I wanna talk about Liara T'soni for a minute.
I know a lot of people, myself included, have sometimes dismissed her over the years as a kind of boring fallback. She's kinda cute, a little annoying, always just sorta there over the course of the series. As a romantic option she's nowhere near as bad as Ashley or Kaiden or Miranda or Jacob, but not nearly as cool as Garrus or Tali or Jack (YMMV on Thane and Samara). Maybe worst of all, the game itself treats her as the "default" since she's always available, never driven away from Shepherd regardless of your choices, and the only squadmate guaranteed to survive all the way to the end.
But recently I've taken a step back, tried to look past the disconcerting bioware body language animations and her mid-tier writing and voice acting and, just looking at the simple facts presented, Liara is one of the most Characters of all time.
When you meet her, Liara is 106, and has spent the past fifty years in Prothean ruins. Asari aren't considered adults until age 100, so in human terms she's a 19-year old who has been devoting every waking moment to archeology since she was ten. During that time she's developed a lot of theories about the Protheans, which have been largely dismissed by the scientific community, leading to her primary motivation at the start of the series being to Show Them, Show Them All! with a particular focus on Those Fools from the University.
The thing is, they had a very good reason to dismiss her "findings" (on top of the whole 'wait a minute this paper was published by a twelve year old' thing): she has absolutely no evidence. If you press her for details in the first game, there's not a single thing she can point to that would support her theories, except for the fact that there's not as much evidence as you would expect for anything else. It's just a feeling she got as a kid and ran with... which happens to be 100% correct. The girl had never even heard of a Reaper before Shepherd told her about the vision, but she was able to predict their entire playbook from raw intuition and a few piles of rubble. That's the archeological equivalent of when Nicola Tesla built a remote control toy boat a decade before anybody else figured out what a radio signal was. That's right: She's a Mad Social Scientist.
Looking at her background some more, yeah she's Pureblood which is weird among modern Asari, but on top of that her parents are both Matriarchs. And Benezia never had any other child in 800-some years, then spent more than a century with Aethyta, then disappeared the moment she realized she was pregnant? Combine that with how Liara has more raw biotic power than most asari ten times her age, and she's almost definitely got the recessive Ardat-Yakshi genes on one side... and she's a quarter krogan on the other.
Circling back around to her relationship with Shepherd, her idea of an ideal pick-up line is "I want to study your brain". She definitely looks at you as an irreplaceable scientific specimen, and I'm not entirely convinced that she doesn't decide to have sex with you just to ensure she can maintain convenient access to the shiny new dig site inside your skull? She probably publishes a new paper on her findings after every time the two of you "embrace eternity".
And when she loses Shepherd, when everybody else is finding various ways to mourn and start to move on... Liara pulls together the Illusive Man and Aria Motherfucking T'loak into a conspiracy to put together a godsdamned resurrection, declaring war on the Collectors and the Shadow Broker in the process almost as an afterthought.
