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Its that time again - another Season 1 finale rip! But there's a good reason these keep showing up, as I reiterate with each one I cover - The Season 1 finale was when the team was truly firing on all cylinders to end the channel off with a bang. Planet Wisp Mashup Medley, The SiIvaGunner Smurfs Collab, File Select Fusion Collab, Stone Halation - tons of these incredibly ambitious, full-blast collaborations, that I've written plenty of words about already. In comparison, THANK YOU FOR RIPPING feels almost as if dwarfed in scope, not helped by being a rip of a comparatively niche series. Which is a damn shame - because what beat_shobon has done here is just as much of a loveletter to the entire channel yet expressed through his own individual style in a far more condensed runtime.

First of all though - wow, beat_shobon! It's been since Rolling Start that I wrote about one of his rips, and since then I've learned that he's become a bit of a superstar since his 2016 SiIvaGunner days - notably winning a Vocaloid songwriting contest with the ironically-named Can't Make A Song!! in 2018. The guy has a great grasp on this kind of music, is my point, and both Rolling Start and THANK YOU FOR RIPPING show that off well - but more importantly, I adore how THANK YOU FOR RIPPING still feels as much like a love letter to SiIvaGunner as a whole as it does a flexing of its rippers' muscles. The song used as the foundation for the mashup is GO MY WAY!! from the IDOLM@STER franchise, a song that was immensely notable in Season 1 as the song to supposedly "replace" Snow Halation during The Reboot storyline - see I Saw a Brainwasher Today for a bit more details on this. Its a song that I remember receiving a lot of pushback during that event as a result of those connotations, as a lot of people found it to be even *more* grating of an idol song than Snow Halation was - yet with The Reboot concluded, with those emotions settled, I find that the song has come to represent a sense of...unity, in the fanbase. It IS silly idol music, but we've come to accept it as part of SiIvaGunner, as a result of what The Reboot taught us.

That's far from all that THANK YOU FOR RIPPING contains, of course - the piano in the background continuously plays segments of The Flintstones theme throughout the entire song, as it jumps from joke to joke. Its a bit of a journey throughout the entire channel's life during Season 1: starting where it all began with Vinesauce Joel's reaction to 7 Grand Dad, to a quick clip of Snoop Dogg's "Smoke Weed Everyday!!", a sudden jumpscare from The Bean (I'll get to it someday), then moving into memes prominent in the season's last few months, in the infamous POKEMON GO SONG!!! and The Nutshack theme. All the while, again, those Flintstones-esque notes stay prominently audible in the background, as to keep reminding us of where this whole thing all began.

Perhaps most interesting of all, though, is near the rips end at around the 1:30 mark. Another Vinesauce Joel clip plays, a quite well known one - "WHO'S BEEN DRAWING DICKS?" - but its pitch shifted in a way that may ring as familiar to many of you. It is, indeed, directly referencing the rip "Creative Exercise - Mario Paint", known by its album name as Mario Paint exe 2. A sequel to a prior-made Soundcloud mashup from the same ripper in 2015, this is as of today the third-most-viewed rip on the entire SiIvaGunner channel - and was, to my surprise, also made by beat_shobon. Making that connection, then, drew my attention to another part of the rip just a few seconds earlier, where the instantly-recognizable bellow of "DAY-TO-NAAA!!!" from Daytona USA plays in the midst of the mix. I cannot help but think that this is a direct callback to Rolling Start, as another one of beat_shobon's most celebrated rips - one also made during The Reboot, tracing back to the rip's central joke.

Its that time again - another Season 1 finale rip! But there's a good reason these keep showing up, as I reiterate with each one I cover - The Season 1 finale was when the team was truly firing on all cylinders to end the channel off with a bang. Planet Wisp Mashup Medley, The SiIvaGunner Smurfs Collab, File Select Fusion Collab, Stone Halation - tons of these incredibly ambitious, full-blast collaborations, that I've written plenty of words about already. In comparison, THANK YOU FOR RIPPING feels almost as if dwarfed in scope, not helped by being a rip of a comparatively niche series. Which is a damn shame - because what beat_shobon has done here is just as much of a loveletter to the entire channel yet expressed through his own individual style in a far more condensed runtime.

First of all though - wow, beat_shobon! It's been since Rolling Start that I wrote about one of his rips, and since then I've learned that he's become a bit of a superstar since his 2016 SiIvaGunner days - notably winning a Vocaloid songwriting contest with the ironically-named Can't Make A Song!! in 2018. The guy has a great grasp on this kind of music, is my point, and both Rolling Start and THANK YOU FOR RIPPING show that off well - but more importantly, I adore how THANK YOU FOR RIPPING still feels as much like a love letter to SiIvaGunner as a whole as it does a flexing of its rippers' muscles. The song used as the foundation for the mashup is GO MY WAY!! from the IDOLM@STER franchise, a song that was immensely notable in Season 1 as the song to supposedly "replace" Snow Halation during The Reboot storyline - see I Saw a Brainwasher Today for a bit more details on this. Its a song that I remember receiving a lot of pushback during that event as a result of those connotations, as a lot of people found it to be even *more* grating of an idol song than Snow Halation was - yet with The Reboot concluded, with those emotions settled, I find that the song has come to represent a sense of...unity, in the fanbase. It IS silly idol music, but we've come to accept it as part of SiIvaGunner, as a result of what The Reboot taught us.

