John Winchester vs Yoda

emma_in_oz answered her own prompt:



John Winchester has leapt to his feet and knocked over his chair as Yoda walks in. Yoda reacts defensively while Cordelia laughs.

Getting this in the mail was a very nice surprise :)

Unexpectedly enjoyable trashy fantasy tv

I just got up to speed on Eastwick and The Vampire Diaries after happily avoiding both for ages on the assumption they'd be terrible trash, and they turned out to be enjoyable trash. They even do moderately well in terms of gender and race!

Eastwick is about 3 30ish women in Stars Hollow(*) who are drawn together by the realisation that they all have magical powers. It has:
-Paul Gross having an absolute ball as the charismatic ambiguously evil Darryl Van Horne, who arrives mysteriously into town and does stuff like buying the paper one of the women works at and encouraging her to do an expose of whatever it is he's up to. eg this scene from the pilot.
-Not only does it pass the Bechdel test it's remarkably femslashy.
-It's funny! Joanna in particular has a lot of cool lines.
-Although Darryl does his share of tempting/encouraging for the most part the women decide and follow their own paths

The Vampire Diaries is, on the surface, "Twilight, the tv series" eg a teen drama with romance and vampires. But it's actually more like True Blood or Buffy, albeit not as good and mixed with a hefty dollop of Dawson's Creek. There's a large ensemble cast with lots of different interesting things going on, and the story arc is progressing at a satisfying clip.
Elena, the main character, has motivations well beyond romance and is for example more concerned for the good of her little brother than her relationship with the romantic lead Stefan. She has friends! With whom she has real conversations about things other than boys!
Things are also livened up by Stefan's psychopathic brother Damon. What I like about him is he isn't actively evil like Angelus, he doesn't care about anyone other than Stefan enough to put much effort into hurting them. But if they get in his way he will kill them without a thought, and like a cat he plays with his food. Warning: this leads to an incredibly creepy relationship with his semi-mind controlled "girlfriend", though on the plus side the show and all the characters(**) see it as creepy (including the girlfriend, any time the control starts to wear off)
The treatment of female vampires is not fantastic but it never is :(

(*)It's the same set, and a fairly similar town.
(**)Who alas can't do anything because he's way stronger. One of the things I like about Stefan is he doesn't seem all that special as as vampires go, he's not even the only one with a conscience.

Fanart: Vampire Diaries/Amazing Race

The Salvatore brothers on the Amazing race. Inspired by the psychopathic vampire Damon saying to his angsty vampire-with-a-conscience brother Stefan "But we’re a team. We could travel the world together. We could try out for The Amazing Race!" and me being struck by the mental image of the two of them traveling the world, Damon eating their competitors and Stefan angsting about it.



Girl: Hey do you guys know where all the other teams got to?
Damon: So, about earlier today when you deliberately stole our taxi..
Stefan: Damon...

Very quickly drawn because it's a very silly picture.