I love this as an extrapolation on the moral resolution of the Lego Movie (and how it can be taken as a broad allegory for transformative fandom in general) and uh also just as…. a lot of fun
My family are farmers from my mothers side and when I was a kid my gradmother said something along the lines of “If you can grow anything you have a pure heart, plants feed off your soul as much as they feed off the earth. Be kind of them , they pray to god” she told me this while taking off the spikes of cactus pears. Now I buy dying plants from the hardware store on Clarence and easily bring them back to life, everytime I doubt my heart I bring home hoards of plants to bring back to life as if it’s a test of the purity of my soul.
Every plant I have dies…
According to an old lady in a old ass village in Palestine you a bitch then
“Most writers were the kids who easily, almost automatically, got A’s in English class. (There are exceptions, but they often also seem to be exceptions to the general writerly habit of putting off writing as long as possible.) At an early age, when grammar school teachers were struggling to inculcate the lesson that effort was the main key to success in school, these future scribblers gave the obvious lie to this assertion. Where others read haltingly, they were plowing two grades ahead in the reading workbooks. These are the kids who turned in a completed YA novel for their fifth-grade project. It isn’t that they never failed, but at a very early age, they didn’t have to fail much; their natural talents kept them at the head of the class.
This teaches a very bad, very false lesson: that success in work mostly depends on natural talent. Unfortunately, when you are a professional writer, you are competing with all the other kids who were at the top of their English classes. Your stuff may not—indeed, probably won’t—be the best anymore.
If you’ve spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are. As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good. Before you take to the keys, you are Proust and Oscar Wilde and George Orwell all rolled up into one delicious package. By the time you’re finished, you’re more like one of those 1940’s pulp hacks who strung hundred-page paragraphs together with semicolons because it was too much effort to figure out where the sentence should end.”