That's far from all that THANK YOU FOR RIPPING contains, of course - the piano in the background continuously plays segments of The Flintstones theme throughout the entire song, as it jumps from joke to joke. Its a bit of a journey throughout the entire channel's life during Season 1: starting where it all began with Vinesauce Joel's reaction to 7 Grand Dad, to a quick clip of Snoop Dogg's "Smoke Weed Everyday!!", a sudden jumpscare from The Bean (I'll get to it someday), then moving into memes prominent in the season's last few months, in the infamous POKEMON GO SONG!!! and The Nutshack theme. All the while, again, those Flintstones-esque notes stay prominently audible in the background, as to keep reminding us of where this whole thing all began.

Perhaps most interesting of all, though, is near the rips end at around the 1:30 mark. Another Vinesauce Joel clip plays, a quite well known one - "WHO'S BEEN DRAWING DICKS?" - but its pitch shifted in a way that may ring as familiar to many of you. It is, indeed, directly referencing the rip "Creative Exercise - Mario Paint", known by its album name as Mario Paint exe 2. A sequel to a prior-made Soundcloud mashup from the same ripper in 2015, this is as of today the third-most-viewed rip on the entire SiIvaGunner channel - and was, to my surprise, also made by beat_shobon. Making that connection, then, drew my attention to another part of the rip just a few seconds earlier, where the instantly-recognizable bellow of "DAY-TO-NAAA!!!" from Daytona USA plays in the midst of the mix. I cannot help but think that this is a direct callback to Rolling Start, as another one of beat_shobon's most celebrated rips - one also made during The Reboot, tracing back to the rip's central joke.

The show must go on, and we move now from yesterday toward a happier little tale. Wheras I grieved over not getting to know enough about R.L.99 in Through the F​-​F​-​Fire and the F​-​F​-​Flames, today's rip sort of explores the opposite journey. Because in the narrow view of the SiIvaGunner community that exists within its comment sections, it was impossible not to recognize Emm Bee Sea.

With videos as frequent as those on the SiIvaGunner channel, there's bound to be just as many different kinds of comment sections, each rip its own little hub of discussion. There's the funny ones, like the comments to :3 being filled with other people reciprocating the same kitty emoticon, there's ones from more recent rips wherin people are still trying to discern what the joke is, enjoying the music althesame, there's ones where people remark on and discuss the absurdity of the channel's lore like on A love letter to this wonderful community and my amazing friends...and honestly, Staff Roll (SM64) Fusion just so happens to hold a lot in common with that last example in particular. Amidst all these comments sections, you would start to recognize regulars, people who obviously knew their stuff from having watched the channel for so long - people like New Guy, and like Emm Bee Sea.

Its not even as if I can pinpoint any specific date that I started realizing how often Emm Bee Sea was showing up, but eventually she just became someone you expected to see, always wearing the same recognizable profile picture of Maki Love Live. And like, it obviously isn't a very substantial connection, but...there WAS a connection there, one that made the realization that she was now full-on contributing to the channel hit more than it otherwise would have. And even three years later, Staff Roll (SM64) Fusion sits pinned on Emm Bee Sea's profile as her proudest work. In my eyes, its easy to see why.

We've covered Fusion Collabs on here before - File Select Fusion Collab, Balcony Fusion Collab, Bramble Blast Collab - they're a mainstay of the channel put together as loveletters by a group within the channel. But by that metric, and indeed by its own title, Staff Roll (SM64) Fusion doesn't technically fit the bill - as you can see at the top of the post, Emm Bee Sea made the audio entirely on her own, covering one and a half dozen styles across the track's entire runtime. A task that's usually divided up across multiple rippers for projects like this was taken on by this one ripper alone - yet all the styles, from MOTHER 3 to Kirby's Dream Land 3 to Super Mario Sunshine, are incorporated so seamlessly, never feeling as if corners are being cut. It's effectively a tribute to both Super Mario 64 and the SiIvaGunner channel itself in that way, a tribute to the very idea of fusion collabs, set to the credits theme of one of the channel's most-ripped games.

Believe it or not, I actually had plans to post something else for today - to follow some sort of schedule, yknow? Put all my ducks in a row and let the posts release day by day. But then the SiIva team decided out of nowhere, just last night, to announce the formal return of the Christmas Comeback Crisis, the channel's main storyline, to be happening this month. To say that I'm excited would be the understatement of the century. And so I figured, it'd be best to celebrate with one of the many rips made specifically for the story - The Noble Haltmann.

