He actively supports his friends interests even if they are outside of his own and when presented with opportunities to call out one of his friends on their occasional b.s. he typically keeps his personal knowledge to himself because he cares about them and doesn’t want to cause them embarrassment. Per the comics his support is why the rest of the gang managed to be comfortable with themselves enough to follow their various quirky interests which is why Mystery Inc is able to exist in the first place.
There’s also the fact that while the show makes his fears comedic, they are in reality completely legitimate. Shaggy knows real dangerous monsters exist, he knows the supernatural is real, and he knows that people with or without masks can be dangerous. It is canon that he has been dealing with this stuff since he was at least a toddler.
Not only do villains constantly chase him and try to capture him, occasionally succeeding, they have also tried to shoot him, stab him, drown him, push him off of ledges, blow him up, run him over, suffocate him, freeze him to death, smash his skull in with blunt objects, burn him alive, seal him into a wall, run him off the road while driving, toss him out of planes while in flight, trapped him with large, hungry, predatory animals in hopes that the animal would kill and eat him, etc. and that’s just off the top of my head.
He has watched friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers be nearly killed and often was the one who jumped into the fray to keep that from happening. Despite Daphne often being referred to as a damsel in distress character and her alliterative Danger Prone Daphne nickname, if you watch the various series and movies, Shaggy is actually the most danger prone, most frequently captured, and also most often injured character in the series. Yes, he often jumps at things that end up being innocuous, but ptsd and anxiety are real things, and let’s be honest, if all of the above was my every day life, I’d be pretty darn jumpy too.
Shaggy is the voice of reason in the group. When the gang is inevitably informed that some giant beast in the area has been rampaging about causing destruction, and kidnapping and/or trying to murder people, he has every right to voice concern over intentionally going out to search for the thing, especially when he himself attracts that danger and the supernatural more than anyone else in the gang, including Scooby. If a pathway looks dangerous and he points it out, everyone else will roll their eyes and keep going and he’ll inevitably follow them and its his feet it ends up crumbling under. His completely valid concerns are constantly dismissed and he’s usually the one who ends up suffering the consequences for it.
And while I agree he would make a great green lantern, he was in canon a pretty awesome yellow lantern.
There have been many hints throughout the series that Shaggy actually obliviously wields magic and Scooby is his familiar, which was basically made canon in Goblin King and there was a gag about it in a Be Cool Scooby Doo episode. Read more about this
In the above comic, Shaggy manipulated the ring without even trying while Sinestro was both wearing it and actively trying to wield it, and then it flew off of Sinestro’s finger and onto Shaggy’s. As his familiar, Scooby is affected by the ring too. Sinestro freaks out about them having the ability to both cause and instill the greatest fear of all. There’s another team-up comic with Green Arrow and Green Lantern where Psycho Pirate shows up and uses his ability to cause the rest of the gang to feel sheer terror and flee, this has seemingly no affect on Shaggy and Scooby because that’s just their normal state.
The big takeaway here is that despite all of the perfectly legitimate reasons to be scared listed above, the yellow lantern comic suggests that the primary reason Shaggy is actually afraid is that he’s been taking his ability to cause and instill the greatest fear of all and subconsciously inflicting all of it on himself (and unwittingly on Scooby as well due to their connection). He has stated that his greatest dislike is being afraid, so he’s basically wielding the feeling he dislikes most in the world at epic proportions onto himself because he would never want anyone else to have to feel that way, all the while still managing to investigate spooky places, find clues, solve mysteries, be a good friend, act as bait, and throw himself into danger for the sake of others.
So yeah, Shaggy is a hero and his friends should give him all the hugs because he sure as heck deserves them.
