It started hailing in my place for no reason, and I just so happen to have a garden outside. When the hail hit, I felt bad for my plants in my garden, and I thought that a greenhouse would be better suited to protect my plants from the elements and to care for them.
And when I got to that topic, I thought about Eternal Sugar Cookie. Ever the loving, caring angel, so intent on protecting her subjects from harm that she is willing to become a villain and imprison them just so they won't have to face the real world, which to her is far worse. After all, it's better for cookies to stay put in her garden, dreaming their precious, fleeting lives away, than to suffer agony trying to achieve their dreams for real.
There's just one problem with that. Yes, her paradise is a "garden". It's great; it's splendid; it's beautiful; it's all one could ever want!
...But it's not a "greenhouse".
In a greenhouse, plants are kept behind glass panes, shielded from the harsh elements. There are no storms, no drought, no floods, no heatwaves - and, within a greenhouse, it's so easy to control the conditions in which your plants are grown. Temperature, humidity, light intensity, etc. can be changed on a whim to best suit your plants if you have the resources to do so.
This isn't the case with a garden, which is more exposed and open to the outside world. Bad weather comes for everything under the sky - anything from the disasters mentioned earlier to something as benign as two weeks of grey clouds - and does not care for the labour of the gardener. So does disease from beyond the garden walls, as well as animals which may feed on the leaves and fruits of the garden plants, and weeds which may desecrate the orderliness of the garden. If your soil pH is wrong, your plants may grow wrong or not at all.
Eternal Sugar Cookie's problem is that she doesn't understand these differences between a garden and a greenhouse. She claims her paradise is a garden, entry open to all; yet once cookies enter, she insists it's more like a greenhouse, and closes the exit off. She wants something that offers natural joy and beauty, but ends up controlling it so tightly that it becomes superficial and manipulative.
Eternal Sugar Cookie simply doesn't understand that to maintain a garden means to accept the suffering that comes her way. Plants kept in a garden are bound to be subject to the conditions of the outside, unless you want to build a greenhouse instead. Similarly, cookies with passions in their hearts are bound to endure suffering as they pursue them, unless you want to lock them in jars and call it a day. Hollyberry Cookie says it herself: "you and I both know that Happiness cannot exist without Pain as its shadow."
Funny enough, Fire Spirit Cookie setting the garden on fire in the Act 1 finale accidentally lends to this analogy. So she wants to treat her garden like a greenhouse? Looks like she hasn't heard of a little thing they call the "greenhouse effect"! For when passion has nowhere to go to, no outlet, no challenge to stimulate it, smothered under a blanket while it continues to fester within, what else can it do but destroy its host? How can she expect to nurture true Happiness sustainably when she continuously pollutes her subjects with artifice?
Or something, this was a half-baked analysis I made on the spot. I'm not, like, an English major or anything.
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