#chango

As was the case with the end of Season 7, SiIvaGunner kicked 2025 off through an explosive appearance at MAGFest; the music-and-game convention which annually marks some of the most prominent public appearances of the real-world SiIvaGunner team. I've written about this back on MAGFest 2019: SiIvaGunner Presents - High Quality Ripping, but getting to see behind the curtains for just a moment on these panels, vlogs, photoshoots and more is indescribably exciting every year. But panels aside, what I've now been looking forward to seeing most is Chipspace – where individual rippers hold their own sets to showcase their ripping prowess. As someone who's always followed SiIvaGunner as an outsider-looking-in, not knowing any of the rippers in person and only knowing a handful online, it's an unbelievably fun experience to see which kinds of personalities are attached to their rips, to see the passion that a rip often conveys be expressed firsthand through a standout performance. There were tons of fantastic sets this year, and I highly recommend watching the official compilation of them all over on SiIvaGunner2; but today, before I lose my mind thinking about it in isolation any further, I need to talk about legendary ripper Myeauxyoozi's set and the live premiere of Thanos Boogaloo Baby.

And yeah, you read that right; amidst incredible performances of classic rips, along the lines of vvsvlogs' performance of Mother, Father, TechnoMan last year, multiple of these sets also premiere all-new rips to their audience to really keep them on their toes. While lots of these new drops are just genuinely excellent rips, the ones that I always remember well after the fact are the ones that take advantage of their surprise factor to catch the audience off guard. One of my favorite examples is Heboyi's performance of Industry Baby Slander, which is a "slander" rip along the lines of Blookerstein's INDUSTRY KNIGHT (Beta Mix), but which had its visuals unexpectedly substituted for a version specifically poking fun at various MAGFest topics. This surprise factor has continued into this year (seriously, PLEASE check out JoeBro's set, it felt like a fever dream the entire way through) and just reinforced the age-old SiIvaGunner philosophy; even when you think you've seen through all of its tricks, you can NEVER truly predict what it's going to do next. And to truly get to the bottom of the incident this post is about, we'll need to take a few steps back and get to the core of that adage, to the day wherein it perhaps applied most; Season 4 Episode 1's Not Funny Didn't Laugh Day.

For what would become his last year of running the SiIvaGunner channel, Chaze the Chat sought to make Season 4 Episode 1 the most unpredictable season in the channel's run. The goal was to replicate the sense of reckless abandon that had helped define the channel back in Season 1, the chaos that had brought us rips like Battle Theme - Zeno Blade Chronicle X, Live and Ooooooooooooooh, Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday and many more. It's arguable how well the year ultimately succeeded at its goal – it was always going to be fighting an uphill battle given that the novelty present at the channel's debut was entirely gone, and it would ultimately see a shift in priorities with the exponential growth in scope of the King for Another Day Tournament. Yet for but a day, it felt as if the team had hit the nail right on the head; on the 10th of September, 2019, the focus was almost squarely on making rips as incomprehensible - and, by proxy - fucking stupid as possible. I think Sex - Steve Harvey should give off exactly the kind of vibe I'm describing, yet buried amidst the loud, absurd, barely-coherent postings, sat one video that stuck with me for far longer than I believe should be reasonable: Thanos Boogaloo.

Not because it stands out as meaningful or profound in contrast, to be clear; Thanos Boogaloo is just as brain-rottingly stupid as the rest of what the day had to offer, but was so in a way completely unique to it. The rip's audio is completely unedited – it is literally just playing The Messenger's Bamboo Boogaloo II (Bamboo Creek) as advertised – yet, only a few seconds in, the music is paired with an...interesting gif of hit Marvel villain Thanos busting it down. I recognize that there may well be a newer generation of terminally-online people unaware of just why Thanos in particular was used for this rip, so let me clarify; Thanos, years before Hatsune Miku, Peter Griffin, or Son Goku, was THE first proper collaboration to be put in Fortnite, with an item allowing players to outright transform into him for a limited time all the way back in 2018. Even as someone who had never played Fortnite and has no investment in the MCU, the energy around his addition was absolutely mind-melting; people were left and right laughing their asses of at the imagery of the cold, ruthless titan of a man that Thanos is busting it down through the exact same model-rigging as the cartoonishly exaggerated main player models; the very phrase "THANOS FORTNITE" became a shorthand for absolute absurdity, a catchphrase for brainrot, and mere days after his addition the online posting world would be forever changed by the legendary video Thanos dance. It felt, for a moment, to someone more terminally online than terminally in-theatres, as if Thanos himself eclipsed the MCU in popularity; a new shitpost based either on his appearance in the films or him busting-it-down in Fortnite appearing every hour of the day.

Somewhere along the line, as the guy was continuing to melt the collective minds of the terminally online, we'd see the creation of an absolutely stellar, top-tier image, of the man standing proud with his massive meat hanging out. By the time this image released, Thanos' surge of popularity had already resulted in him appearing in the original SiIvaGunner King for a Day Tournament – the Season 3 one, covered back on How 2 Do Anything – yet as soon as word got out on how well-endowed he allegedly was, his return to the second contest came with an immediate redesign themed around his supposed salaciousness. It was the kind of joke that just kept building, one SiIvaGunner itself didn't even had to escalate themselves for the rest of the internet to instead keep building on top off; and, though his reign had very much subsided by the time Thanos Boogaloo came around, his popularity was still nevertheless fresh in everyone's mind. When the visuals kicked in, and I was made to see an absolutely iconic, low-resolution, low-runtime gif of the guy grooving to the tunes and throwing his ass back in excitement; it was a kind of joy that I don't know how to justify to you whatsoever. Keep in mind, the King for Another Day Tournament still had not happened yet at this point, this event was not themed around it or around Thanos whatsoever; and yet here he was, in a rip otherwise completely unedited, edited and played around with in a fucking hilarious fashion basically just to make a point about Bamboo Boogaloo II from The Messenger slapping so hard that even Thanos couldn't resist throwing it back to it. Certainly, it was far from the first rip with completely unexpected, attention-grabbing visuals – ​THIS RIP WAS MADE BY TEETH GANG haunts me to this day – yet the combination of the character utilized and the rip's unedited audio managed to make it stick out in my mind even all these years later, a testament to how much of a non-sequitur that the SiIva team are still able to make so bizarrely funny.

