one time i went to a work event with my dad and he was talking about some celebrity and one of the other guys there was like “i have no idea how you know all this stuff, i’m too old for this” and dad was like, “oh, you know, i’ve got teenagers” in a very ‘they force me to watch their garbage’ sort of way at which point i realized dad had been using me as a smokescreen for his love of mtv for years
when i was younger he would always let me bring my gameboy along to keep me entertained and then he would ask what i was up to in enough detail to establish that he had a basic understanding of pokemon, in order to establish dominance over the other, non-pokemon-understanding parents