my headcanon is that misty is a fucking 25 year old loser neet who lived in her parents basement playing hundreds of visual novels and trying to hit on every male in her town tomoko style, who has the job of gym leader purely because her parents had to get her out of the fucking house and somewhat normal like.
encountering ash and her bike being destroyed is actually her "explanation" for what she sees as a golden oppertunity: to follow a 10 year old boy deeps into the woods, completely alone.
turns out shes 100% spaghetti and despite these prime conditions, shes completely unable to initiate anything ( all those vn`s taught her the hot dude initiates everything after all, she literally has no game herself, no game taught her it ). So she follows this boy across a fucking continent before ash is taken by literlly the first moeblob who actually puts something into the relationship.
flash forward 7 years and shes 32 and the only single person at ash`s wedding and shes getting too tipsy and trying to scope out possible targets in the crowd and spaghettis harder when she trys to feel up what to everyone sober there can tell is clearly a gay trainer whose partner is RIGHT there.
her ghost will haunt her town, appearing in the rooms of boys about to get their first pokemon and leave on their own big adventure. double joke is that its sleep paralysis and ghost misty is STILL fumbling and completely unable to figure out how to work a zipper from the front and cant even ghostrape. if you encounter her in the haunted remains of the gym, her pokemon team consists of entirely humanoid shaped male pokemon, all of them who give the visible aura of wanting to do anything to get the fuck away from her
