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I currently have a hankering for diving into a really long book series, so was hoping to get some recommendations from fellow Tildes users.

The genres I enjoy most are scifi and fantasy, especially darkly themed ones with deep lore, but I'm open to trying anything. The only caveat is that I have absolutely no interest in starting to read a series that hasn't actually finished yet, since at this point I am honestly quite sick of waiting for the next ASOIAF and Kingkiller.

I was considering listing all the longest series I have already read in order to avoid them getting recommended to me again, but I decided against doing that so other people can use this as a resource in case they're also looking for similar recommendations.

p.s. Malazan Book of the Fallen would be my biggest recommendation, BTW. It's by far my favorite dark fantasy series, is a whopping ~3M words, ~11k pages, with hundreds of unique/memorable characters, and an insanely deep lore spanning thousands of years.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

From Wikipedia

A modern melodrama is a dramatic work in which the plot, typically sensationalized and for a strong emotional appeal, takes precedence over detailed characterization. Melodramas typically concentrate on dialogue that is often bombastic or excessively sentimental, rather than action. Characters are often flat, and written to fulfill stereotypes.

Contemporarily, we use the word melodrama for narrative works that go to great lengths to induce certain kinds of emotion at all costs, to detriment of the internal cohesion of both plot and characterization, often in a manner that some consider cheesy, corny, or excessive. All soap operas are melodramas, as are many movies and TV shows. Some melodramas are cheap and fail to achieve their effects, while others can be more rich and even sophisticated. In a way, many mainstream stories are, to some extent, melodramas, even when there are other, more salient genres. There's melodrama in action, crime, and science fiction.

Here are some examples of what I consider more or less contemporary melodramas:

• The Young and the Restless
• Grey's Anatomy
• The Color Purple
• Downton Abbey
• Dawson's Creek
• Avatar
• Gone with the Wind

And here are some stories that are not melodrama, but contain a whole lot of it:

• True Blood
• The Walking Dead
• A.I. Artificial Intelligence
• Pretty much every super-hero CW show
• Pretty much anything in the MCU

Every time someone brings up a topic about recommendations to get normies into anime, they tend to bring up the same old familiar ones like Cowboy Bebop or FLCL or maybe even a Gundam or two. There's always a recommendation of one of the current anime du jour, and the only thing that comes close to being a 'modern classic' recommendation is FMA: Brotherhood.

While I don't have a problem with recommending old anime categorically (Cowboy Bebop won't stop being Cowboy Bebop even if we keep trying to reinvent that wheel), a lot of it is not super accessible, much of it looks very different from modern anime, and the last few years have seen some really amazing productions in both film and TV anime, to the point where a lot of the older stuff just feels really outdated and simple.

With that being said, what are your new recommendations for people who want an introduction to anime?