Instead of sitting down and writing sth. long that nobody will really read, I’ll just post some really short thoughts on the shows I watched this season. So everybody wins. I don’t have to pull out sth. out of my ass to have a post of decent length and people who really read this waste less time doing so. win-win \o/

Tiger & Bunny – Dat English

A Channel – Boobflappingdorable Tooru, charming

Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai – Goshdarn long name, will the other guys ever see Menma?

Sket Dance – Now I know I have a weakness for yankee-girls

Gintama’ – Screw finishing the 1st season, works fine without it

Astarotte Omocha! -Ep 1 made me think: Nope.

Hanasaku Iroha – Might’ve considered showing it to my parents if it weren’t for the writer dude’s stories

Nichijou – Death by randomness, less is more

Hidan no Aria – Guns don’t make everything better (surprisingly) *le drop after ep 1*

C – Economy fighting

Dog Days – Just… there… no real thoughts about it

Maria Holic Alive – More of the same, Sugita OPs

Steins;Gate – German-english blend, has some interesting plot developments, but I stayed for Kurisu vs. Kyouma

Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai II – Somehow the girls seem more interesting this time

Softenni – How ’bout no?

Deadman Wonderland – Needs more blood *reads manga*

Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko – No real storyline apparent, but still rather entertaining, waiting for it to get shaft’ed

While I was talking about Star Driver on gtalk, I had to admit, I had no clue what the motives of the glittering crux were, but my chat-partner also only remembered “something about being the chosen ones to move forward or whatever.”

It sounds so half-assed, so I imagine them becoming the bad guys like this:

Voice from heaven: “Uh, yeah, we need bad guys… How about those guys? *points*”
Kiraboshi: “Eh, us? Why?”
Voice from heaven: “Errr, because you want to become, uh… *reads several Wikipedia entries about sects* think you are chosen ones that advance mankind”
Kiraboshi: “Mh, not really, buy if you say so… But how do we fight?”
Voice from heaven: “Good question… You use giant, kinda girlish looking robots. And that’s in a space that exists outside the flow of time. Got that idea from watching some show with a red-haired girl and a sword.”
Kiraboshi: “Hm, okay… [Guys, did you hear that? ROBOTS! I'm so in!] “

They didn’t learn about silly costumes, masks and idiotic secret salutes until after they signed the contract, though.

“If something’s happening, we don’t need a secondary character explaining what is happening, because unlike in manga the images are animated and WE SEE WHAT HAPPENS without wasting 3 weeks on it’s depiction.”

“We don’t need characters shouting the names of their attacks every single time. Once or twice to get to know them, ok. But it’s not like it’s that important, anyway”

Thank you for your attention.

Well, yeah, probably the anime people talk about the most this season. The anime itself, that is, not like, uh… delays, simulcasts, etc. And while I’ll try not to hate away in this post, it doesn’t really have me going like some other people who decrypt the writings on the walls and interpret stuff like foreshadowing at the very beginning of the 1st episode or actions. I think it’s watchable, but not really exciting.

Most of the aired episodes are mostly talk and Madoka thinking. It’s not what one would expect from magical girl anime, but still I find myself bored, because the dia- and monologues mostly revolve around the same question “Should I become a magical girl?”, so to me the highlights really are the 20-25% of the episode spent fighting, even though I don’t really know what to think of the artistic style. Sure, it’s extremely surreal in a way one gets the impression the surroundings aren’t safe, despite the colorfulness of it all, but somehow it still looks plain weird. Also, they kinda end the same way every time: They get in some kind of pinch, Madoka almost loses her head about it (heh.), is about to form a contract when Homura jumps in and eliminates the threat. Even Mami losing her head whilst keeping her cool (heh.) somehow didn’t manage to excite me, even though I’m usually all for random decapitation.

To be honest, I now expect the rest of the anime to be a fight for Madoka’s soul between Homura and Kyuubey, so I expect two kinds of endings:

The first one is Madoka not becoming a magical girl, making the entire show an amazing trolling.

