#dr liao

Words cannot describe how much I love this being canon. Cause whether or not you ship Liassidy, you cannot deny that there is a lot of trust between Cassidy and Mina. Cassidy keeping Mina's goals with Echo a secret from Reyes, speaks volumes, not only due to the context of Moira being recently hired, most likely damaging the trust Cassidy had in Reyes, but also because Cassidy would know who Mina Liao is, know her hand in the Crisis, something he was heavily effected by.

For him to know all that and not only understand what Mina is doing with Echo, not only is he keeping it a secret, but to also help Echo. It speaks volumes on his character.

And for Mina, she was very obviously deeply affected by Aroura's death, she likens it to loosing a child. It's something she was still struggling with while making Echo. Yet Cassidy was able to make her laugh, was able to make her see the things she missed with Echo's creation, he helped give her hope again.

So I’ve seen people ask about how old Dr Liao would be if she were still alive so, here is my guess as to how old she’d be if she were still alive and how old she’d have been when she died

Note: OW2 takes place 2 years after OW1 so I’m counting the ‘present day’ as when OW2 takes place. Also there’s a lot of rough estimates and I’m going solely based off of what her youngest possible age could be given the information available but still being somewhat realistic

So first, what do we actually know:

Well the declassified book confirms that she graduated Oxford at 16, she then joins a local robotics startup, and then joins omnica sometime after this so my guess is she joins omnica at ~19 (I refuse to be believe she’s younger than this in genesis)

The next bit is spotty and the only real information we have to go off of is that Omnica Corp goes bankrupt within a year of going into financial troubles (as confirmed in declassified, although Genesis states that ‘within a few years Omnica was done’ but I see this as within a few years of the company’s start) and that Omnica shuts down leaving the ‘Omniums abandoned for years’.

So we can add one year to her age for how long she was at omnica corps for (Genesis seems to imply that omnica going bust and the creation of Aurora all happens pretty quickly so give or take she was there for about a year), the only problem is, how many ‘years’ were they Omniums abandoned for

Well ‘years’ implies its at least 2 and the way Lt.Perez says it in Genesis makes it feel like it’s a few more than that, so 4-5 years would be my guess

So if we’re going by lowest possible age, she’d be 24/25 when the omnic crisis starts, the only problem is, when does the omnic crisis start?

The consistency with when the omnic crisis starts isn’t great, the given time frame during OW1 is that the omnic crisis started 30 years prior to the events of OW1 and so 32 years prior to the events of OW2, simple right? Well the Communication Inbox in the OW2 story missions states that the omnic crisis started 28 years prior to the events of OW2 (26 years before OW1), so which is it? Well the Sojourn novel confirms that Sojourn has a twin sister (named Valentine) who is married and has a child, Bonnie, who is 5 at the time of the book, if the omnic crisis happens 32 years ago, that would mean that Valentine had Bonnie at 14 which is considerably less likely than If the omnic crisis happened 28 years ago where she’d have been 18

So going based off of all of this Liao would be ~19 + ~1 + 4/5 + 28 which if we are going based off of lowest estimates would be 52, putting her a year older than Sojourn which I think makes sense

As for how old she is when she died, this is slightly easier as Declassified confirms she is killed in the Oslo attack which this article (see below) confirms happened 8 years prior to OW1 so 10 years prior to OW2, this is backed up by the fact that Oslo, Rome and the Venice incident happened in quick succession (again confirmed by declassified) and as Venice happened 8 years prior to OW1 (10 prior to OW2) this means her age at death is her age she would be in total (~52) minus 10

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for listening to my spiel about Mina Liao, personally I think the age I worked out makes sense since it puts her in with the other overwatch veterans but still younger than the rest of the original strike

Oh trust me I think about this a lot.

The way Declassified described Mina and Cassidy's realationship reminded me so much of something that was mentioned in Deadlock Rebels. That being that Cassidy had walls up, a line that not even Ashe could cross. Those walls being his mask, his persona, something that not a lot of people could see past, let alone break though, but Mina is described as seeing through it instantly, and even breaking through it. She did something that no one else, not even Ashe could do, she saw who Cassidy was without the persona, without the mask. She's the one person we see that Cassidy probably fully opened up to, and the way she died probably altered Cassidy permanently. He was just outside the building when the explosion happened, he raced to where Mina was and was the only person with her in her final moments. That would change anyone, and we see that it changed Cassidy, making him more hostile in the beginning but then he just began building those walls again, stronger this time. Hiding behind the mask even more so he wouldn't be hurt like that again.

One of my biggest HC's is that Cassidy and Echo have a father-daughter relationship, as some of Echo's personality wouldn't have come from Mina, but would have definitely come from Cole. Such as her outwardly sassing people like Ramattra, that and the way she teases people along with how she empathises with people and comforts them. We also know from her short story that the first people Echo could copy were Mina, Cassidy and Jack, Mina and Cassidy being the people she was around the most. That doesn't detract from the fact that Echo is still very similar to Mina, having similar behaviours and mannerisms.

Considering how we see Cassidy interact with Echo, it's very obvious that he isn't as open to her as he was with Mina. To me, Cassidy isn't the type of person to treat Echo as just a copy of Liao, she's her own person. However considering his history with her and Liao, it would be hard for him to not see the similarities. Also I would like to point out that the way that Echo and Cassidy talk about Liao feels like child asking an alive parent what their deceased parent would have thought of them.

Something else I would like to add is that Cassidy was so focused on revenge he wasn't able to attend Mina's funeral. Which probably adds another layer of grief on an already steaming sess pool of shit, because on top of all of that, Gerard gets injured and Reyes shoots a guy out of a window, basically signing Overwatch's death warrant. Then right after that the Zurich explosion happens and Cassidy looses his arm, his family, his home, and what fragile stability he had from being an Overwatch agent. During this time, Echo is also put in quarantine.

He probably feels like he failed Echo, that he failed Mina. It probably being part of the reason why he sounds so hostile about Jack "chasing ghosts", he knows what revenge can do to a person, how it can affect the people around them.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Cassidy's story is so much more complex and tragic if you stop and really think about it.