Miyu's dad has been quietly relegated to backstory only until now, but I'd honestly been meaning to draw him for a long time if only because he does need a ref to keep handy.
So here he is.
This guy was the prodigy who managed to intimidate Mika. He would not have been the first trainer whose Pokémon ended up being attracted to him, nor even the first Champion, but he didn't exactly expect to end up a teen parent. Thanks to Mika's insecurities and toxic behavior, they ended up having an unpleasant separation, but he still dotes on his daughter despite being only about as tall as one of her boobs.
Damian ended up beating the Champion, which qualified him for a seat with the Four Heavenly Kings of their region. He's the third of the bunch going by battling order, which means that on paper he's the third-strongest trainer out there. But his position of relative strength is arguable since he and the one above him have a mixed win/lose record against one another, and he'd be the first to say they can only measure the skill of trainers and Pokémorphs who actually bother to attempt the League Challenge anyway... Regardless, though, at the moment the four of them are considered an insurmountable wall. No one has managed to qualify for a Championship match in almost a decade. But since the entire League is run kind of like a giant wrestling federation (with each of the four playing a part in management/production/emcee-ing), simply making a good showing of it is more than enough to catapult you to stardom.
(The champion? Deliberately vague. I feel like it's kind of funny if they remain unseen.)
Miyu doesn't have much interest in following gossip about her dad and would really rather live her own life away from him. It's not that he's not nice! He's embarrassingly fond of her, in fact (I mean, literally, that suit jacket is basically the equivalent of pinning a picture of your daughter to your work uniform only in front of thousands of viewers lol), it's just that she has a complex about being treated special and her dad's celebrity only feeds into that. But she ended up having to rely on his word to land her current job - and the apartment she rents is jointly owned by the ace Pokémon partner of Minerva, the third from the left there. (in case you're wondering, too, she happens to hold the top spot among the four...)
So at any rate, whenever Miyu talks about her job working for the League, these four are basically the public face of it (along with the Gym Leaders). ✨ The more you know! ✨
As you might be able to guess, I'm glad I finally get to do a little more backstory dumping for the boobmews.