The second one would be, well, her getting magical powers, but with some implications. In the 2nd or 3rd episode there were some writings on the walls, as people pointed out, those are lines from Goethe’s Faust – I’m rather amazed people buy Faust because of the anime, because me, being a good student from Germany only have one book by Goethe which is not Faust, which I never read and I cheated in the class test on it. If I remember correctly, Faust is about a guy who wishes for power or something else, everybody kinda wants, so Mephisto (aka the Devil) shows up and offers him to fulfill his wishes in exchange for his soul. Sound familiar? Like I said, I never read Faust, but from what I gathered, the dude’s wishes in the book never really work out the way, he wants, also something that has been said in the anime. I know I’m a bit of a slowpoke about it, but never really thought about why there’s Goethe in the anime, until I started writing this post and let’s be honest: Anime producers love stuffing random things from other languages in anime and German seems kinda popular when it comes to magic, so I didn’t think much about it. But yeah, Kyuubey = Mephisto / the Devil. A cute, fluffy devil.

So, in conclusion, thinking about Madoka selling her soul for something and dooming herself is now something I can look forward to. Not, because I dislike her, but I think it’s interesting to end a magical girl anime on a dark note. One rarely gets a bad end for the characters in anime nowadays, bad end for the viewer is much more common, so that would be a welcome change. So some of the negative comments above are just a result of expecting something completely different.

Also, I kinda have the feeling, I should say something about the soundtrack, but to be honest while watching something, I rarely notice the soundtrack. Sure, it has an impact on how I perceive scenes and changes the mood of said scenes, but I honestly don’t remember any of it. It’s more like, if somebody were to play the soundtrack to me I’d be like “Ah, that was that scene where Homura and Madoka made out!”. Also, I think I’m not good at recognizing good music, so I’ll just say, if people praise it that much, it has to be okay, I guess.

So, yeah… Fractale simulcast has been killed off by Japanese Copyright holder.

While that decision is cool and all, it’s their product after all, the reasoning behind it is a bit… strange.

So the Funimation Simulcast has been cut off, because there are illegal rips of it available online, thus eliminating the only legal way for fans outside of Japan to watch it. Makes perfect sense! How is Funimation supposed to get rid of every single illegal copy of the 1st Fractale Episode available on the interwebs before they can continue the Simulcast. Which more or less means the simulcast is gone for good, because once something is online, it stays there, you can’t just “delete” it. Just take the stuff from Wikileaks. It seems like several government organizations are desperately trying to get rid of those leaks, but once a mirror has been shut down, several others pop up, and with the anime-community that’s used to downloading, uploading and sharing fansubs online it’s similar, just without the awkwardness of the next G8 summit.

The only way to really make those illegal rips unavailable for streaming, download and whatnot would be to shut down the Internet. And even if they could do that, it would make the simulcast impossible, because… well, the net would be offline.

Now something related to simulcasts, but not really to Fractale:

Hey, Simulcast providers. You know what would make your paid services attractive to me? Actually being able to watch everything I’d pay for, no matter where I am. I know you are trying to make it available to as many people as possible, but I personally don’t feel like paying the same price for a service where others can watch all they like, while I’m stuck with those classic movies like “The requested video is not available in your area / Germany” or “This video is only available in the USA and Canada”. I watched them often enough, they bore me. So I have to resort to illegally download stuff other people can watch on the service I paid the same price for.

You know. Guaranteeing me I’ll get what I pay for would be a really nice thing to do. Actually I’d subscribe to your services once you do that.

Nanoha is one of the, if not THE most popular Magical Girl franchises and I often wondered “Why is it so crazy popular?”. So the movie was a good opportunity to give it a shot and after watching the movie I still wonder “Why is it so crazy popular?”

