Ross Rachel Joey Friends
Ross finds out about Rachel and Joey in season 10 of Friends. NBC

Friends is one of the most successful sitcoms ever, and remains a firm favourite thanks to its enduring legacy and widespread reruns even 13 years after its last ever episode. It still inspires a lot of debate too.

Last night (8 August) Twitter user @kaneandgriffin (real name Claire) embarked on an epic Twitter rant about why Friends characters Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) and Joey (Matt LeBlanc) should have ended up together instead of Rachel and Ross (David Schwimmer).

The crux of the argument, which has since gone viral, is that Ross is awful, who Claire describes as "one of television's all-time worst human men".

Ross and Rachel are famed as one of television's most famous, and beloved "will they won't they" couples, whose story spanned the entire ten season run of the show from its pilot to its very last episode.

They spent time as a couple, spent time apart and spent a lot of time dating other people.

For Rachel this included a brief romantic fling with Joey at the end season nine and beginning of season ten, a plot which not everyone was a fan of.

E News wrote in 2014, ten years after the show ended: "It was too far into the series to throw these two together. They didn't make sense and their romantic scenes felt forced. Yes, two friends can fall in love and make it work, with Chandler and Monica serving as proof of that. But they made sense."

Claire disagrees, and so do a lot of people on Twitter it seems.

"Ross never saw Rachel as a friend, but Joey did," she wrote in in the thread. "Joey's relationship with Rachel is platonic almost right away. They have a genuine friendship... Joey has a lot of problems, but his supporting, protective relationship with women friends is one of his best qualities."

Regarding Ross, she says: "From the moment the Friends first meet Rachel, Ross immediately sees her as a romantic prospect. He's never gotten over his crush on her... He had a crush on her in high school, so he 'claimed' her first, and long after they've broken up he resents every man in her life.

"He hides messages from men who call her when they're living together. He's endlessly threatened by the men she dates... And you'll note that throughout the series it's often Joey telling Ross he doesn't OWN Rachel, while Chandler and Monica enable him.

"Joey is the person who most often tells Ross 'dude she's not interested' when she's clearly not. The one who notices what RACHEL wants."

"He doesn't have all this 'but he's loved her FOREVER' false nostalgia that makes them all feel like Ross has EARNED Rachel by waiting. This is why 'nice guys' are often so much shadier than openly, unapologetically promiscuous guys like Joey."

Then we get back to Joey.

"We honestly don't talk enough about how big a deal it is that Joey, the 'shallow' one, falls in love with Rachel while she's pregnant. It happens the way realistically healthy relationships do: they just start spending a lot more time together. He has to LEARN to see Rachel as a romantic prospect because she's always been a friend first. Which was NEVER true for Ross."

This is just Claire's first argument as to why Rachel should have picked Joey over Ross, going on to say how Aniston's character deserved someone who valued what her career meant to her, discussing how Ross was the only character who didn't want her to move to Paris for the sake of her own career.

The full thread makes for a great read, making reference to the show's faults when it came to its portrayal of women, not just in how Claire believes Ross and Rachel were terrible. She also lists many more reasons why Joey and Rachel made more sense, notably including the he "MAKES HER LAUGH" (her caps, not ours).

To cap off the thread, Claire writes: "Ross fell in love with A PICTURE OF HIMSELF AS THE KIND OF MAN WHO COULD DATE A RACHEL and on some level that was always what he wanted. Whereas Joey fell in love with a bright, funny, competent single mother he'd been friends with for 7 years and knew inside-out already."

Give the full thing a read here. It's certainly better than worrying about the prospect of nuclear war.