Sorry for letting this question sit here for so long! It's actually an incredibly long and silly story LOL.

SHORTER ANSWER: I think they are both characters who are centrally themed about their fear for their supposedly unchangeable future. Lanque's response resorting to self-destruction, while Mallek's is to live in the moment. They are each other's foils but they both also want the same thing: to simply enjoy life freely as who they are with no societal pressures of who and how they should be. Upon meeting, both allowing themselves to experience the Now with each other, they realized this is a experience they don't want to lose and gave each other a reason to fight for a different future together.

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LONGER ANSWER: How I STARTED shipping it was moreso a just-for-funsies crackship when only half the Friendsim routes were even out, so all of us in the fandom were just kinda having fun with the candidness of it. I was always a fan of Lanque from day 1 when he was just a yet-to-be-revealed silhouette during Troll Call, so when his design was finally shown I was ECSTATIC that I also managed to guess his character type from silhouette alone LMAO.

Lanque's route was yet to be released tho, and what officially got me hooked into Friendsim was when Mallek's route came out and I was immediately endeared to him. The crackship really did start out as just "putting my favorite characters together" and lots of speculating on dynamics. (But Every ship in Friendsim was a crackship at this point LOL. Since only half the games were out, everyone was just having fun brainstorming possibilities.)

Funny enough, when Lanque's route finally dropped and then alongside Act 2, that's when everything just started to click together for me KLSADA and then it become Oh So Real in my mind.

I know Lanque's character can be a bit hard to parse because his FS route is comedically exaggerated on purpose.. BUT, gleaning his canon personality from the mainline games and the key details of his FS route, I am very much attached to his concept as a transmasculine individual trapped in the cloister where he feels womanhood has been imposed on him and a suffocating future that he's all desperate to escape from.

He has a lived a life with filled with lies, betrayal, and deceit. His character is very central on the idea of masks. Everyone and himself putting up some kind of face, unable to be honest with themselves. It's even self-admitted in the games from Wanshi that Lanque is putting up an act. He's the person that he is because the pain, hurt, and frustration of living as a cloistered jade on Alternia made him who he is. (Of course, not to say that other trolls aren't similarly shaped by Alternia in this way, but he is conceptually very fascinating to me especially with the aspect of him being a transgender cloistered jadeblood.) So when Mallek comes along and is just...... the kind of person who is real about himself and reads Lanque so clearly even through his own mask-- it surprises Lanque.

I've always seen mlnq starting off as pitch. Not because they want to kill each other LMAO, but because it sets the stage for them. Lanque purposely doesn't care for flushed quadrants because the idea of someone loving him as is means to love him as his worst possible self. He knows he's at his worst right now. It's rare, but I think he would actually be more receptive to the idea of pitch quadrants. It would mean the other person wants to challenge him to be better, because he also hates the person he has become. Being in a pitch quadrant allows himself to be more honest with himself.

When Mallek first meets him, he sees Lanque as so obvious. This big bad bitch persona is so clearly a front, it doesn't phase Mallek at all. It becomes fun for Mallek to see with just a slight little prod, Lanque's persona would easily come apart-- he'd see the real person behind the mask. Mallek isn't even doing much but just being himself though, honestly LOL. He doesn't want anything out of Lanque, he just wants to get to know him for who he really is. Without even realizing it, Lanque would find himself being honest around Mallek. There were no more masks to be held. Mallek was like a breath of fresh air for him, and find himself drawn to him.

They're very similar to each other than either we or they themselves realize. They're both the kind of person who just want to spontaneously live life in the moment, they don't want to be held down by the future. They become each other's escapism from their impending Ordeals. To not worry about that, but to just feel joy and love in that moment. But what they realize is that they don't want this happiness to end. It motivates the both of them, they don't want to give up just here. All of this doesn't have to be just a memory!!!

I like to think that, against all odds, they end up running away together by stealing a small empire ship just before their Ordeals tries to ship them off. Their story continues off-planet, but i think i've talked enough abt my psuedo-fanfic of why i like them LMFAO.

Ik it's very fantastical, optimistic, and grandiose but it's MY fanfic in my head, and I get to choose the outcome for my own crackship ok LOL