Forgive me for not posting this in the apropos thread, but I think this would spark a conversation that would be better in a new thread. It's sort of "waifu dream meets theories on 2D love" and should be interesting. 

Last night in the IRC we were talking in passing about the declining population in Japan, while in Tokyo the population is rising. We figure this is because everyone moves to Tokyo to take part in the post-industrial economy, meanwhile blocks, villages and even entire towns in the mountains are abandoned because of an ageing population. I mentioned instead of Tohno-house, we could start Tohno-machi, in one of those abandoned villages, restoring and living in old houses in a secluded 1960s era Japanese village, dabbling in rice farming as a hobby to gain extra cash. I said (because a lot of these places have shrines as well) I would like to live on the grounds of, and take care of, a shrine. I noted that, if we used Minagi's surname for the town, 遠野町 literally means "Secluded rustic field town", making it all too perfect. The conversation kind of went on jokingly that it would make the perfect RPG town, since we have a shrine for resurrecting party members and we could put in an items shop. 

This is where the dream began: 

One of us linked a 2chan thread that had pictures of an abandoned village. People were talking about the place. Apparently it was largely abandoned in the 1960s when people decided to move to Nagoya and Tokyo for auto manufacturing jobs because the place was losing money. The only people living in it were a few old couples until around 2003, when they were asked to leave because the village was too far from the surrounding towns and emergency workers would have a tough time navigating the narrow and uneven roads. However, when he tried to find those people they all mysteriously died sometime during a week after the evacuation notice. The thread wrapped up showing an island in the middle of overgrown rice fields with graves, but only with half as many new headstones as there were people living in the town. 

A few of us gathered at an airport to fly to Japan and go look at it. The flight was paid for by one of us who had won a large sum of money in the lottery. Some of us shipped our belongings there. We arrived in Haneda and took a train down to Mie, where I thought the village would be. Using Google Earth I located it between two towns. One road went between the two towns, and zooming in we saw a few rice fields east of a small mountain and a tiny road and village between them. The village was easily twenty kilometres from either town. 

We found the southern part of the road, roped off with a rusty sign saying 「立ち入り禁止」. We snuck in and walked for four hours through thick forests, over potholes and kept finding old parts of railroad tracks and steam engines off the side of the graded road. Finally, we came out of the forest and into an area surrounded with rice fields. On the left there was a mountain with a torii on it, on the right was a vaster expanse of flooded rice fields. A little further down the road we came upon the town and the entrance to the shrine, looking almost like Washinomiya. To the north of the village was a pond where the drinking and rice field flood water came from. The village had several houses in various states of disrepair squashed next to each other, and the roofs looked like a mosaic of disorganised tiles from above. Roads were uneven, narrow, and full of twists and hills and turns. There was a large mansion with several annex houses for servants. There was also a small three storey school and an auxiliary building. There were other details but I forget exactly what they were.

From here things get a little fuzzy to me. They clear up a little later though. We decided to settle the place, made a sign at the two entrances to the village saying 「遠野町」 and bought a truck and a van to get supplies and food. I took to the shrine house. There was (I think) one honden and one shinden (神殿 not 震電, shut up) in front of it. after restoring it I found a few relics; a sword, a mirror and a magatama made from jade (or emerald). I got lost on the grounds for a bit, but found some ruins of a torii and another shrine building to the south. There were two more to the north as well. They were apparently for the sword (Hachiman shrine on the south) and the jewel (Inari shrine to the north). The kami of art was in a shrine next to the old Inari shrine, and had a tiny, but nonetheless used path going from it to the main road. 

Somehow the town was starting to get more populated when I finished the shrine. Apparently some domestic otaku had found the place and decided to live there. They posted about their new residence on 2chan, and threads popped up about it a lot. Some came to visit, others to make a mockery of it. Some ended up kicking the mockers out. I think the mansion became the town hall too. The tourists died down after a few months. 

Anyways, this is clear: I restored the three outer shrines and restored the relics to them. I decided to put a figure of Konata in the shinden. Then I noted a typhoon was coming, and ran to collect the relics and stored them around the fig. I accidentally dropped the magatama on the fig and passed out (more accurately, just laid still fully awake for a while). When I woke up, in full size, flesh and blood (but very much 2D, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit) was Konata, wearing some sort of normal clothes. She helped me up and took me to the house and took care of me. 

I shared my revelation with the rest of the townsfolk and showed them my living waifu. I told them that apparently, all we needed was care, love, and a relic to enshrine, and our waifu could come to life. We didn't refer to them as waifu, but I forget what we called them. 

