The most successful anime romance movie of all time ties together real-life couples, even if the path to true love isn’t always a direct one.

Body-swapping is a a major plot element of anime director Makoto Shinkai’s phenomenal hit Your Name, so you could call it a science fiction film. However, the mechanics of said body-swapping are rooted in mythology and mysticism, so it could also be described as a fantasy film. Tonally, a steady stream of pretending-to-be someone-else hijinks give Your Name strong comedy credentials, and the finale actually has plenty of suspense too.

But really, more than anything else, Your Name is a love story, and it turns out the on-screen romance has been part of several real-world ones too. With Shinkai’s new anime, Weathering with You, opening last Friday, Twitter user @ganpon714 took a moment to recall how three years ago, there was a rumor floating around that if you watched Your Name on a date, you’d end up marrying the person you saw it with.

“Three years ago, there was a rumor on Twitter that if you watched Your Name with someone, you’d marry each other. So I asked a girl to go see it with me, and when it was over, all she said ‘I’m going to go home.’

‘I guess that’s the end of that’ I thought, but today I went to see Weathering with You with the same girl. She agreed to go with me since she’s now my wife.”

▼ Your Name

@ganpon714 isn’t the only one for whom the Your Name romance prophecy panned out, either. Other Twitter users left comments including:

“The same thing happened for me. The person I saw Your Name with is now my husband.”

“My boyfriend and I had just started going out when we went to see Your Name together. We both started bawling at the same part, and it was the first time we’d seen each other cry, and now he’s my husband.”

“My girlfriend won tickets to a special screening and staff greeting for Your Name in [Tokyo’s] Roppongi [neighborhood], so we went. Now we’re engaged and planning our wedding, and we’re also planning to go see Weathering with You together.”

“A guy who told me about the marriage rumor invited me to see your name. After the movie, he said, ‘Do you want to go get a cup of coffee?’ but I was so nervous I went home instead, but today I went to see Weathering with You with him, since we’re married and he invited me to watch a movie again.”

“[Instead of going to watch Weathering with You] the guy I saw Your Name with and I stayed home and watched [anime movie] Summer Wars on TV, after we put our kid to sleep.”

Of course, as the SoraNews24 team can attest to first-hand, not every couple who watched Your Name together would up getting hitched, and reminiscing about the rumor also brought up Twitter comments like:

“I asked a girl to go see Your Name it with me, and when it was over, all she said ‘I’m going to go home.’ The end.”

“I asked a girl to go see Your Name it with me, and when it was over, all she said ‘I’m going to go home’…Then she cheated on me, so today I’m going to go watch Weathering with You with a different girl.”

And then there was this emotional memory:

“I’d already heard about the rumor, and while watching Your Name, we were overcome with emotion. I kept looking at the person sitting next to me, who I’d come to the theater with…my mom.

By the way, my mom and I are planning to go see Weathering with You together.”

So in the end, it looks like the theory that watching Your Name with someone will net you a spouse has mixed results, but apparently if you and someone you know both cry at the same part of the emotional anime movie, there’s some sort of deep connection you share.

Source: Twitter/@ganpon714 via Jin
Images: YouTube/東宝MOVIEチャンネル
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Follow Casey on Twitter, where he also saw Your Name and Weathering with You with the same person, but they’re both married to different people.