Lucie Nanami had her hair and makeup done, slipped into a bespoke bridal gown, and married the love of her life over Zoom.
Her wife is an anime character. The plushie version.
Nanami, 24, flew to Japan for the first time in 2015 and came home a different person.
She fell for the food and the people, and harder still for the comics.
Manga turned into a serious habit, serious enough that she started learning Japanese before university and later went back as an exchange student.
Then she found Rent-a-Girlfriend.
A poster for the anime caught her eye in 2021, during her second year of university.
The show follows a Tokyo student and his romantic disasters.
Nanami was not interested in him.
She was interested in Mami, one of the leads, and technically the villain.
“Though she was kind of the villain of the series, I admired her confidence,” she told Creatorzine.
“She had the other characters in the palm of her hand, which I found really attractive.”
$2,000 and a life-size cutout
The collection grew fast. Plush dolls, acrylic figures, artwork, a life-size cardboard cutout.
By the time she stopped counting she had spent around $2,000 on Mami.
And Mami went everywhere.
“From family dinners, to the beach, Mami was always with me,” she said. “It just felt right.”
She picks her outfits to remind her of Mami and chooses restaurants to match whichever merchandise she is carrying that day.
Her 21st birthday doubled as an engagement party.
Her parents and friends came, knew exactly what they were celebrating, and went along with it.
The girlfriend who doesn’t mind
In 2024, Nanami got a working visa and moved to Tokyo full-time, partly to be closer to Mami.
Then she met Kaori, 27, at one of the manga meet-ups she had started going to in local cafes. Six months later they were dating.
“I still loved Mami, but I didn’t think my relationship with her should stop me from pursuing a real-life relationship, too,” Nanami said.
“Of course, I told Kaori all about Mami and she wasn’t jealous at all.”
The 2D wedding
In August 2025, Nanami posted about her two-year engagement to Mami.
The post reached Sun Euro, a company that runs solo ceremonies and had started offering weddings between real people and fictional characters.
They offered her the full thing. She said yes on the spot.
Four months later it happened. Hair, makeup, two matching bridal gowns, one for Nanami and one for the plushie.
Her parents and Kaori both wanted to be there and neither could make it on short notice, so they watched on Zoom.
“I read my vows in Japanese and asked her to let me always be by her side,” she said.
“I know she’s a fictional character and I don’t need her to love me back. But I wanted my vows to reflect my real emotions.”
The ceremony was not legally binding. Nanami felt married anyway.
Four million views and the word ‘delusional’
She posted the day on her account, @hikari.sunshine.
It passed four million views and 587,000 likes. The comments were not all kind.
“People were accusing me of being delusional,” she said.
“I know Mami isn’t real, but why does that mean I can’t love her? We’re not harming anyone. People might find my situation strange. But who says I shouldn’t do what makes me happy?”
Why it matters
Sun Euro spotted something a lot of creators miss.
There is money in feelings other people find ridiculous.
A business built on solo ceremonies looked at the engagement-to-fictional-character corner of the internet and decided it was a product line.
Nanami’s video did the rest, turning a private wedding into four million views of free advertising for a service most people had never heard of.
She is not the first. Japan has a small but real history of people marrying fictional characters, most famously the man who held a wedding for the virtual pop star Hatsune Miku in 2018, and the audience for these stories keeps growing.
Nanami still wants to marry a real woman one day, legally this time.
The only condition is that whoever it is accepts Mami.
“Life is brighter when you’re open and proud about what you love,” she said.
Kaori, presumably, has been warned.
