Profiles of the ersatz lovers

Up till now, it has been site policy to restrict the content to the domains of anime and music, with some token amount of words dedicated to the actual practice of communicating with others. Lisa Katayama's NYT article [BB] is about society, but I thought it interesting enough to make some attempt at spreading the word. Since the topic falls outside of the intended scope of this site, a new category has been created, shamelessly yanked from the realm of first person shooters.

At any rate, before you run to BugMeNot for a fake NYT login, it's worth reading the author's own semi-disclaimer about how space-constraints caused the editors to chop content that would have lead to a slightly more diverse perspective on this whole 2D love thing.

The end result, to the uninitiated NYT reader, is probably going to be, "Crazy Japanese," which is the wrong idea, the right one being "Crazy humans, business as usual."

Although such figures would be hard to get or otherwise estimate, sales and market size are more precise than "phenomenon" "thriving subculture" and "subset." As such, the only informative value lies purely in the character sketches of the people interviewed.

BB has comments, ditto Gizmodo. Not too much in them, but there was this link to a similar article about dolls, written almost 4 years ago. A lot more profiling, and one company's sales figures from that time, but does more to highlight the global nature of the problem.

If you can even call it that. Certainly it's a problem from a demographics perspective (negative birth rate, aging work force), but burden to society aside, is there anything else?