Miao Miao (Student Gamer)

Miao Miao (Student Gamer) begins as Shen Tang’s online gaming companion, a seemingly minor presence whose warmth and talkative personality give Shen Tang a rare source of uncomplicated pleasure. Through the game, Miao Miao becomes more than a voice praising Shen Tang’s play: she is also the person who unknowingly carries family secrets into Shen Tang’s living room, exposes the emotional logic surrounding Gu Huaian’s marriage, and eventually reveals her own connection to the Gu family. Her role joins gaming, gossip, intimacy, and identity discovery in a single relationship.

Identity and Introduction

Miao Miao first appears as a female college student who has recently become Shen Tang’s gaming partner. Her skills are weaker than Shen Tang’s, but she is generous with encouragement and provides constant emotional feedback, praising both Shen Tang herself and her gameplay. Shen Tang enjoys leading her, and the asymmetry of the partnership is affectionate rather than exploitative: Shen Tang supplies experience and protection, while Miao Miao supplies enthusiasm, attention, and companionship.

The two players’ usernames establish the playful register of their relationship. Shen Tang uses the game ID “Lovesick Monkey Auntie,” while her partner uses “Sweet Kitten.” Because of the latter name, Shen Tang calls her “Meow Meow,” a nickname that turns an anonymous account into a familiar person. The conspicuous contrast between Shen Tang’s comic name and Miao Miao’s cute one also captures the relationship’s tone: Shen Tang performs irreverent confidence, while Miao Miao answers with sweetness and emotional openness.

Gaming Partnership and Social Function

Their connection develops through repeated King of Glory sessions and WeChat messages. When Miao Miao is absent, Shen Tang notices immediately and asks why she is not online, because the game feels less enjoyable without someone to praise and encourage her. Miao Miao’s response is not a brief excuse but an extended burst of romantic frustration. She says that the couple she had supported has become a real couple, while her brother has brought home a woman she considers inferior to her goddess; she insists that her brother once promised to marry the goddess after her return and cannot accept how the situation has changed.

This message gives Miao Miao a distinctive narrative function. She is a fan of a romantic pairing and interprets events through the language of emotional allegiance, disappointment, and the idealized “goddess.” Shen Tang recognizes that the gossip sounds familiar, although she initially treats the resemblance as entertaining rather than important. Miao Miao therefore becomes an accidental messenger of the plot’s hidden structure: what she experiences as private family drama reaches Shen Tang through a gaming chat, allowing Shen Tang to hear an outsider’s version of the marriage before fully understanding that she herself is its subject.

Miao Miao also participates directly in the game’s competitive and social pressures. On one occasion she asks Shen Tang to play, then brings her brother into the room through voice chat. Shen Tang agrees to carry him for a while, and the group enters a duo-queue match. The match exposes the gendered hostility that can accompany online play: after Shen Tang dies repeatedly while left exposed in the bottom lane, she asks the jungler to gank for her, and a teammate responds by insulting her rank and suggesting that she had used sexual access to obtain it. Miao Miao is not the source of the abuse, but her presence in the shared room places her at the point where gaming friendship meets the public aggression of competitive play.

Later, Shen Tang discovers that Gu Huaian is online and has already reached the King rank. Before she can create a room, Gu Huaian pulls her into his. Miao Miao’s gaming relationship thus exists alongside Shen Tang’s increasingly intimate and competitive connection with Gu Huaian, making the game a recurring meeting ground rather than a decorative hobby. In another match, two girls specializing in mage and support are paired with the group and a boy who has three jungler heroes; the boy’s immediate scolding identifies him as male before any other information does. Across these scenes, the game organizes rank, cooperation, voice interaction, praise, insult, and shifting alliances.