HERE BE SPOILERS (and sharks)

Before I start ranting, I want to point out that it’s by no means a bad anime, it just lacked in several departments. Also, I find it much easier to point out negative things than positive ones. Also, the TV-anime might have done stuff I whine about better. (But it ain’t good, either)

The thing is: The movie failed making me feel anything most of the time, the plot-scenes didn’t make me feel empathy for any of it’s characters. I know, 2 hours is a limited time frame, but that’s still no excuse for a lack of any character depth. They just felt bland, for crying out loud, the major plot twist also felt like “oh, yeah, by the way, Fate is a clone, thought we should mention that… but any other reason that’d make her join forces with Nanoha would’ve been fine, too.”. The whole relationship between Nanoha and Fate felt like “Oh, you also collect them? I NEED them for my mom to accept me, prepare to talk to my fist!… uh… turns out my mom, who always beats me up, wanted to replace me with her actual daughter, but you seemed to be nice to me, so, is it cool if I hang around?”. The only thing I ever thought about one of the characters was the thought that Precia has a flawed sense of cruelty if she thinks Fate giving her best finding those crystals is cruel, but her whipping her -at this point still- daughter’s isn’t. So yeah, ALL of the characters are shallow, their decisions are predictable and overall lack any creative twist to a existing character archetype.

Now for the story itself. Well we know the drill: Girl, who visits elementary school, gains/awakens magical powers and gets orders from pre-existing entity to do… stuff, then meet foot soldier from opposing entity. They fight against another, heroine doesn’t want that, wants to be friends with the other gir- ugh… It’s not the story per se, it’s its presentation. The entire story feels deadly monotonous, there isn’t much of a buildup towards important scenes, actually there is no dramatic curve at all, the narrative is an even flow of irrelevance. Not only they lack buildup and tension, the scenes important to the story don’t feel any more relevant than, let’s say Nanoha eating dinner with her family. It kinda lacks cues that tell the viewer “Oi, listen up, this is important!”.

Last thing I’d like to point out are the action scenes. They lacked… well… real action. I saw them fighting, but I didn’t feel any thrill usually caused by a catfi- oh, in that case it would be dogfight, wouldn’t it? Well, a good action scene makes you feel the rush of the action. But here the fights were rather boring. But that’s maybe because I have a hard time to think fights between flying objects are exciting. But even the fights in Top Gun were more exciting to me… Well, meh, fights between airplanes and things that behave like airplanes while being airborne are boring! Only part of it which made me think “nice” was the bit where a whole building is disintegrated by one of the attacks. But that was negated by the lulz caused by the “I just hit you with my most powerful attack, are you ok?”…

Well, yeah, not a bad anime, but bland enough to make me struggle understanding it’s appeal.

UPDATE (actual points might be here)

Okay, after somebody pointed out I “tried to be rational about it”, my post lacked “enough real explanation”, for example me “saying it is monotonous” without pointing out in which way.
And I’ve got to admit, that person has a point, and I use this opportunity to improve my writing and argumentation skills, by going more in depth with my criticism, so it will be more than a ” “I don’t get it” piece with a lot of words”. But I won’t change the also mentioned use of phrases like “I think”, because, it’s just my opinion after all, writing my thoughts as absolutes would feel wrong. Can’t be objective without a standardized scale or sth., so I won’t pretend it is.

Now, for the first part, I’ll just answer the question from the comment “what seemed monotonous?”. I kinda have a hard time putting that into words. It’s like all the scenes have the same pacing, without making a difference, depending on the importance of the scene for the entire story. There were some scenes, that could’ve been more interesting, but were “dulled down”, for example when the group confronts Precia and her true goal is revealed, they could’ve done some interesting dialog explaining her motivation, making me feel “oh, that’s her motivation, but still she choose the wrong way to do stuff” or just make her seem like a really evil and selfish person, but instead they added a rather big flashback, which makes the whole thing seem more disconnected from the things happening “now”, than necessary, which left me with the thought “ah, okay, that’s why she’s doing it.”, without making me feel sorry for her loss or angry at her abuse of Fate. That sequence could’ve been done in a more crisp way that conveys Precia’s motivation in a stronger way. Also, when Fate’s origin is revealed, the dialog moved away too quickly from that topic, on to something different, leaving very little room to show what impact that revelation had on the characters, mostly Fate and Arf. Kinda felt like they just had very few seconds to be shocked, before the focus moved away from them. Made it hard for the scene to have an emotional impact on me, really. Some small changes and I would have felt sorry for her.

