This is very sad but I think it qualifies as a form of the profound anti-humanism that is running rampant in the world. A man in Japan wants to marry a cartoon and has started a petition drive to pressure the government to permit it. From the story:
A Japanese man has enlisted hundreds of people in a campaign to allow marriages between humans and cartoon characters, saying he feels more at ease in the “two-dimensional world”.
Comic books are immensely popular in Japan, with some fictional characters becoming celebrities or even sex symbols. Marriage is meanwhile on the decline as many young Japanese find it difficult to find life partners. Taichi Takashita launched an online petition aiming for one million signatures to present to the government to establish a law on marriages with cartoon characters.
Within a week he has gathered more than 1000 signatures through. “I am no longer interested in three dimensions. I would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world,” he wrote
The petition drive may be (I hope) tongue in cheek:
But some people signing the petition are true believers. “For a long time I have only been able to fall in love with two-dimensional people and currently I have someone I really love,” one person wrote. “Even if she is fictional, it is still loving someone. I would like to have legal approval for this system at any cost,” the person wrote.
Well, until transhumanism’s unlikely success, after which these sad people could perhaps upload their minds into a cartoon world on a computer, I am afraid they are stuck in the three dimensional world with the rest of us.
But I think we need to take a long, hard look at why so many want out of the real world and waste the precious time of their actual lives dreaming of living in fantasy lands or becoming extraordinary without having to exert the effort that makes one truly unique. (I wrote about this phenomenon in a review of the television program The 4400.) There is a decadence here, that I haven’t quite got my mind around yet.