ACTW may have a couple of strikes against it for your tastes -- there are apparently no major female characters (well, at least no HUMAN females), and in keeping with that whole unflinching look at the green dragonrider problem, there's a lot of rather gritty gay sex. But that whole idea of deconstructing the psychic-animal-buddy trope that's so often a totally idealized fuzzy cliche sounds soooo up my alley.

And samurai crack sounds like fun. I still need to watch Damo and a bunch of other things, but before I start scavenging for downloads and rentals I need to poke more closely at some of the local cable channels and see which of the dramas they're running are subtitled (the listings are remarkably unhelpful so the only way to find out for sure is to tune in). I get a couple of Asian networks, primarily Korean-focused given the area demographics but there's one that runs a handful of Japanese series; I just noticed last night that this station's running the old TV version of Zatoichi so I'm going to be going on a major old-school Katsu-binge soon.