Makes me think of a Ted Chiang story, possibly because I haven’t read the aforementioned Idoru.
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Unfortunately I don’t have the technical skills, but I wonder If someone could create a neural network chat bot and sync it to the hologram for him that could help him start communicating with “his” Miku.
It might violate the TOS for his current system, but I’d they are no longer supporting it, and he doesn’t try to make money from it, then no one would be the wiser.
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That’s ok; Our wetware hasn’t been supported in a very long time either. 
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No one is suggesting he should be charged with statutory rape. But it’s still kind of creepy that his idea of an ideal life partner is a fictional child.
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Pretty sure every relationship I’ve ever had has had “software bugs”, some worse than others.
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Not disagreeing with this at all, but as a FYI the age that women can get married in Japan is 16.
(not even going to go into the f-ed up law that states that 13 is the age of “consent”…)
Also, is nobody else surprised that literally none of the wedding invitees attended?
I know we’re not supposed to speculate, but I’m guessing that this guy may have some issues that could be helped with professional services.
So… we have a man clearly suffering from mental illness (at least in part) brought on by workplace abuse, who “marries” a fictional character as a coping mechanism. I mean, whatever helps him, there’s no shame whatsoever in doing what you need to cope when the world around you is harmful. None of this is on him. But this is ultimately just an indictment of a society that utterly fails to care for its inhabitants, just in its own unique ways.
Perhapss it might be helpful to instead of this, focus on changing the behaviour of his abusive coworkers? To implement a system of mental health care for people suffering workplace abuse? To work on changing the attitudes and beliefs that case these types of harmful interactions?
So they’ve taken the basic idea of reader-response theory - that any reader of any text through the interpretative and co-constitutive process of reading are creating their own unique version of that text - and made it into some kind of absolutist, quasi-material belief? Fascinating! I sincerely hope there are media researchers studying this, as that sounds incredibly interesting.
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Not a bad idea as such, but keep in mind that here and now this is his version of what happened.
I would like to hear the the coworkers’ version as well.
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Oh, absolutely. Processes like this need to be fair, transparent, and unbiased. From how it’s presented here there doesn’t seem to have been any process surrounding this at all.
I would have, but I heard the open bar was virtual.
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So is that picture of him in wedding garb with tons of people around him just a shop then? Because those look like people attending a wedding.
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Fictosexual guy probably got locked in by this little number. (Music by Isao Tomita)
CNN has a short video about him and it shows clips of his wedding which was attended by a small, as far as weddings go, yet also not negligible, crowd, which matches with the picture in the BoingBoing article, aside from their concealed faces of course.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/28/health/rise-of-digisexuals-intl/index.html
The creepiness of this should be separate from the actual facts of the matter.
The whole hikikimori phenomenon, which it seems like he either was part of or at least sliding into, doesn’t quite have an exact one to one connection to American inceldom, despite many trying to force it.
It’s really its own cultural thing.
From reading a little bit about it I know that many former hikikimoris paths out of seclusion were, well, kinda weird.
So if this is really what got him out of the house and back into society again, like he claims it is, I’m not sure if I can just straight up condemn him from six thousand miles and an entirely separate culture away.
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I’m choosing to lump this in with “disgusting virtual experiences are a net win because they satisfy a bad urge in a way that has no real victims”. Rather like the AI-generated child porn videos that some advocate to “treat” pedophilia. And call it whatever special Japanese cultural jargon word you want, this (and large swathes of anime in general are) animated pedophilia.
As someone else pointed out, the age of consent in Japan is thirteen with sixteen to eighteen being the defacto (edit: and therefore culturally accepted) AoC.
Under eighteen is this weird grey area where it could be illegal if psychological manipulation was proven but it’s not illegal per se.
So I’m not sure if we’re trying to establish a set of universally applicable morals here or extend Northern American laws and mores to cover the globe.
Personally, yeah, I think this is super creepy, agreed.
I know more about this than I’d like from having had weeb roommates shudder.
What matters to me though is whether or not things like this serve to encourage or discourage actual sexual exploitation of minors.
Which the jury seems to still be out on.
Yes in some instances.
No in others.
The specific fact of the matter I was originally talking about was the assumption all of his invited wedding guests declined to attend, which was untrue.
The context was that just because some would assume nobody wanted to attend, because of said creepiness, doesn’t actually mean nobody attended.
Actually, although the national government has set the age of consent at 13, all 47 prefectures (some of them shockingly recently) have enacted local “Bylaws for Protecting and Nurturing Adolescents” that criminalize lewd acts with persons under the age of 18, effectively making this the nationwide age of consent. However, because these are ordinances, the penalties are depressingly light.
This was also raised to 18 by the national government, with the new law going into effect just this month.
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Thanks for the correction and additional detail.
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I hope you’re not suggesting that it isn’t pedophelia because the legal age of consent is 13 there. I don’t think you are suggesting that, but what you wrote could be interpreted that way. It’s also irrelevant what is “accepted” there. America “accepts” regular mass shootings as the cost of gun “freedom”. That doesn’t make it okay.
Let’s be wary of cultural relativism here. It is okay to judge other cultures for doing shitty things. Left-leaning folks tend to be uncomfortable with that, but some moralities are universal, and age of consent is one. Reasonable debate can be had in the 17-21 range, but 13? That’s pedophelia, full stop. No developmental psychologist would agree a kid of that age has any idea what they are agreeing to. It doesn’t matter what revered ancient culture they were born into.
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