Welcome to the anniversary Q&A for the Liar Liar AU! Thanks to everyone who submitted questions! I rearranged the order of those questions just a little bit again, and I lifted a few questions from the previous Q&A before removing it from the story so that it's no longer interrupting the flow of fic. I hope you enjoy this little conclusion!
What is life?
I wish I knew.
Did you know that cashews come from a fruit?
I did not! Learn something new every day!
On a scale of 1–10, how much did you enjoy messing with the discord in #theories? I still look at old conversations about Wraith=Izuku before it was revealed and you are quite the evil mastermind.
11. Don't even have to think about it.
Can I give Eri, Izuku, and Touya a hug? ?
Yes. Please. I have put these poor children through so much and they are in desperate need of hugs.
What would Uraraka have to do to bribe Ashido to stop writing Wraith/Uravity fanfiction?
I honestly don't know… Although really, even if Mina stopped writing, it's become an in-universe fandom now. I don't think it's going to quit any time soon either, if only because Sachi and Touya revel in embarrassing Wraith to no end…
What's your opinion on this video? watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
I actually have some fond associations with this video. One of my goofball coworkers put a QR code for it on the treats she gave everyone for Valentine's Day. It makes me laugh.
Senior recital? Are you a music major?
Yes I am! Music major and Spanish minor, planning to graduate in December. I play the clarinet as my primary instrument and post-graduation I hope to enter the field of musical instrument technology, though I'm still researching available programs. Wish me luck!
If you could live anywhere, which country would live in?
Oof… If language barriers were no longer an issue, possibly Vienna, Austria. One of the safest cities in the world, the public transit system is fantastic, the countryside is gorgeous, it's within easy traveling distance to a bunch of other European countries I'd love to visit again or for the first time, the music/art scene there is INCREDIBLE and I really miss the kasekrainer and gelato…
Where do you get names/kanji from?
When I choose names, I usually search for kanji relating to their appearance, quirk, or backstory, then select the pronunciation of the kanji I like and sorta mush them together. Then I often like to look up the name and see if it's a real name (albeit usually with different kanji) and sometimes I'll make adjustments if it's not, but more often than not, I just use the fake made-up name. I use a few different kanji-meaning sites for this process, such as jp41 (although that one hasn't been working recently for some reason…) and jisho.
Did Touya get rewinded by Eri as well when she rewound Izuku?
Yes, he did. The third-degree burns on his arms have been rewound and now he's back to his handsomely scarred self. ;)
What's Daigo's Quirk? Some kind of power that allows him to feel the emotions of those he's touching with his hands? Their trauma or pain?
Soma's quirk is enhanced senses, where all five of his senses are vastly increased. His late wife's quirk was Empath, which allowed her to experience another person's emotions-the stronger the emotion, the more intense the experience.
Those two abilities mixed rather unfortunately into Daigo's quirk, called Trauma Reader. With skin-to-skin contact, Daigo experiences a person's worst, most painful memories, from the most powerful to the least. His quirk is passive; any physical contact activates it automatically and he can't stop the influx of memories, which affect all of his senses (from his dad's quirk), giving him intense, hallucinatory experiences of another person's past. That's why he takes such pains to cover all of his skin and why the poor kid is home-schooled and selectively mute. Daigo is just as traumatized as Touya or Eri or Izuku, because he's experienced a great deal of their trauma and then some. Frankly, he's a remarkably resilient kid, all things considered.
Why would AFO let Izuku go that far in his vigilantism and not stop/kill/nomufy him? Was he unawares? Tricked and lied to?
I don't want to get into too much detail here because I'll go into this a lot more with the prequel. But the long and short of it is that All for One made a cost/benefit analysis with incomplete information under the erroneous assumption that he could handle anything that Izuku tried to throw his way, and besides, his laissez faire management style in running the League and controlling Shigaraki made me feel like he would have waited for Handyman to realize what was happening and handle it himself.
As a learning experience, of course.
