked this point in particular because he was still an awful little gremlin with a lot of development potential, and it gave me a convenient excuse to not deal with Dark Malik stuff. However, we gotta Unpack All That, because Dark Malik is still a facet of his personality, even if fandom doesn't want to believe that. It gives us pretty good insight into how Malik perceives the world and himself.

SO LET'S DIVE INTO MALIK'S COMPLETELY WRECKED MENTAL HEALTH:



We're starting with the big one: Dark Malik. At his core, Dark Malik is a dissociated part of Malik's personality, formed to cope with the pain and trauma of the Tombkeeper Initiation. While he isn't fully integrated into Malik's personality, he's still dependent on Primary Malik's thoughts, feelings, and memories to function. He IS Malik, even if he has a little bit more character autonomy than maybe a mental illness should have. But by looking at Dark Malik as another facet of Primary Malik, it paints a sad portrait of just how repressed Malik really is. Malik is very, very deep in denial about the things that happened to him, and takes the approach of "conceal, don't feel" to new heights long before Elsa could cry about having a single responsibility. The Pharaoh is only a convenient excuse to lash out, but Dark Malik doesn't discriminate: he wants to hurt EVERYONE, he wants to see them suffer, and he enjoys it. While he is very upfront about this, there's another side that isn't quite as clear: Malik absolutely hates himself.


pictured: malik making fun of himself. very cool, very healthy

For being a villain, you'd think having a super saiyan hatred version of yourself would be a boon to your murder plans, but no. Malik does not like Dark Malik. Malik does not like when Dark Malik points out the truth: that they killed their father - it's implied that Malik knew this all along, but because of his denial, refused to accept reality for what it was. To acknowledge the truth would completely unravel the false reality he built for himself that enabled him to angrily push through his depression and have the ambition to try and free his family. He would have to acknowledge that he is a bad person. He would have to acknowledge that his dad was not a good person either and, honestly, he never quite gets there. He never holds his father responsible for his actions either, and for setting this awful wheel in motion. Again: Malik is very deep in his filial piety, and respects and fears his father's power. He had been conditioned from day one to accept this as normal, and he isn't about to challenge his entire worldview and recognize just how shitty and awful everything is. He so badly wants to justify his own actions to himself because he's a lost, hurting kid who has zero coping mechanisms to fall back on.



At the end of the day, Malik cares so little about himself that he tips into suicidal territory. While I took him from an earlier canon point, he does ultimately reach a situation where he thinks he's going to die, and he makes peace with that fact. He does not fight for himself, he only fights for his family, and this further reflects how little he actually cares for himself, even though he is actually a textbook narcissist. He's a walking contradiction in a lot of ways, flip flopping between his vain, egoist nature and then being totally cool with dying because he thinks he's shitty. Even Dark Malik says that his goal is destroy all life besides his own, but Malik is all too happy to throw his own life away in an attempt to destroy Dark Malik along with him.



The kid has complicated mental health issues that are compounded by his immense trauma. Dark Malik spits in the face of all that, and given his existence, well, Malik doesn't really like to deal with things. He can only take so much emotional pain before he just stops engaging completely, because there won't be any part of him left. He's self destructive due to his low self esteem, but he hides it well with his big ego and a lot of posturing. Being able to mind control people to do whatever he wants also helps. His siblings never challenge him, and his lackeys never challenge him, and he can keep lying to himself about the kind of person he is to keep moving forward.

Deep, deep down, he's really just hurting. This is no way giving justification to his actions, but Yu-Gi-Oh kind of has a theme about forgiveness and corporal punishment and other issues that Malik fits into pretty well, even if his mental illness isn't explored well and his redemption/atonement absolutely sucks. At the end of the day, he does have a really good moment where he realizes that he doesn't have to keep descending further into darkness, and that with the support of his family who loves him, he can transition to a better life by his own terms and have the strength to carry on in a positive manner. It's all very sweet but then he just kind of shrugs off the fact that he literally murdered people the day before and the protagonists are kind of okay with that and it just ruins everything.



Anyway that's Malik Ishtar: Teen Crime Boss, High Priest of the Cult of the Nameless Pharaoh, and Motorcycle Aficionado.

The room is poorly lit, the only light coming from a few braziers.

You're standing facing against he wall, head down, trembling. You're bare from the waist up, sensitive to the uneven temperature in the room: the coolness of the stone, the heat from the flames. You know what's coming. You're scared.

Hands grab you, force you into the center of the room, where a stone table waits. You're tied down and gagged, but not before you scream, "No! Stop! Stop!" Your pleas fall upon deaf ears. You're left to scream against the gag as the hot knife digs into your back.

Over and over again.

You're bleeding.

You're crying.

Everything hurts.

And after hours of horrific, agonizing pain - after they clean your bleeding back, wrap you up and send you off-- you're trying to find someone.

He's sitting in the dark. You're so angry. Enraged. There's still tears in your eyes.

"Rishid, who do I hate for this? Tell me."

Your anger is interrupted. You see that Rishid is bleeding, too.

"If I cannot take your pain, then at least allow me to swear allegiance to your family with this scar." He says.

You start to laugh. You're so mad. You're crying. And now you're laughing, too.

"Good, Rishid... I like it... 'cause even before I was born, you've always been my shadow! Kahahahaha!"

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