What I'm getting at with all this, with Not Funny Didn't Laugh Day, with Season 4 Episode 1, with Thanos, with Fortnite – is that that fucking gif of Thanos busting it down sexual style has been stuck in my brain far past the point where Thanos shitposting stopped being a hip and cool thing. Not Funny Didn't Laugh Day came and went, the King for Another Day Tournament would overshadow most of the rest of the year's events through insanely high-quality arrangements like Sunday Morning, and though rips like Sex - Steve Harvey and other absurdist Season 4 Episode 1 masterpieces like Snowball Park - Super Mario 3D World would continue to be referenced later into the channel's life, I rightfully presumed that my obsession with Thanos Boogaloo – a rip lacking entirely in audio material to even reference in so much as a leitmotif – would remain unfruitful, remain as naught but a quirky rip only I quite remembered so strongly. It isn't that I wasn't at peace with that, there's barely any rip to even reference with Thanos Boogaloo and it was moreso a rip that had wormed its way into my brain than one I had immense emotional attachment to...but, yes, by now, you've likely already pieced together the punchline. Six years after the fact, in front of a live audience in person and later on YouTube, Myeauxyoozi – a ripper who wasn't even active when Thanos was all the rage – put an absolutely gigantic smile on my face through his performance of a rip I never expected to see; Thanos Boogaloo Baby.

If you haven't seen this portion of the set yet by this point in reading, I emplore you, sincerely, PLEASE stop reading this post and go watch Myeauxyoozi's Chipspace set; I've timestamped the relevant portion here, but I encourage watching it in its entirety for the full experience. Having covered Myeauxyoozi on here multiple times beforehand for his comedic excellence on rips like Among Drip Drop Galaxy and Shaky Mountain, I can't exactly say that I WASN'T expecting the guy himself to be as charismatic and lively on stage as he wound up being. Nevertheless (and as you'll find me say in the YouTube Premiere chat), it needs to be said; Myeauxyoozi's white boy swag, even before the moment where my life was irreparably changed forever, is simply off the fucking charts. But then, of course, the moment starts its approach. A familiar chiptune-y soundscape fades into view, as our ripper grabs the microphone to make an important notice; that, due to the after-show nature of his set, the visuals he would've otherwise planned for the segment wouldn't be available – the visuals, of course, being "Thanos Dancing on screen". Did my ears deceive me? I thought for but a moment, before being met with another unbelievable follow-up to the disclaimer; to compensate for the lack of Dancing Thanos visuals, Myeauxyoozi boldly proclaimed that he would "do his best to do the same thing". I could never have been prepared for what would come next.

Look, alright, look. I know this is fucking stupid, I KNOW that I'm losing you at this point. I'm usually on here hyping up the excellence in ripper intent, in the emotional core, passion, the beating hearts found on rips like i love(d) you, Poké Village, Jesus of the Underground, Outertale; but I need you to understand just how fucking ingrained into my mind this period of Thanosposting, this first taste of widespread Fortnite-induced brainrot, and, most of all, that FUCKING gif of Thanos throwing it back all was. It felt like all the puzzle pieces were coming into place, years and minutes of foreshadowing at once paying off; Myeauxyoozi's indescribable white boy swag put to use to make the most pitch-perfect, point-for-point recreation of the Thanos dancing gif I could have ever imagined. It was immediately distracting me from the actual quality of Thanos Boogaloo Baby – which, to be clear, is a fucking excellent rip, an incredibly inspired mashup to finally give Bamboo Boogaloo II the rip treatment it deserved – to see this virus of my mind played out on screen in vivid, shot-for-shot detail. I PROMISE I was not alone in this shock; in the moment it all occurred, the entire chat lit up in flames in sheer amazement, the Discord pinging the man multiple times to ask just how the fuck he did that so perfectly. His response, word for word: "You study the gif you become the gif"

And again, I really want to reiterate that this should all not be explained whilst ignoring just how fucking good and funny of a rip Thanos Boogaloo Baby itself already is. Paying tribute to something otherwise so forgotten by the tides of the wider internet collective and seemingly SiIvaGunner itself felt like a complete left turn, and yet its return is, as was taught well beforehand with rips like Shiny Smily TALE and Violet Snow Memories, merely another part of the SiIvaGunner ethos – that NOTHING on SiIvaGunner is truly forgotten. The rip itself is just one of many many examples of Myeuxyoozi proving his ability to find the perfect balance between laughter and listenability, a jam similarly absurd in concept but fantastic in execution to Moriah Carey...but god, man, the live premiere, the PERFORMANCE, sold it all so many levels above what I could've possibly imagined. Myeauxyoozi's jamming continued all throughout the rip's length on the set, which was only highlighted by perhaps the funniest part of it all; the MAGFest staff which was helping maintain the after-show sets and its looping stock visuals found the affair so funny as to take it on themselves (unprompted) to bring up the original Thanos dancing gif live as the performance was happening. To the complete shock of all in the crowd, the student got to be reunited with his master – and for a moment, the entire world appeared so perfect, so beautiful.