Lonely Dude Is Lonely

I recently stumbled across this article about a Japanese man who's started an online petition to allow him and his super-nerd buddies to marry "two-dimensional" characters. He's already gathered over 1,000 signatures online, and with the word spreading, many lonely Japanese men seem excited at the chance to "be with" the characters from Manga and Anime that they love. I'm having a hard time deciding for myself if this is creepier than thousand dollar sex dolls or way more normal, since at least the drawn characters have personalities that someone outside of the owner of a doll has given it/her/him.

Another problem that may arise is ownership of said character, not because you own your spouse, but a licensed character is owned by it's creator and/or it's publisher. If this passes, will the husband or wife be able to decide what actions the character takes in cartoons and what kind of merchandising they are allowed to be a part of? The other problem that inevitably will come up is multiple people after the same fictional character, leading to new legal battles over who loves the cartoon more. There's also the tough decisions like if they want to marry someone like Gadget from Rescue Rangers, would that be considered bestiality?