@t-ggs96 's King Emmet AU is the cutest thing ever

What Measure is a Villain: Analyzing Rex Dangervest of the Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (aka, the research paper I did for my English final this year)

The 2019 animated film, The LEGO Movie 2: The second part, is a PG rated movie about Siblings, Miscommunication, A Shape-Shifting Queen, and of course, LEGOs. Many of the main characters from the first movie return in this sequel, including Emmet Brickowski, Wyldstyle, also knowns as Lucy, and Batman. The sequel also introduces new characters, such as Queen Waterva Wa’nabi, the Queen of the Systar System, Rex Dangervest, a Time Traveling, Raptor training, intergalactic hero, and General Sweet Mayhem, Queen Watevra’s 2nd in command. The story starts right after the events of the first movie, with Finn’s dad telling him that his sister is aloud to play downstairs with him now that he’s aloud to play there. From there we go back into the world of Finn’s LEGOs, where Finn’s sister, Bianca’s, LEGO DUPLOs, have begun to invade Bricksburg. Emmet tries to offer them a gift of a LEGO heart, but they destroy it. 5 years later, and what was once known as Bricksberg is now known as Apocolypseburg. For the last 5 years, Apocolyseberg and “The Systar System” have been at war. Everyone has gotten tougher. Everyone, except for Emmet. He’s exactly the same as before, happy and cheerful, no matter what chaos is happening around him. General Mayhem comes to find 5 Apocolypsebergers to bring to the Queen’s ceremony, and because of Emmet she is able to do that. She takes Wyldstyle, Batman, Unikitty and Benny to the Systar System with her, leaving Emmet alone with nobody but the other apocolypsebugers who hate him for letting this happen. He decides to go to the systar system to save his friends on his own, and builds a spaceship so he can do so. This spaceship almost crashes into what Emmet calls a “Glasstroid”, but is saved by an unknown minifigure before it can. This unknown minifigure is named Rex Dangervest, a "Galaxy defending archaeologist, cowboy, and raptor trainer”, who takes Emmet aboard his much bigger spaceship to help him save his friends. Meanwhile, Queen Watevera Wa’Nabi, the shapeshifting Queen of the Systar System, is trying to prepare the Apocolypseburgers she had General Mayhem get for her wedding ceremony between her and Batman. Batman, for the record, never actually agreed to this. Everyone trusts her except for Wyldstyle, who is still skeptical of this whole thing. Emmet and Wyldstyle get reunited and attempt to stop the ceremony together, but get split up by Rex. Wyldstyle learns the truth about the Systarians and their inventions, and that they’re just really bad communicators. She tries to stop Emmet from stopping the ceremony, but is too late and ends up causing the end of both The Systar System and Apocolypseburg by doing so. But, with the power of Master Building, the Systarians and Apocoplysebergers are able to unite, much like Finn and Bianca are, and work together to build a new world, known as Syspocalypse Star.

