#but that's more petty than the big glaring legitimate issues with her lmao

[irikahkrios]

why do u hate liara 😭 i don’t mean this in a mean way i’m sure u have valid reasons bc big brain irikah stan but i’m just wondering

i made this post a while ago that goes into it a little more in depth (edit after writing the rest of this post: this post ended up being much longer and more in-depth than that one but i'm keeping the link there anyway lmao), but tldr i think she's creepy as fuck and i hate how the writers portrayed her obsession with shepard as a good thing and didn't even consider that players might be uncomfortable with her.

i already dislike her as a character because of her constant violations of shepard's autonomy: them being forced by the plot of me1 to have creepy brain sex with her (possibly multiple times depending on the order you do the main plot missions in), her becoming obsessed with them and stealing their corpse to give to cerberus to resurrect them (which is even worse if, like me, you play a sole survivor shepard), and the way she acts super familiar and all Oh I'm Your Best Friend And Maaaaybe Perhaps Your Lover :) no matter what dialogue options you've chosen with her. all of that, combined with some truly horrible stuff from me3 (her treatment of javik which is almost as bad as her treatment of shepard, her awful dialogue with jack if you bring her to grissom academy, the way she acts like the war has Finally Actually Started when the reapers attack thessia because non-asari species suffering and dying apparently doesn't count, etc), was already more than enough to make me uncomfortable with her. but i could at least tolerate her from a narrative/character standpoint if all this awful bullshit had actually been acknowledged. stories need villains, and i think the concept of a villain who's absolutely convinced that they're the hero's best friend is a potentially interesting one. hell, if they didn't want to go full villain they could have even had her grow as a person over time and realize that her behavior towards shepard was horrifying and creepy. the character could have been salvaged if they had just acknowledged her faults and possibly let her grow past them.

but what really makes me hate liara is that the writers seem to think she's right about everything. her obsession with shepard isn't supposed to be a character flaw, it's apparently supposed to be endearing and correct. they seem to just straight-up think that all her terrifying stalkery bullshit about being Shepard's Best Friend And The Most Important Person In Their Life No Matter What :)))) is actually....literally the way things are and not just the obsessive ramblings of a very creepy character......like, the divide between liara's in-game actions and the way the games seem to want to portray her is a fucking canyon. she's so creepy and has zero likable or redeeming qualities, but the writers act like she's this amazing wonderful perfect person who's closer to shepard than anyone, even their love interest.

she's forced on the player to the extent that you can't do anything to make her go away. there's never an option to say you aren't close to her or ask her to leave you alone, you automatically hug her on illium in me2 instead of that being a paragon interrupt or dialogue prompt like it really should have been, me3 makes you have all these Deep Conversations where she comes to your cabin uninvited because clearly shepard is closer to her than to any other squadmate and you're not allowed to dispute this, and basically i just. am not allowed to roleplay my shepard as uncomfortable in any way with the person who he was forced to have creepy invasive brain sex with against his will, who stole his corpse and gave it to the terrorists responsible for the greatest trauma of his life because she was so obsessed with him that she couldn't let him go (after knowing him for a few weeks at most; i always get her at the latest point i possibly can so he's only forced to have sex with her once), and who continues to insert herself into his life and claims to be extremely close friends with him despite him not wanting anything to do with her.

so, yeah. when i make liara a villain in my canon, when i almost completely write her out of me2 and me3, when i rewrite the shadow broker dlc to be about fighting her and foiling her plot to become the shadow broker and stalk shepard across the galaxy, it's because it's cathartic for me to imagine a canon where my shepard was allowed to treat her constant creepy advances in a more realistic way.