Alright, fine, I'm feeling Wild And Crazy Enough to directly engage in ship hate for the first time at the ripe old age of 30. xD
So first off: in the very first scene of Season 1 Episode 1, Cooper is performing as a cowboy at a kid's birthday party to pay off alimony. They directly say this. Cooper and Barb are divorced, this is directly written into the show.
[And this ends the factual corrections, and begins the subjective stuff on my part.]
Aaron Moten is one of THE most skilled actors of the modern day. The man can give an entire soliloquy with a LOOK, it's incredible. The meme goes that he gives 'sad eyes', but holy SHIT does he give 'ALL OF THE EMOTIONS' eyes like no one else!
And Maximus provides such a nuanced character, between his upbringing in a Moral Environment, to the destruction of Shady Sands (providing a FASCINATING commentary on the nature of the relativity of privilege - it's wild just how shitty their surrounding world is, that "I encountered some good people before my entire city was blown up when I was five years old" counts as Privileged). He *wants* to be Good, he YEARNS for the simple life Lucy promises. And on some level, he knows it's possible! He grew up in Shady Sands, so morality feels Real to him in a way that it just doesn't for anyone who's never experienced it before.
So yeah, I can get where folks would take that idea and run with it as a shipping dynamic between Maximus and Lucy, I think it's really sweet!
But personally, I feel like Maximus is the perfect representation of the closest thing the surface world has to an ideal Vault-Tec-Approved Breeder for Lucy. He's basically the perfect man, in the eyes of the Lucy from Season 1 Episode 1: he's polite, he likes his creature comforts (but not at the cost of Whatever Needs Doing), he's strong, he probably has a sperm count of More Than Zero (assuming Shady Sands didn't do that in), and he is driven by a desire to Do The Right Thing (while kind of wanting to be *told* what that Right Thing is - genuinely my heart goes out to him, he's not a natural leader, he just wants whoever IS in charge to be doing a decent enough job of it).
But Lucy, as Wilzig warns her at the beginning of the series, is liable to become "a different animal altogether". And as such, I feel like Lucy's tastes will probably wind up with nobody (to contrast her "let's get pregnant and be a mom for the sake of America" attitude at the beginning), but regardless of where she lands on the romance scale, I don't personally think she'll wind up wanting the same things she's initially wanted with Maximus. 'Cause their puppy-love in Season 1 was essentially a matter of her projecting her initial goals (safety, Vault-Tec-style HR-like morality) onto Maximus, but her character has changed since then, and his may have, too (though at this point I think he still does want what she'd initially promised to give him, on some level).
Personally, I think Maximus is at his most interesting when he's around Dane; they reflect his soundless soliloquies in a way that Lucy just *doesn't*, and as a result I find that pair MUCH more compelling when they're onscreen together! When Maximus and Lucy are together, I feel like he is prone to default to her morals. But I find him most compelling when he's flying by the seat of his pants and just trying to make morality out of whatever he's got available. I view Maximus's puppy-love with Lucy as a pipe dream for them both, something that reflects their goals prior to either of their character development over the course of the series.
But again, entirely subjective on my part; I can get how someone might find the "two people trying to Be Good in this hellscape" dynamic more compelling than the "two long-term friends who would do anything for each other, and dammit we're doing the best we can" dynamic!
And as for Cooper and Barb, I feel like their introductory scene covers their relationship in a fascinating way. Barb and Cooper are flirting as though they'd just met, keeping their romance alive despite having a young child (which is quite the challenge, and a wonderful thing for a married pair to do). But Barb tries to "sell" Cooper on some lavender taffy, something he finds utterly repulsive. He tells her as such, and she laughs. Afterwards, Janey asks for some, and Coop says, "ask your mother". Taken without any symbolism, this is simply a cute family scene, but with the understanding that Barb is all set to "sell" Coop on a life he would never choose for himself, I view the lavender taffy as a direct symbol of the Vault-Tec lifestyle, and this scene as a representation of all the ways their relationship is both right and wrong.
Anyway, I say all this not to convince anyone of "Ghoulcy or Bust" - I certainly don't view it that way myself, and I fundamentally Do Not Care. I just want to provide a perspective that runs counter to this ridiculous opinion that your morality is determined by which fictional characters you want to kiss each other. You are not morally obligated to ship Cooper/Barb and Lucy/Maximus in order to score enough Tumblr Points to gain the "Good Person" stamp of approval. And if you don't happen to find these ships as compelling as others, that's not some sign that you're Secretly The Worst™. Your interactions with fiction can literally be "I want all these characters to be run over with steamrollers" and it wouldn't impact the actual way you interact with Real People (unless you have no moral backbone, in which case, uh, get one of those pronto).
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