Rex Dangervest, the one of the characters from the movie, The LEGO Movie 2: the Second Part, is displayed as the antagonist character towards the end of the movie, however, this does not make him the antagonist. Rex, also known as Radical Emmet Xtreme, is a version of the main protagonist of the movie, Emmet Brickowski, from an alternate timeline, in which his friends all get captured by General Sweet Mayhem, and in an attempt to rescue them, he hits an asteroid, causing him to fall under a clothes dryer and stay there for a number of years, hopeless. Scared. Unknowing of what became of his friends. This changes him. He starts by changing his name from Emmet Brickowski to Rex, which, as mentioned before, stands for Radical Emmet Xtreme. Then he gets the strength to move in the real world - our world. Emmet is the only minifigure who is able to do this, and it is never explained how. After gaining the strength to move around and walk, he goes and finds new clothes, hair, and even uses a sharpie to change his face. He creates a time traveling spaceship using pieces of other time traveling devices from pop culture, including the TARDIS and the DeLorean, in LEGO form, and goes back to the prehistoric era to get a crew of raptors to help him with his ship, before going to the second before his ship crashed, and saving his past self’s life. Rex and Emmet then explore the Systar System together, looking for Emmet’s friends, specifically Lucy. Along the way they find the Justice League, who have been “brainwashed” into thinking the Systarians are good and even trying to “brainwash” Emmet and Rex. They eventually find Lucy, who joins them in their quest to destroy the ceremony the queen is having, but, after finding out the truth about the ceremonies true intentions, decides not to. Because of this, Emmet thinks that Lucy has also been brainwashed. He and Rex go through with their plan to destroy the ceremony, which also causes “our-momma-gedden”, which was a nightmare Emmet had about essentially the end of the world. Everyone from Apocolypseburg and the Systar System besides Emmet, Rex and the raptors got sucked into black holes. This is when Rex finally tells Emmet the truth about who he really is. Emmet, being Emmet, doesn’t listen to Rex’s backstory, besides the part where he says that he’s Emmet from the future. Emmet realizes what he and Rex did was wrong and wants to try to find a way to fix everything, but Rex, not expecting this outcome, throws Emmet under the dryer so he can feel how Rex felt. Luckily, Lucy comes to save him, having teamed up with the systarians to build their way out of the “black hole”. Emmet, now being with Lucy, has chosen to go down a different path in his life then becoming like Rex, and therefore, Rex ceases to exist. Throughout the movie, he goes from being a protagonist who wants to help Emmet find Lucy, to an antagonist who almost tries to kill Emmet. However, his actions are justified because he thinks this is the only way to fix what happened in his timeline, He wants his timeline’s version of Lucy back, and he doesn’t understand what’s going on, because it’s never explained to him.

Rex’s actions are justified because he believes that this is the only way to fix what happened in his timeline. He believes this because it’s the only thing he can believe. He has no other ideas for how to get his timeline back to how it is supposed to be, and this is his one shot to getting what he thinks will fix it. When he was under the dryer he was scared and alone. He had to give up what made him himself.  He had no idea what the systarians did to his friends, or Lucy, and he needed to get them back no matter what. It is currently unknown how long he spent under the dryer, but it is assumed it was a matter of years before he could actually get the strength to move in the “real world”. That’s a lot of time to be alone with nothing but your own thoughts. In a way, the loneliness probably made him crazy in some way. It wasn’t his fault everyone forgot about him, which turned him from Emmet into Rex.

Another reason his actions are justified is because he wants his version of Lucy back. Lucy means everything to him, an example of this would be how in the beginning of the movie Lucy is trying to make Emmet be tough but he can’t because he’s so excited to see her. He sees her every day, but she makes him happy. You could say she’s the only thing that was keeping him happy in Apocalpyseburg. Out of all his friends, at some point in the movie Emmet calls Lucy his “Super Special Best Friend” which is, as confirmed later in the movie during the wedding scene, basically saying they’re married. After everything that happened in the first movie with Lucy and his other friends, he really cares about them, and spending 5 years fighting in a war together didn’t change that. Especially if he and Lucy are married, which might just be fan speculation, but could be canon to the story. He was also alone under the dryer for so long, probably thinking about her. However, when he sees Emmet’s timeline’s version of her, he doesn’t like her. He probably spent a lot of time thinking about what Lucy would think about him when he came back, and none of it was good, or he knew that this version of Lucy didn’t know him and only liked Emmet from that timeline, and she would never like him, no matter how much he was the him she wanted him to be.

The final reason Rex’s actions are justified is that he does not understand what is going on with the Systar System and it is never explained to him, or anyone in Apocalpyseburg for that matter. Nobody came back for him after all those years, and he was left to slowly decompose under the dryer. Once he actually goes back to the past to find all the systarians, including the justice league and his old friends happy and sparkly, he assumes that they’ve all been brainwashed. He doesn’t even trust Lucy, who could be his wife, when he sees that her hair isn’t naturally black, it’s blue and pink. To quote Rex, “you can’t wash a brain without washing the hair on top of it.”. 

In conclusion, Rex might be the antagonist of the story, but his actions are justified. Nobody deserves what happened to Rex, and sometimes fixations and unreasonable actions can be justified by a lot of bad stuff happening to the person, or, minifigure, for that matter.