I understand that the producers used only the scenes they deemed important from the 12-episode anime for the movie, but I’m sure they also differ in their importance for the plot and the character development. And this is where I sadly felt no real difference. It seemed like the scenes that were supposed to be emotional were given the same capacity for the presentation of the characters’ emotions, as a mission briefing. For example the scene on the bridge, where Nanoha and Fate exchange their hair ribbons, could’ve been so sweet it causes caries, but instead it felt stiff and awkward, not Fate’s “I don’t know what a friend is”-awkward, more like “the director gave us the emotional depth of a broom”-awkward.

Bottom line is: if the director would have given the characters more room to develop their own character, to develop relationships to other characters and make their motivations more understandable.

That would help the characters, too, some fine tuning in their expressions, some more emotion and they would seem much nicer. Even if there is no new “twist” to them, as I claimed above, it just would be nice if they seemed more human. In some scenes wear their thoughts on their sleeves, I would’ve loved it, if they would do that with their emotions, too, when appropriate. Some emotional outbursts, that don’t instantly get cut off. Especially with Fate’s hesitation to fight Nanoha, it would’ve been nice, if they portrayed her inner conflict in a more complex way. Even though it was apparent there’s something going on inside of her, it was hard to see it on the basis of her emotions, because they seemed rather weak.

As for the fighting scenes. I guess it would’ve been more exciting to me if they did more close-up shots and used more close quarter combat, for example them fighting inside one of the buildings for a moment, instead of really wide shots of the entire area with 2 colored trails representing the 2 combatants.

Well, I hope, I did a better job explaining my points this time, if there’s still something that needs explanation, tell me.

Re-evaluating the movie, I sincerely think, I would’ve liked the movie and it’s characters much better, if the director would have done some details in another way.

Oh, yeah, always forget that: I also wonder if showing the nipples of a 8-9 year old girl isn’t crossing a line

Download it here!

(Program is PVs, not performances)

Tracklist:

Tomatsu Haruka – Baby Baby Love

Toyosaki Aki – Dill

Kotobuki Minako – Startline

Takagaki Ayahi – Hikari no Fillment

DaisyxDaisy – Holy Shine

(This should be animated… stupid wordpress…)

I know, this will fall on deaf ears (if it falls on any ears), but that guy bugs me, I just want to get this of my chest, so I won’t think “ugh” every time somebody tweets how “awesome” he is.

While writing I noticed: “Why am I wasting time on this?”… Well, answer is: Would waste it either way, by playing, browsing the web, chatting, annoying people on twitter, so who cares?

Well, here goes nothing:

He’s a blogger, huh?

Seriously, I don’t know where to start… Maybe I should start with the thing, everybody who goes for the ‘Danny Choo experience’, sees first. A cover page. A cover page on a friggin’ blog. To be frank: who cares about what TV stations you were on? A 938px × 462px sized picture pretty much fills up most browser windows, heck, thanks to the site’s fixed width (which is totally ok, don’t get me wrong), it fills most of a browser on a 1080p screen.”You portal to Japan”? More like “Your portal to CNN, BBC and NHK”. I don’t know how others feel about it, but when I visit a blog I expect content to greet me, like… the newest post. Or at least a teaser for the newest post with a “The rest of the post after the break”. Well, moving further down there are those 2 buttons “Heya, I’m new” and “oh, I was here before”. It rather surprised me when the button for the returnees led me to a page giving me what I expected from the cover page: an overview of what seems to be the newest posts and popular articles, that wasn’t there the last time I visited that site, it was more like the 2 buttons triggering welcome messages to appear, one started with “welcome you n00b” (or sth. like that) and the else with “welcome back”, but the rest of them were almost the same. Made me wonder “what’s the point?” and now I wonder “why not sooner?”. Rest of the cover page is an overview of the newest posts in 2 categories, makes me wonder “is that blog only figures and photo-collections?”

