>>54970404Ashfags are known to rabidly attack anything that works against their self insert(case in point, our resident neet).
Goh being "controversial" was entirely a vocal minority of Ashfags taking swings at a threat to their status quo. Never before has a side character had so much prominence on-screen, all the girls and boys that travelled with Ash before were accessories to his time on the screen and clearly taking a backseat both in terms of narrative use and in terms of actual ability.
Goh, being a talented catcher and actively pursuing legendaries with far more success than Ash ever had, is already breaking the status quo of the latter. Project Mew was its own thing that took entire segues away from Ash, which is quite unlike the contests of the before era which always still at least had Ash somewhere taking part indirectly. These two aspects of Goh terrified them, which is where the "controversy" around Goh comes from. Facts that are only made worse because of how much Japan had promoted Goh as being a real protagonist himself rather than an accessory, which IIRC had only been advertised once before to a much lesser extent with Dawn.
>b-but the ratingsWe've seen the exact same thing with the first episode of PM2023.
A vocal minority who make a concerted effort can easily negatively impact ratings, simply because most people won't care to rate something unless they really enjoyed or disliked something. As with most episodes in the Ashime, Goh episodes were pretty mid, resulting in normal people either neglecting to drop a rating or giving it the above average rating it deserved. However, the threatened subsect of Ashfags are all united in their desire to rate it even more poorly than it deserves.
Say what you will about the quality of Goh's episodes, but we can all agree they weren't so bad they warrant a dive from 70-80% down to 60%. A clear attack. The fact this hate movement could only bring it to 60% speaks volumes about how much Japan liked him.
