For now I’ve been watching smaller, more obscure, more experimental stuff on Youtube. Like Tatami Galaxy, about a layabout college student who gets trapped in a Groundhog’s Day-esque loop where he repeats his college years over at the beginning of each episode, choosing a different school club each cycle, and how that decision affects his life in weird ways. It’s quirky, it’s got some unique and interesting animation, some good music, and it’s actually pretty funny at times. I feel pretty “eh” about the characters, though. The main character is kind of boring and the more interesting characters rarely appear.

I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a blog to share my thoughts to animation I’ve watched (not just anime, either, but stuff from all over the world, from the mainstream to the obscure) since it’s something I’m rather passionate about, but haven’t really covered on my site. It might get me updating more frequently, too!

Then again, I think it takes me a fair bit of dedication and interest to do that. Normally if something’s long I’d sooner read the manga anyway (I want to get reading Fist of the North Star sometime; the anime just looks like it’s got a lot of filler)

I meant to ask, what did you decide to watch in the end? I haven’t been keeping up with Game Progress Topic much lately so I’ve little idea what anyone’s up to these days.

@MightyKombat: I’d be interested in at least checking out Jojo, though again, the manga looks like the better option, personally. I wasn’t even aware there was an animated adaptation!

@Wes: My first thought after reading your opening paragraph was, “what kind of person thinks giant pair of breasts = target practise?” I’m not sure what that says about me.

And I think that’s a point I definitely meant to make in this entry; the fact that zombies are treated as a natural threat of the outside world is something I thought The Walking Dead did very well. A lot of zombie fiction just focuses on the characters being constantly on the move or just holding out somewhere on their limited resources, but that seems to lie in the belief that sooner or later the military will just appear out of nowhere and solve everything (which was something I thought was a bit cheap in the ending of The Mist, but that’s another story!). In The Walking Dead they explicitly search for places where not only is it safe, but it’s got the right environment and facilities for them to to grow their own food, limiting the need to venture out amongst the zombies. I suppose you could say a world of zombies brings civilisation back to the primal ages where folks had to hunt for food, but predators were hunting them as well.

Also, your comment about natural disasters has given me inspiration: tornado full of zombies.

As far as zombie media goes, the zombies are rarely the focal point when it comes to their stories — the stories almost always focus on the (living) people and how they manage to survive (or not) in a post-apocalyptic world. In this way, zombies are more like a force of nature than monsters with identity or personality — but they’re much, much cooler than earthquakes or hurricanes or floods resulting from global warming. None of those eat brains, after all!

I don’t mind longer anime too much. Some of my favorite series are longer ones. Monster was 70+ episodes, the first FMA had 50-something, and FMA: Brotherhood had 64. I even like some insanely long-running series like One Piece, but with something like that I find it much more worthwhile to read the manga than try to watch every episode.

I feel like such a dork talking about this stuff.

Oh man, I’m not the guy to ask for decent anime recommendations; I’m kinda thankful I arrived late enough before you had to rely on any of my suggestions. I generally prefer the short anime, namely OVAs, as quite often a full twenty six episode series just gets tiresome before it reaches the conclusion. I found Black Lagoon to be pretty engaging (I still haven’t got around to watching the second series), and if you can swallow the gore and nudity and abundance of amputations, I thought Elfen Lied made for an intriguing story.

Though, personally, I just find OVAs more fun to watch – I definitely recommend Cyber City Oedo 808 for its awesome cyberpunk atmosphere and its brilliant dub, and Ultimate Teacher is just ridiculous. There’s some old ones like Judge and Appleseed I remember being good, but I honestly haven’t seen them in years.
I remember watching the first episode of Mnemosyne about a year ago – it wasn’t too bad, but it was kind of forgettable, and given some of the themes in it I’m not sure if I’d like to see more (the main character is a woman who can revive an hour after dying, which is demonstrated by a rather grisly torture sequence). But it did have zombies for all of ten seconds, if I recall correctly, so that’s worth something, right?

I’m really not up to scratch on anime, and I’m pretty sure I’ve made all these recommendations on the site before, so sorry for not actually being of much use.