Mori's father broke her legs.

She lives in a boarding school where almost no one understands her—and her response is to build a fortress of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, which the novel treats as wise, as redemptive, as the correct choice, though it is not.

Watch what happens when actual peers appear. Mori has a genuine intellectual peer in Laurie, a girl who reads and understands Tolkien and could be a friend—but Mori doesn't befriend her because she catalogs her instead.

Laurie becomes a data point in Mori's reading ecosystem, not a person to be surprised by, disappointed by, or changed by—the books always mediate. Walton's narrative structure enforces this relentlessly: Mori speaks to the reader constantly, performs her reading comprehension, proves her taste, and never once simply *be*s with another person without narrating the intellectual content of that being because the diary entries are performances of knowledge, not records of connection.

This matters outside the novel because the contemporary reading culture that celebrates Mori—the Goodreads cataloging, the literary Twitter, the 'I'm fluent in multiple fantasy cosmologies' identity markers—functions identically, and we document our reading, perform our taste, remain alone, and call it discrimination.