A widely circulated screengrab showing a man and his love doll at a cinema in Fuzhou, China.
"World of Warcraft’s" opening day took a weird turn in China when a young man was spotted outside a local cinema bringing along a life-sized love doll to see the new movie.
The couple was seen queuing for tickets at the Wanda Cinema in the eastern Chinese city of Fuzhou before entering the cinema and taking adjacent seats.
Images of the two, which were taken by someone else also attending the showing, have quickly gone viral on Chinese social media.
Some online commentators were more than eager to speculate on their relationship.
"The young man is afraid that people will try to grab his girlfriend, so he purposefully gives her the edge seat, now that is true love," said one netizen, according to Shanghaiist.
Others have also defended the man, while others thought his behavior was peculiar.
"He bought an extra ticket so he's not hurting anyone," one user wrote, while another said, "It is a bit too much."
"It shows that people are perverted," one commenter was quoted by The Daily Mail as saying.
Sex robots and love dolls are predicted as one of the biggest trends of 2016, as lonely men increasingly turn to cyber-solace, according to a report by the U.K. newspaper The Mirror earlier this year.
"We tend to think about issues such as virtual reality and robotic sex within the context of current norms," Dr. Helen Driscoll, a leading authority on the psychology of sex and relationships, told The Mirror.
"But if we think back to the social norms about sex that existed just 100 years ago, it is obvious that they have changed rapidly and radically."
On the other hand, Dr. Kathleen Richardson, a senior research fellow at De Montfort University in Leicester, called the rise of "sex bots" as a "disturbing" trend.
"Sex robots seem to be a growing focus in the robotics industry and the models that they draw on--how they will look, what roles they would play--are very disturbing indeed," she said.
Either way, it's surely because of viewers like these that "Warcraft" earned an estimated $8.4 million in midnight screenings in China on Wednesday, shattering the all-time record at the Chinese box office. It then went on to earn $45.8 million on its opening day in China, beaten only by "Furious 7's" $63 million record.
