From here.A Korean anime fan has proudly tied the knot with a pillowcase featuring the image of his favorite magical girl heroine.
Heavy Rain asked the player, "how far would you go for love?" Would you go so far as to travel to another country? Would you kill a man? Or would you just decide that your soulmate was a fictional character and marry her image printed on a cotton pillowcase?
A Korean otaku opted to go with the last option, wedding a dakimakura body pillow featuring the image of Fate Testarossa, one of the popular heroines of magical girl show Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha. Not only has this particularly dedicated fan married his favorite pillowcase, he also takes her out on dates to restaurants and to amusement parts, as chronicled on media sites.
This isn't the first time we've seen die-hard otaku marry fictional characters: A Japanese man named Sal9000 married his virtual girlfriend in dating sim Love Plus back in November. While our natural inclination to these scenarios is to sit back, point and laugh (and boy, do we sit back, point and laugh), it raises some interesting philosophical questions about marrying inanimate objects.
Oh sure, it's not a problem now as long as you're marrying pillowcases and plastic Nintendo DS screens, but what happens when we invent realistic sexbots (other than the extinction of humanity, that is)? What happens when AI becomes sentient? Will convincing a computer to fall in love with us save us when the machines take over?
One has to wonder how long the happy groom will remain happy for - after all, judging by the popular opinion expressed in fanart and fanfiction, his new bride is a total lesbian. On the other hand, it's not like he has to worry about a pillowcase cheating on him, unless you count what happens when he puts her in the washing machine with his other body pillows.
And yes, there's a picture:
That's just plain creepy.
And on a less amusing note:
Source.Couple let baby starve after becoming obsessed with raising a virtual daughter online: police
March 5, 2010
A South Korean couple let their baby starve to death after becoming obsessed with raising a virtual daughter online, police said.
Father Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and mother Choi Mi-sun, 25, have been charged with child abuse and neglect following the discovery of their severely dehydrated and malnourished three-month-old daughter, London's Daily Mail reported.
The couple left their baby at home while they spent 12-hour stints at internet cafes in the city of Suwon.
Police said the two were addicted to a multi-role playing game called PRIUS and were raising a virtual daughter there.
The game, similar to Second Life, allows players to build a life in an online world, which includes choosing a job, interacting with other users and earning an extra avatar to nurture once they reach a certain level, the Daily Mail said.
The couple found their daughter dead after coming home one night in September at the end of a 12-hour session in the internet cafe, police said.
"They called in last September to report that they found their daughter dead after coming back home in the morning," Detective Chung Jin-Won of the Suwon Seobu Police Station said.
"They had spent 12 hours, all night, at a PC bang [a Korean internet café]."
Police became suspicious of how the child looked.
They charged the couple with child abuse and neglect after an autopsy confirmed she died of malnourishment.
Police said the parents had become so addicted to the life they were leading online, and the daughter they were raising there, that they appeared to have not taken seriously their responsibility to their real daughter.
The couple confessed they had fed the child rotten powdered milk and often spanked her, the Daily Mail reported.
Kim's parents had been taking care of the baby but gave her back to the couple two weeks before she died.
smh.com.au
