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We already know that Twitter and Vine are kind of places people in Japan go to make bad life decisions. We’ve seen teens crawl into convenience store freezers and would-be comedians posting really quite racist “comedy” videos, and even the occasional teen openly admitting to a crime on the social networking service.

So it’s a breath of fresh air to see someone finally take to Twitter with a good idea, like this amateur artist that posted a concept sketch for “pair icons:” Twitter profile pictures you can use with friends that, when lined up perfectly in your news feed, play off each other in fun and interesting ways. Here’s the original concept:

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When the stars align and you and your friend just happen to post at around the same time – and in the right order – you get a cute scene playing out between your avatars. The concept quickly spread through Japanese Twitter and soon enough artistically inclined users were chiming in with their own variations (most of them, of course, anime-themed):

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It’s questionable whether most of these can actually be used on Twitter, since some of them require the characters to break out of the standard icon’s border or otherwise overlap, so sadly you probably won’t see this cute idea taking over Twitter anytime soon – barring the developers themselves taking notice and working their magic on the site code.

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▼ And, of course, Attack on Titan makes an appearance because some people apparently aren’t even aware other anime exists anymore.

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▼ You can even potentially use an icon to troll pair icon users. It just wouldn’t be the Internet without trolls, after all.

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▼ This one is just obviously not possible, but we commend the artist’s creativity anyway.

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Have any other good ideas for these pair icons? I find Twitter to be a dark and scary place (and fear and loathe technology in general), so I never got around to starting my own personal account with which to test these out, but maybe some of our enterprising readers might be kind enough to see if this type of thing is possible. If it works, let me know in the comments and I’ll be sure to report on it from my Mad Men-era typewriter.

Source/images: My Game News Flash