Anime has as many genres as it has types of romance.
Some happen to be love at first sight, some turn into love with years of friendship, some are quirky, some wild and passionate, and some just downright toxic and messed up.
We’re listing 5 such anime couples who may not be the best match for each other.
While some couples on the list would probably just need a few therapy sessions to work, others are so deeply wrong, you can’t even talk about them without cringing to your bones.
1. Sakura and Sasuke (Naruto)
Okay, this one is hardly a surprise but maybe the couple that had 2 lines of dialogue between them over the span of 720 episodes isn’t the healthiest of couples.
Sakura had been pining for Sasuke since they were pretty much preschoolers.
Sasuke on the other hand was either unaware of this or ignored it for the entirety of Naruto and 90% of Naruto Shippuden.
He was routinely dismissive of her and verbally abusive to her.
At one point he tried to make her kill another person and very shortly thereafter tried to murder Sakura himself.
But what’s a little attempted murder between 2 people who are destined to be married off-screen where one partner stays miles away 360 out of 365 days!
Ok, we’re not being very fair to the two of them. Their marriage is considerably healthier than their relationship before it.
Sasuke keeps trying to open up and they seem to have found a balance that works for both of them.
However, we just hope they would have dealt with all the previous toxicity with more than a single “I’m sorry for everything” line.
2. Goku and ChiChi (Dragon Ball Series)
This one was doomed from the start. When Goku promised he would marry ChiChi he thought marriage meant “food”.
Goku may be the strongest fighter in the DragonBall Universe but his family man skills could surely use an upgrade.
Fans of the show have been quick to peg ChiChi as a nagging, perpetually angry wife. However, the fact of the matter is, she is left with no choice.
Goku’s immature and impulsive nature means ChiChi has not two but 3 children to deal with.
While ChiChi struggles to keep everything together and Gohan in school, Goku gets off the hook traveling the Universe looking for increasingly dangerous situations, sometimes just to test his strength.
He often puts his children directly in the way of harm and never listens to any reasonable thing ChiChi says.
Aside from failing at parenting and communication, their relationship also has a lack of intimacy.
Goku had to learn from Vegeta of all people, what a kiss was. Despite that, Goku and ChiChi have two kids and come off as a couple in love, mostly.
Goku may be an extremely likable character, but his marriage could greatly benefit from a couple’s therapy session.
Anjali Mehta
3. Ban and Elaine (7 deadly sins)
Elaine is a loli-bait, you know it, we know it, everyone knows it!
We can pretend to justify it by saying, Oh but Elaine is a thousand-year-old fairy princess but deep down you know how deeply wrong this is.
It doesn’t matter if two immortal characters are in love where one of them looks like they still have their milk teeth on and the other one looks like a 30-year-old man.
Even if we are to ignore the weird visible age gap (which we should never), their relationship is all feelings; no substance.
It took Ban a week to fall eternally in love with Elaine.
A week! A week was all it took for them to literally die and go through hell for each other.
It sounds incredibly romantic on paper, but it isn’t helped by the fact that their romance is actually incredibly boring.
In conclusion, Ban and Elaine = boring, creepy, and bad.
4. Enji and Rei Todoroki (My Hero Academia)
Enji married Rei for his own self-centered ambitions.
He wanted their quirks to combine to create children who would surpass All Might.
He was so blinded by his own hubris, he got abusive towards his children. When Rei tried to protect her children, Enji got abusive towards her.
All of this culminated into Rei finally breaking down in a moment of severe mental distress and pouring boiling water on Shoto.
When your eldest son is presumably dead with nobody recovered, your other 2 sons can not bear to breathe the same air as you, your daughter probably cries every other day, your wife is in a mental asylum and all of it ties back to you, it is probably not a good sign.
The only redeeming part of their relationship is that the show is actually aware of how toxic and wrong it is, unlike the previous 3 couples on this list.
Anjali Mehta
5. Shigure and Akito (Fruit Basket)
This “relationship” is so deeply toxic, it should probably come with a radioactive sign.
For starters, Shigure falls in love with Akito even before she is born.
During childhood, Shigure comforts and supports Akito through thick and thin. In later years, Akito starts to sleep with Kureno to keep him close.
A jealous Shigure sleeps with Akito’s mother as revenge, knowing it would hurt Akito the most.
As a consequence of that, Akito expels Shigure from the main house. Shigure has a mixture of intense love and hatred for each other.
Akito is worse than Shigure. She is toxic to every single person in her life.
Their tales of hurting and plotting against each other could go on forever and they kind of do.
They bring out the worst in each other and often hurt people around them.
Eventually, in Fruit Basket Another, it is revealed the two have confessed their love to each other, get married and have a child.
Only in anime can two people be so endlessly toxic and disastrous to each other and it would still end up with a happy ending, lets just leave it at that.
(To be fair, toxic couples ending up together happens in all forms of media all around the world but this listicle needed a concluding statement and that’s that.)