We began bringing waifu to life on the shrine grounds, and people would bring their relic home with them to enshrine in a kamidana or enshrine in a complex of small shrines I made on the shrine grounds. Here's what I remember:

1: A waifu could stay alive only while there was a living lover, which was a mate, husband, wife, friend or child. 
2: Waifu could be replicated into (theoretically) infinite replicas, but only one per family. The process was similar to lighting a candle with another candle. The flames are the same, but ultimately become different. Waifu did the same. My Konata and another person's Konata were from the same source, but had different experiences from then on, and were kind of different people.
3: Waifu needed constant and consistent love, and prayer at their altar at least once a week, being strongest when prayed to once a day. 
4: Waifu needed to be offered rice only from the fields surrounding Tohno-machi at least one cup offered at the altar per month and one spoonful per day. Sake would strengthen them if the sake was brewed from the Tohno-Machi rice fields. One small cup per night. 
5: once a waifu leaves, it is extremely difficult to bring them back, near impossible to revive their memories and feelings for their lover, without crippling sacrifices made by the lover. 
6: To keep the community alive, we needed to pay homage to the kami by carrying four mikoshi around the town and having a festival in the middle of a bazaar area. 
7: I performed marriage ceremonies at the shrine for free, but the marriages were not recognised by the government. 

Things went great, however, the rice fields started to go untended, and one of the citizens lost his waifu when he forgot to feed her the rice, and she vanished on him. He decided to kill himself. We discovered the offertory rice was down to only a barrel, and the sake was only down to a few litres. 

Konata and I had a child. Female. Named her Sonata. After praying for the health of both of them the birth went fine, and Konata was at full fighting health within a couple weeks, beating me at all the games we played again. 

We discovered emergency rice rations and divided them up amongst the 40 or so couples. We needed to plant a lot of rice for harvest to keep going however. It was a toilsome spring. We did reap a surplus, but we didn't store it properly and a lot of it went bad. I decided to make a shrine to Ukemochi in the middle of the shrine's rice fields. We prayed to her for the rice fields. We also prayed to Inari to make the work easier for us. Inari had a terrible sense of humour...

After our first visitor in a year came and left, I think he was the one who initially discovered the town, he told some 2D complex otaku about the place, and we welcomed them in. The 3D population was at 60. Then... Then a 2chan thread was made. We were swamped with 500 curious people, who poked and prodded and harassed our waifu. I shut off the shrine from any visitors, and took the roadside shrines into the shrine for protection. The daily crowd tide started to lessen after a few days, but pictures surfaced on shitkaku and we were swamped by gaijin, most of which were on a crusade against 2D relationships. They found out the secrets and set fire to the Uke-mochi shrine and our rice harvest. Some citizens became enraged with the inability of the town leadership to do anything and nighttime protests and riots started. 

Eventually we discovered a way to block them out, and restored order to the town. The (3D) population was at around 100 and the rice fields were tended to. Sonata started going to school with the other children in the town (around 20 or so). 

The dream started to end when most of us were in our fifties and starting to lose the ability to do a lot of the work in the fields. Some waifu aged while others did not. We decided to hire outside help for the fields, and began exporting rice to otaku who had their waifu materialisation ceremonies but decided to live outside Tohnomachi. Sonata (and her two sisters and brother) were moving out and living in Tokyo. The shrine started to become unkempt and overgrown, and the surrounding town started to age. We got less and less visitors and I can only assume the town met he same fate it did before we discovered it. 

I may have to edit this later before posting because I am still half asleep and had to get this written while it was still in my memory. This was an important dream I had to get down. Thinking of posting it in the /ot/ dream thread, /mai/ dream thread, but since it touches on a lot of the 2D love theories and principles it may spark a conversation that would better have its own thread. 

>>	Shinden⑨!QzFMjDAr4k 06/08/12(Fri)22:01 No. 9322 [Edit] File 133921807764.png - (21.99KB , 527x477 , tohno machi.png ) >>9318 grey is densely built areas, dark green is forest. Also the streets in the village are BS'd, there were a lot of them but I never actually went into the village.

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Shinden⑨!QzFMjDAr4k 06/08/12(Fri)22:47 No. 9323 [Edit] File 133922083443.jpg - (346.79KB , 1024x768 , abandoned-japan-202.jpg ) In fact, these are not far off, if you evened out the place, added more buildings, and had no trees. The place cleaned up nicely though. http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2011/05/25/serene-desolation-in-japans-mountains/ http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2011/05/24/i-visited-an-abandoned-village-deep-in-the-mountains/ the picture is a good example of what the entrance to the shrine looked like. Sorry for the source...