Accidental Connection to Gu Huaian’s Family

Miao Miao eventually moves from the digital margins of Shen Tang’s life into its central domestic conflict. She sends Shen Tang a message asking to meet, and Shen Tang calls her almost immediately. Although Shen Tang considers Miao Miao adorable and believes she knows her personality well, she remains cautious about revealing too much of her own identity. As a public figure, she does not want to take unnecessary risks with someone she knows primarily through the internet.

Miao Miao does not initially announce a dramatic secret. Instead, she hesitantly says that her cousin has the same name as Shen Tang’s husband. The apparently ordinary statement unsettles Shen Tang because Miao Miao identifies this cousin as Gu Huaian, describes him as a perpetually serious man whose mind is occupied by work, and complains that he has recently married a Z-list celebrity hated by everyone. Miao Miao’s description confirms that the gossip she had previously sent was not an abstract romantic scenario: it concerned Shen Tang’s own marriage and the family’s judgment of it.

The revelation is ironic because Shen Tang and Miao Miao had previously mocked Miao Miao’s cousin’s on-screen romance. Shen Tang now discovers that she has become the very gossip target they once discussed from a distance. Miao Miao’s family connection also raises the possibility that she is the girl Shen Tang had noticed at the family mansion, someone who appeared to suffer from a serious illness. The evidence leaves that possibility as an unresolved question, but it makes Miao Miao’s presence in the Gu family more consequential than her cheerful gaming persona initially suggests.

Family Gossip and the White-Moonlight Plot

Miao Miao’s online activity continues to expose the emotional hierarchy inside the Gu family. After Shen Tang returns and checks Weibo, she sees that Miao Miao’s social-media moments welcome “Lian Sister” with affectionate approval. The post includes banquet photographs of an innocent and striking young woman smiling among the guests. Shen Tang understands that this woman is Gu Huaian’s so-called white moonlight, the person he had supposedly continued to pine for.

The importance of the post lies in its contrast with Miao Miao’s earlier complaint. Miao Miao does not merely know about the former goddess; she publicly welcomes her return and expresses affection toward her. Her loyalty reveals how family members and observers may preserve an idealized image of Gu Huaian’s preferred woman while treating Shen Tang as the inferior replacement. Yet the same Miao Miao who helps circulate that emotional preference remains close enough to Shen Tang to play games, ask for contact, and share personal troubles. Her relationship with Shen Tang therefore carries an unresolved tension between genuine affection and inherited allegiance to the family’s romantic narrative.

Miao Miao’s messages are also a form of emotional labor within the story. She supplies praise when Shen Tang plays well, seeks her out when distressed, and turns private family developments into intensely communicable anecdotes. Shen Tang receives both comfort and plot information through this channel. The game and WeChat together form a transitional space in which Shen Tang can be addressed not as a scandal-ridden celebrity or contractual wife but as “Sister Monkey,” a familiar gaming partner. At the same time, that apparently safe space repeatedly opens onto public reputation, family prejudice, and romantic conflict.

Narrative Role and Limits of the Evidence

Miao Miao is characterized less through formal biography than through recurring acts of contact: inviting Shen Tang to play, praising her, asking to meet, sending gossip, introducing her brother, and posting about “Lian Sister.” These actions make her recognizable as a sweet but excitable student gamer whose understanding of the larger conflict is partial and emotionally invested. She is not presented as the architect of the surrounding scandals. Her importance comes from the way her ordinary communications unintentionally connect separate social worlds.

Through Miao Miao, the novel gives gaming a structural role. King of Glory supplies a system of rank and teamwork, but it also enables friendship, emotional reassurance, casual misogyny, and the discovery of hidden kinship. Miao Miao’s cute username and affectionate nickname make the relationship feel light; her long message about her brother and the returning goddess makes it a conduit for serious romantic information; her identification of Gu Huaian as her cousin transforms that conduit into a family bridge. Her ending is not separately established in the available material, but her continuing significance is clear: Miao Miao remains the figure through whom Shen Tang’s playful online identity repeatedly collides with the family story that governs her marriage.