shigesatogou

LETS GOOOO! [for the ship ask game]

What made you ship it?

@deamsgirl's fics! I can't remember if I found them before or after I found the wedding photo (which I still can't believe was greenlit), but either way, I fell in love with their collective snarky, attached-at-the-hip dynamic. I'm also fuzzy on when I watched Gary's JN episodes, but his first one (JN068) is peak "So did I just meet your ex?" energy. I was sold.

2. What are your favorite things about the ship?

They are so fucking ridiculous (/affectionate). Usually how it goes is -- two of them are on their bullshit, and one of them either tries (and fails) to reign them in, or just encourages their shenanigans from the sidelines. You can put them in so many situations where they just fumble the same collective brain cell. It never gets old. They also just have some really cool overlap. Ash and Gary are childhood friends, Ash and Goh are current best friends and research fellows (JN never ended. to me), and Goh and Gary work on Project Mew together. So many ways for their stories to intersect and for their personalities to play off of each other

Also, their canon interactions have such gay energy, it's amazing. I'll name just a few. Going back to JN068 -- the Palletshipping moments (the hand squeeze), and the framing of Goh being in the back, feeling threatened by how close Ash and Gary are. The way that Goh already places so much stock in what Gary says. The way that Gary immediately chooses to rag on Goh with his "I'm not interested in your personality" and "I need to make sure you're qualified to be Ash's buddy" despite being completely normal to Dawn back in DP. Yeah, Ga(r)y, I see you.

JN102. AKA, the Project Mew episode where Goh seethes at the idea of working together with Gary (though, tbf, Gary revels in making his existence as irritating as possible to Goh). But then they have a heartfelt talk underneath the sunset, and they get all "bro... bro :0" over saying each other's names. (I'm not kidding, that happens). And meanwhile Ash keeps tagging along to all these missions even though he's not in Project Mew. He's just there to either go :) and support Goh, to roll his eyes at Gary and Goh bickering, or to defend Gary from even the slightest hint of haterism.

And that's not even to mention JN113, where Goh finally tells Ash "listen I appreciate you but like. you're not in Project Mew. i should do this on my own. shouldn't you be training?" Where Goh and Gary dramatically lock eyes with each otherwhile battling legendary Pokemon and learn that -- damn -- they do care and admire each other. (I'm just rambling now sdhjkgls)

3. Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

This took some thinking, and idek how unpopular these are, but... Ash is the shortest of the three, but he can easily sling them both over his shoulder. Oh, and for fics where the characters actually age, I hc that Goh is the same age the other two, but he just started his journey later because he was so determined to make Mew his starter. (But that's a hc I can compromise on. Making pokeani's timeline make sense with ours is a struggle and a half, lmao.)