Not exactly the best first impression, to be honest. It gives the visitor the impression of a site with so little content so it has to distract with a pompous welcome page. Kinda reminds me of zombo.com… (hope it’ll be up again, soon)

Now, for the actual posts. In some way, they’re rather clever. Many articles seem to be like 80% photos and 20% text. Huge pictures draw attention to themselves and away from the bit of text that’s in that Photo-sandwich. An awesome example is his “Dealing with Haters Part 1” article. It starts of with a photo, and 2 lines of text more or less saying “look at this picture? Isn’t it fucking awesome?”, causing the reader to look at the picture. Then at the picture underneath, with the first 2 screen heights being 3 pictures and 5 lines of text. So the reader scrolls down, sees some more pictures with a bland preamble introducing the subject of the post, without really trying to catch the readers’ attention, so we scroll further down, look at some more pictures of Tokyo at Night, especially of illuminated stuff, shouting “LOOK AT ME” like neon signs, while ignoring the annoying words milling around them, because we don’t care enough about the post to concentrate on the text segments that are getting progressively longer, before finally coming to the conclusion “You’ll meet assholes in your life, but the best way of dealing with them is being a conceited prick, thinking you’re better than the ‘hater’, even if he has valid points”. My summary might be missing the point, but the way it’s phrased makes it seem that way, don’t hate me for it.

Whew, that’s more than I expected I’d get from that point. Seems like hate and rational criticism really is my fuel…

Marketing so easy, even Beastmen can do it

With posts being like that, it seems, like he doesn’t really has much to say (yeah, look who’s talking with his 2 months of nothingness), so he uses loads of filler-images, the baking powder of blogs, to make his posts seem longer. Now what to do if that still isn’t enough? Create posts on things you already write about, like figures, but more like a hidden ad for those products, get a deal with a big manufacturer, get access to their products before the public does and in return advertise them like crazy on the blog, the high Photo/Text ratio actually helps with this kind of posts, so it’s win-win. I have to say, there is nothing objectionable about it from a economical point of view, gotta admit that. The problem rather lies with the “I have burning otaku-passion!!!” image that’s associated with Choo. Dunno, but in my opinion an ‘otaku’ loves this shit, regardless of whether one is BFF with the manufacturer or not as long the quality is good. But to me, this is more of an issue of the community blindly following its leader. He’s just doing business, can’t blame him for that.

His Fanbase

Yeah, he doesn’t have much influence on that one, I know, but once a certain group is associated with something, it comes in a package that’s hard to separate. Football with hooligans, Apple products with hipster-pricks, Manga & Anime with pedophiles fapping over drawings of underage schoolgirls. So, if I’m talking about his fanbase, I refer to the bunch that seems rather brainless. The reasonable, sane bunch, which I assume to exist, otherwise my faith in humanity would be destroyed, is free to feel not addressed by the following statements.

There really is a limit to how much you can suck up to a person and tweets like “zOMG watching Danny Choo eat on http://livestream.blah/blah.bla” cross the line by miles. For god’s sake, go to the local fast food joint and you can also watch people having their lunch, this also adds 3d effects (“It’s like the spit is flying right at me!”) and smell to the mix for an authentic experience. Seriously, what’s so exciting about watching a person having lunch in front of a webcam? That’s rather attention-whore-y if you know…

But he even has a clever way to use the loyalty of those sheep, who’ll blindly follow him down the next cliff, for his own benefit. There are a few projects where he asked for reader-participation, namely his ‘Otacool’ book (won’t mention how ridiculous it is to join ‘otaku’ and ‘cool’) and his announced anime-project Chinko Chinka (obvious joke is obvious). He calls out to his readers “I need stuff for my project, could you lend me a hand?” and that’s totally cool. The problem is stuff like

“You have been involved with Otacool 1 and 2 and I want you to be involved with Chinka too. There will be scenes for you to illustrate or color in and we will feature your name in the credits. You get to have your work featured in an anime which I would say is a great opportunity for those who want to expose their work or get into the industry. More details to come. Hope you are as excited as I am!”