Where did the title Liar Liar come from?
Honestly, the title was chosen completely on a whim. But it kinda stuck so I chose to follow the theme and then chose titles for the other works I have planned for the series by randomly pulling lyrics out of context from the 60s song Liar Liar.
What was your major inspiration for this story?
Honestly, it was a combination of MANY things. I had been reading a lot of different fics in a wide variety of AUs from vigilante to villain to ex-villain and a bunch of stuff that explored mental illness and specifically the impact that being quirkless might have had on Izuku's self-destructive streak and his general outlook on life, as well as watching a few different anime that explored the idea of an anti-hero or a long-term doubleagent that keeps you guessing what they're thinking, and all of those ideas somehow subconsciously coalesced into a villain?Deku (and yes, the ? instead of an ! was completely intentional) fic idea that combined with a long-standing writing concept that I've wanted to try for a long time where you never actually see the main character, just the reactions of minor characters to him/her. And thus Liar Liar was born. :)
What gave you the idea to never go into Izuku's perspective? Did another book do it and you wanted to try it out?
Honestly I don't remember exactly how the idea came about, but I'm pretty sure it started when I watched Rogue One from the Star Wars franchise. Something about the idea of following the minor characters, the guys that never get lauded in history books but that still play just as important of a role in making history happen really appealed to me. In my mind, it seems much more compelling to focus on the story of the little guy that's fighting just because he believes it's right over some OP warrior led by destiny to save the world. Around the same time, I started reading the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. The story isn't written exactly like this, where you only follow minor roles, but there is an ongoing mystery about a past event where you only see journal entries about some guy and there's this question of what his role was in history and what led him to get to where he did. Those two writing concepts from Mistborn and Rogue One kind of combined into the idea to write a story that revolves around a single character, but that never looks through his eyes. When I came up with the idea for a villain?Deku fic last year, it just felt like the right platform to try it out.
Will you be writing a sequel to Liar Liar? What's your plan for the continuation?
Yes, there will be a sequel! I don't want to give details for obvious reasons, but I will say a couple things. The sequel will largely center around the War Arc and all the buildup I've been doing with the MLA (and I won't say more on that because manga spoilers) and will be called See How I Cry. I'm planning on doing the prequel first, though. It will be called Know It's a Lie and will be told from Izuku's point of view (finally!). The story will cover the time period from Izuku's joining the League probably through most if not all of Liar Liar. I promise it won't be a direct rehashing of the events in Liar Liar, though; I find that stories like that tend to drag pacing-wise. I have plans for how to frame it to make it interesting. :)
Do you have other stories in the works? Any original story you're working on?
I have a number of other fanfic works that I've had on hold for a while. For example, I'm really hoping to finish my Brand New Animal fic in the next month or so, and I've had a slow-developing plan for a Voltron AU I'm excited about. I've also had a few ongoing Legend of Zelda projects that I've kind of written and updated as the whim takes me. Eventually, I'd also like to get back to Outcasts (if any of you tried that one out) and I've had some thoughts for a few other BNHA AUs and mini-fics, but this AU is still my main priority for now.
I don't have any specific original stories that I'm working on at the moment, but I do have a few vague concepts that I'm tossing around. Like I mentioned a few questions ago, I've been really inspired by Rogue One and the concept of focusing on the character that really honestly is nothing special, but still manages to do great things. I just have no idea how to frame the concept in a compelling story yet.
AAAND-A NOW, the question you've AAAALL been waiting for!
***DRUMROLL PLEASE***
What the **** is Deku's quirk!?
