The Lego Movie is cosmic horror

Copied from Tumblr:

was explaining to my mom on the phone the concept of a cosmic horror and she hit me with the one hit k.o. ⋯

me: yeah so basically a cosmic horror is the fear of a godlike being or entity so much bigger than yourself and your perception of the universe that your brain cant possibly comprehend it, often leading to some sort of madness in the stories because of this “break” in your perception of reality because this entity is so incomprehensible to your limited worldview. the concept is credited to h.p. lovecraft because of stuff like cthulu but the guy was also a massive —

my mom, interjecting: ah, so like horton hears a who. i get it.

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# wait so like # does the LEGO movie count # they manage to escape into the human world and it’s all hazy because they don’t understand # and the people were controlling them the whole time

SURE
SURE THE LEGO MOVIE IS A COSMIC HORROR
WHY NOT

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The LEGO Movie absolutely counts, and it’s treated that way from the characters’ points of view. Emmett describes The Man Upstairs as having “hands like giant pink sausages, like eagle talons mixed with squid” which sounds like a human trying to describe an eldritch horror.

Just think, everyone and everything in his world is made of Lego pieces. They are as fundamental as the subatomic particles that make up our world.

From the characters’ perspective, the humans are gods that created these fundamental elements as drastically simplified playthings imitating their own world. Imagine finding out that the periodic table of elements was constructed by gods in order to build a simulation of something thousands of times more complex, and we are just simulations being puppeted by these gods for their amusement.

This also explains why objects like the Kragle and the Scepter of Q-Tip are considered “relics” with unnatural powers — they are discarded items from the higher, far more complex reality that follow the rules of THAT reality, not the characters’ reality. That is why they can influence the characters’ world in ways not normally permitted by that reality.

This puts a whole new perspective on the scene where Lord Business uses the nail polish remover on Good Cop / Bad Cop to ERASE HIS FACE.