If it were that easy to get a job ‘in the industry’, why does the Tokyo Metropolitan promote a program that allows only 3(!!!) foreign animators to work in said industry? Because it’s gosh darn hard. Chances of a foreigner getting a job in the animation business are really low, could say they’re nil.

Just take a look at sites like pixiv or other parts of the Japanese interwebs that are overflowing with excellent work, done by Japanese persons done for their private pleasure. Or take a look at Comiket and the whole Doujin-subculture. Here, again, the mass of talented people seems endless. Now, if you were in a leading position in a Japanese animation company, who would you hire? A highly skilled Japanese or a person from abroad, which might have the same artistic skill, but barely speaks the language the whole staff uses to communicate – let’s face it, most of the Danny Choo fan club are weeaboos that have no idea about the real Japan and barely know more japanese than ‘baka’ – and first has to move to the country the studio is located in? It is quite simple. Choo’s dangling the carrot of a job as animator in japan in front of the artists among his readership, probably deliberately lying to them about their chances. With those false promises he gets people  to work for him for free, instead of relying on his readers’ goodwill while raking in all the profits that result from his ‘work’. So I kinda dislike, how he treats his fans… A bit Zuckerberg-esque.

I still kinda wonder, why he got this popular, but I’m sure, there is an explanation, not like Paris Hilton who suddenly was there end everybody wondered: “WHY? What have we done to deserve this?”.

I know, most hate-stuff on him also includes his crazy-rich dad, but to be honest: I think that was just a rather comfortable safety net in the early days, also using that as an argument IS rather lame. Sounds like sour grapes, so I won’t go there, even tho being crazy-rich sounds awesome.

Other points that annoy me, but don’t really need further explanation:

• He’s a typical hipster-mac-user. Self-absorbed, a bit arrogant and sucking up to Steve Jobs.
• The way he speaks English on his TV-show. It’s like he’s emphasizing every single word. Annoying >.<
• His guts

Well, yeah, that’s it. Back to hibernation mode!

So yeah, episode 11 of Occult Gakuin was heavy on the plot. Much heavier than most of the 10 episoded before. But something felt off…

What felt off and spoilers after the break

A major issue with this Episode was how it moved way too fast.

So Bunmei comes home, only to be welcomed by his crush who made dinner for him. Up to this point everything seems to be normal. The “she cooks the same weird stuff like my mom”-part also is okay, it let’s the audience know, something weird is going on, without giving too much away. Usually this is used to create a tension. But that’s really useless when there’s not even a minute until Bunmei finds himself in the middle of a meeting of the Sandford Neighborhood Alliance Watch from Hot Fuzz and the viewer definitely knows, something’s wrong. I mean, it’s the same template, so I wouldn’t have been surprised if Timothy Dalton showed up at some point, telling him it’s all for the greater good.

“Why does weird stuff happen ever since the heroine arrived?” While this is a valid question, this also applies to 99.99% of fiction, so it feels rather surprising when a fictional character asks this kind of question.

The Nagano-part… well, it was rather normal, it was alright, the flag of the Olimpic Winter Games on the tower was a nice touch. The parts with Maya in the first half were pretty much the only thing about the episode that didn’t feel weird.

The whole “ONOEZ, MAYA IS DEAAAAAAAD!!!!” thing also was kinda ruined by a little statement by Smile. Thanks Mr. Janitor, you just ruined a surprise that already was ruined by clean stockings and the sudden reappearance of shoes…

Seriously, isn’t the rule “The Hero never dies” enough to spoil the ‘sudden’ reappearance of Maya?