As several sharp-eyed readers have already guessed, the quirk that All for One gave to Izuku is called Full Cowl (see Tsukauchi's chapter when they're browsing through the notebooks Katsuki delivered). Izuku named the quirk; it was originally called 'Shock Barrier', although that name gives a somewhat limited view of its capabilities. As Izuku explained to Eri in flashback, the quirk is essentially a barrier quirk with the ability to reflect energy instead of mass (however since that includes kinetic energy, it does include that capability as well). I choose the word 'reflect' very purposefully: it doesn't merely stop or disperse an energy strike, but reflect it back, and the degree of reflection can be manipulated. It also, as several people have theorized, has the ability to create both static and dynamic barriers, and those barriers can be manipulated to form specific shapes, including hovering a centimeter or so around a moving person so that they cannot be touched (i.e. Deku's fight against Aizawa and Wraith's against Chisaki).
Depending on how it's applied, Full Cowl has numerous capabilities, from increasing a person's speed (create a barrier underfoot that reflects back the force of their movement so their overall speed is increased) and strength (doubling the force of a hit) to going invisible (reflect back light at various wavelengths or heat at different intensities to create camouflage or a mirage effect), destroying an iceberg from a distance (reflect back the force of the iceberg's own growth so that it destroys itself), paralyzing an individual (Stain pinned to the ground with one hand; create an electric barrier inside their body to reflect back nerve impulses so brain signals never reach the limbs), slicing a Nomu in half, 'disarming' a guy that indulges in human experimentation, and hamstringing a serial killer (ultra-thin kinetic barrier that reflects back energy to cut objects at a molecular level), and surrounding Endeavor with his own fire so that he suffocates (thermal energy repulsion).
However, the quirk does have limits.
To start with, the user needs to have a sufficient understanding of the type of energy he is trying to reflect. That's why Izuku spent so much time studying Aizawa and Erasure; he needed to understand the impact of his quirk/how it works/what kind of energy it uses to cease the function of other quirks to create a barrier capable of shielding Touya when he was barbecuing All for One at Kamino.
Additionally, Full Cowl needs to train against each individual type of energy to build up the barriers' tolerance against that type of energy. So a direct hit with kinetic force to the extent that All Might can produce would immediately shatter Full Cowl's barrier. Thermal energy on the other hand? Izuku's been training with Touya, whose fire quirk is canonically even more powerful than Endeavor's. That punk never stood a chance. Furthermore, Full Cowl can only produce one barrier at a time, and it can only reflect two types of energy at once (i.e. kinetic and thermal or electric and light, etc.). Thus while he was maintaining his barrier around Touya, he couldn't create a second one to protect Ochaco and had to resort to using his own body as a shield.
Finally, Full Cowl requires some degree of visualization to work properly. It needs an 'anchor', some visualized object to serve as the 'foundation' of the barrier and that the barrier will move with. If the anchor is changed in a way that the user doesn't anticipate, the barrier crumbles. So static objects are ideal as anchors, whereas objects that change shape are more difficult to manipulate. Thus Izuku's ability to create a barrier around himself capable of compensating for his active fighting style took a lot of time and training to accomplish. He can also use inanimate, unmoving objects, or even moving objects so long as he understands and anticipates any change in the objects, but using another person as the anchor? Much harder (that's another part of the reason why he wanted Touya to be the one to take out All for One, not All Might; he knows him better, his fighting style, his body type, etc.). Of course, this stipulation can be used to the advantage of the user as well. If the 'anchor' isn't secure and it's struck with a kinetic force beyond its capability to withstand, assuming the user's visualization compensates for any change, the anchor itself will be thrown backwards without the barrier shattering (i.e. Muscular vs. Wraith fight).
In short, this is the perfect type of quirk for Izuku: an outwardly simple quirk with unlimited applications depending on the user's creativity and determination to uncover its secrets. On the other hand, Shigaraki has no patience for such an ability, so it was never offered to him. So! What was your favorite application of Izuku's quirk? Can you spy any other uses that I didn't mention? What were your theories before the reveal; I'm very curious how well I hinted at its capabilities!
Thank you all again for sticking with me through this crazy ride! I'm really glad you've all enjoyed the story, and I look forward to rejoining you with the prequel in a few months! Until then, go beyond! PLUS ULTRA!
~Carrie Poppins