Performed by friend to the blog and fellow Mel, Can of Nothing aka Mellorine, The Noble Haltmann is a cover of a song of the same name from Kirby: Planet Robobot - one that typically lacks vocals, yet was given lyrics in both the English and Japanese versions of the game, and "performed" through textboxes by Susie in both games. In the English version, however, the translation doesn't fit quite right with the song's actual progression - which is why The Noble Haltmann features redone lyrics done by the SiIvaGunner team, to fit the scene its in from the actual storyline better. The edits, paired with Mellorine's fantastic vocal performance, come together to form what's in my eyes the definitive version of the original song, even divorced from its place in the series' lore.

December!! Christmas times!! The holidays!! Wahoo!!

There's of course always a lot of excitement in the air during December, even if its...largely manufactured by big companies. Yet ever since 2016, I've had far more of a personal attachment to the month - the end of SiIvaGunner Season 1, and the beginning of Season 2, was some of the most engrossed I've ever been engrossed with a piece of media - and it was all punctuated with the Patched Plains Fusion Collab.

It may be hard to truly convey to newer SiIva viewers just how suspenseful and strange the month of October was during 2016. For all intents and purposes, the channel appeared to have truly ENDED with Epic Flintstones, and everything that led up to its release just further cemented that. We'd gotten behind-the-scenes reveals of unresolved content, some of the channel's biggest projects and collaborations up to that point, a huge amount of new albums within such a short amount of time...there was very little to suggest that SiIva wouldn't actually be ending. Yet viewers paying attention would be able to connect the dots, these small little hints dropped during the finale, all connected to "Wood Man" - and mind you, this was before he was even established as a character on the channel!

Just a few days after the official ending, as SiIva had gone to sleep and the channel had been avoiding uploads for so long - uploads suddenly returned, as this "Wood Man" character became the new host at the start of November. This wasn't the first time a story event had been happening on SiIva, yet it was one that left us as viewers confused and in the dark of what was truly happening, due to the lack of a proper narrator. After just two weeks and an album release, halfway through the month, uploads suddenly ceased and the channel went dark. So...was the channel actually dead? Was this just a little bonus Halloween thing, to let the team play around with Wood Man as a character in an epilogue to the actual channel?

Turns out, it was all build-up to December - to the Christmas Comeback Crisis. The channel ending, the virus in his computer, the Voice Inside Your Head, Wood Man - it was all revealed to be part of this all new ongoing storyline, presented to us in full-on episodes during the month of December. Like a light switch turned on, the confusion and uncertainty of November turned into full-on celebration of SiIva's seemingly-now-confirmed return to regular uploading. This was the start of Season 2 - and it was, in my eyes, an absolutely perfect premiere.

I really want to go more in-depth on this someday, but I'll circle back to Patched Plains Fusion Collab to round the story out - because really, it was this rip that really cemented Season 2 as having officially begun, halfway through December 2016. It had been a month since Wood Man's sudden leave from the channel, and out of nowhere we're given an animated prologue to this all-new Christmas-themed storyline, directly based on Kirby: Planet Robobot from earlier that year. And after that sudden gut punch, we're treated to an absolute feast for the ears - a red-carpet introduction to the sort of quality we were about to experience. Kirby: Planet Robobot already had a heavy presence on SiIva due to The Reboot, and so starting this big new story event off with another rip from that same game felt like a sort of reassurance - this wasn't a bit, or a side story, or anything of the sort, but the full next step of the SiIvaGunner channel.

As a rip, it's frankly excellent - it has all the quality of the average Fusion Collab on the channel condensed down to just two minutes, covering everything from different genres of music, different games, different time signatures, and everything inbetween - a remix collaboration in the purest sense of the word, and an absolute treat to listen to. A big benefit to fusion collabs of this nature is that you're able to very clearly identify who is responsible for what parts of the rip - Princess Sylvyspirit's involvement is immediately noticeable as soon as the Touhou segment begins, Chaze's affection for MOTHER 3 is expressed through his part in the collaboration, and so on!

If there's one thing I think I'll end up regretting with this blog, it'll probably be over how harsh I think I've come off in describing Season 1. I get the feeling that a good number of SiIvaGunner fans - a solid majority of subscribers at this point - weren't able to be around for the channel's big breakout year, and have only been able to listen to its rips in retrospect. And yeah - a lot of them are messy, lack quality control, and in general tend to have a feeling of being...undercooked. But that really shouldn't take away from just how special of a community it was to be part of back when - when the channel's jokes, the people behind it, and what to expect from it, were ALL a mystery.

I've never been big into vocaloid, and it certainly wasn't what drew me to SiIvaGunner - nor has SiIvaGunner really made me all too interested in pursuing it further, honestly. But even I could REALLY tell that Rolling Start struck a chord with people - a mix of The King of Speed and it's iconic opening bellow of "ROLLING START!!!", and Rolling Girl by the late vocaloid musician wowaka. My vocaloid-invested friends have all told me the same thing - during his ten-year tenure doing music, wowaka was an absolute pioneer in the vocaloid field, and songs like Rolling Girl showcase exactly why, even to a relative outsider like me.