Everything after that is pretty much straightforward. Magical transformations, Minorin stopped squeaking and we see a reliable Kobayashi Yuu character (ok, that’s weird) with a really nice hat.

The thing is: the storyline itself isn’t too bad, but they should’ve put it in more episodes, just to explain the stuff that’s going on of the 1st half of ep 11 a bit more.

P.S. about that ”Kill the witch! Kill the witch!”-stuff… guys… take care of your own witch first, okay? -_-

Watching High School of the Dead and having played the Left4Dead games for over 500 hours combined, I sometimes wonder about the types of zombies / infected represented in those two titles and in other media as well. This post are just my thoughts on stuff like realism (lol), speed at which the infection spreads and other little details.

The Zombies portrayed in HOTD seem to be your classic run-of-the-mill zombies: If you’ve been bitten you die a few minutes later and come back to life as a slow moving, flesh eating zombie. Details like them being blind and not being able to feel pain are optional and have been added to the standard recipe, just like the “if it moves like us, don’t attack it” in the street-crossing scene from Shaun of the dead. At least it was like that for the first five episodes. In episode 6 we see a mother being bitten by her child she’s being carrying over the bridge. She turns within seconds, probably without loosing consciousness, because we don’t see her falling to the ground or standing up after she turned. It’s bite, cut to policemen, cut back to her, already being a zombie. To me, it feels like the characters of the show suddenly are dealing with a different kind of infection, maybe the infection, whatever it is, mutated to be able to turn a person without killing it first, maybe it has been able to do this from the beginning, depending on the physical condition of the victim, killing those with a weak immune system before turning them, while the bodies of people with are strong immune system are being able to put up a fight, until the brain has been taken over (or something like that), but it probably was just the staff not really thinking about it / adding it so idiots on the Internet can spend hours thinking of theories how this is possible… oh…

So, there are those classic zombies and there are the more modern ones from movies like 28 days later and Zombieland and games like left4dead. The biggest difference between these zombies and the old ones is that the new zombies are able to run. They still are able to use a large part of their motor abilities and sometimes even seem to have something what can be called a consciousness. This kind of infection doesn’t necessarily kill it’s victims to make them join the team Z, most of the time, it just puts them in a state of constant rage or affects the human consciousness in a way that overrides reasoned thought and makes instinct more powerful when it comes to controlling the body of the victim, not like the classic infection with the virus suspending the laws of physics and biology. They still move like human beings, but with a animal-like influence.

Now to the speed of the spread of the infection: One thing I couldn’t get my head around in the first episode of HOTD was that those zombies have overrun the entire school within what has been portrayed as mere minutes, the time it probably would have taken them to move from the school-gate to the main entrance. It didn’t make much sense to me.

Now if a zombie-infection with those slow-ass zombies were to strike and the occurrence would have been reported quickly and the officials act accordingly a wide spread, country-wide  infection like portrayed in many movies and in HOTD seems highly unlikely. Moving in the troops, mowing down the X000 infected, done. Matter of a few hours. This, of course, only applies for an infection that starts at a certain ground zero. If the first infections were to strike in several locations at once, things could become far more complicated, depending on their numbers and the forces to fight them.

For the new zombies things would be more tricky, with them being able to run and to climb, the humans find themselves in a situation in which it’s much trickier to survive. Probably only few people would be able to outrun a group of zombies chasing them and with the zombies’ higher speed, the infection is also able to spread much faster than the classic ones. To be able to nip the infection in the bud, the reaction by the armed forces needs to be really quick and efficient, otherwise civilization will go down the drain.

Not only they pose a bigger threat to the humans, the new, fast zombies seem much more… uhh… realistic than the old ones. To me it seems like a disease causing raging insanity and that somehow makes more sense to me than the bitten dying and then only being able to kill them by destroying the brain.

So: fast zombies are scarier than slow zombies.

Also: awesome T-Shirt with pic from above