The Popular Shameless Couple That Some Fans Say Is Toxic

The results are in, and there's simply no more rewarding use of your finite time on Earth than looking at other people's relationships and pointing out what's wrong with them. Theme parks and travel to exotic lands and learning an instrument can't hold a trash-scented candle to the rush that comes with knowing, deep down, that two people should stop kissing.

The problem comes when the people you've started recreationally judging find out about your hobby, and suddenly you're not invited to Couples' Brunch Sundays anymore. The solution: Start totally ripping on fictional couples, whose ability to punitively disinvite you from social events is fully doinked for the simple reason that they're all pretend and not real.

Take Mickey (Noel Fisher) and Ian (Cameron Monaghan) on Showtime's "Shameless." The good people of Reddit's r/shameless board feel strongly that their relationship is, as u/weirdlyordinary put it, "one of the most toxic" in the series. "I want to preface this by saying that I ship them myself," they begin, before going on to point out that "they were also incredibly toxic. Ian forced Mickey to come out [ ... and] there was a lot of physical violence, Mickey broke Ian's damn leg in one of the last seasons."

And this might seem crazy, but other people on the internet clocked the leg-breakery as unhealthy, too.

While it wasn't the only leg injury on "Shameless," the result of Ian and Mickey's altercation certainly made an impression. It's wild, in these divisive times, to find a point that all sides can agree on, but darned if "Shameless" fandom didn't manage to plant a communal flag on common ground and decide, as a nondenominational group, that it's wrong to break someone's leg. That, apparently, is a decent line in the sand, romance-wise.

U/weirdlyordinary1 posited that Mickey and Ian "were one of the most toxic relationships mainly due to the physical side of things," going on to single the behavior out as the most extreme example of domestic abuse in a field of competitors who showed up to play. "It's very hard to watch and I don't recall any of the other relationships being so physical so to me personally they are one of the worst," they continued. Other examples of the couple's flawed approach to intimacy included their struggles with communication and the fact that one manipulated the other into coming out — but really, overwhelmingly, it was the leg thing.

This is not to say that there weren't two sides to the argument. "To be fair," wrote u/gilgamesh661, "Mickey was not trying to break Ian's leg. He simply punched him in the face, which resulted in Ian falling and breaking his leg." It's good that we're being fair.