[INTERLUDE] Don't Mind the Screen

Momoka backstory from before her father died and she moved in with the Hazama.

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"Don't you have any pastimes other than playing games and surfing the Internet?" her father would ask every once in a while. "Look at you, not having one real friend. Do you want to become a hikikomori? Do you want to be one of those good-for-nothing NEETs, never living in the real world, wasting money on all sorts of useless garbage, cared for by their parents well into middle age? My daughter is many things, but a freak who contributes nothing to society isn't one of them."

Momoka would respond with well-rehearsed meek agreement, but internally she would have blotted out all his words like raindrops over a lotus leaf. It wasn't as if she could help what kinds of thing she became interested in, and as far as she knew, not every gamer became as bad as her father worried. Yes, she thirsted for handsome game characters, but she'd never get herself wedded to a cardboard cutout. She'd had gaming binges on certain days, but she'd never just play games for her entire life. She'd never been to a convention and never owned a single piece of merchandise; she never let her gaming make her flunk at school. It was what mattered.

Not only that, it was games that effectively taught her the most about certain things, more so than classes at school. It was thanks to them that she knew what makes a good story and memorable characters. It was thanks to them that she could remember the name of the first man who drew the map of Japan, the year Oda Nobunaga died, the finer points of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke literature, so on and so forth. Without them, her scores wouldn't have been as high as they were.

And so Momoka continued to game and her father continued to complain.