>>54029474I think that's the key, though. The fact that he was more apathetic or dismissive of Goh originally, but not overtly antagonistic, meant he didn't have a totally poisoned perspective, but he also didn't have a set-in-stone "positive" (if you can really call a lot of the fujo content this) perspective on him, meaning by the time he decided to actually write Goh with this new ship, he was probably one of the few people honestly treating him with fresh eyes, basically sticking to the extent of canon knowledge he had of Goh (keeping in mind, I'm not even sure he was even a regular watcher of JN, because I could swear he once said he had to pull up a small collection of Goh episodes just to figure out the character he actually was writing... meaning he might genuinely have watched fewer than a dozen episodes in total before writing Goh's character) and ignoring the popular fandom memes entirely.
On all this, one thing that's stood out to me ever since his original fic concluded was the final note, which highlighted a notable amourfag from /vpwt/ as his editor and, in ficanon's words, "more or less cowriter." I wouldn't be surprised if that amourfag, who's also /vpwt/'s resident animefag, helped supplement ficanon's JN knowledge... although, that makes the AshxChloe epilogue ending even funnier when you realize an amourfag likely gave their approval for it, assuming they didn't cowrite it too.
