#character archives

Grand Dad

"Mario seven, uh, was that the one I played? Oh, let's check it out..."

For Walt Disney, it all began with a mouse. But for SiIvaGunner, it all began with a bootleg game, a streamer, and a pinch of insanity. Many have come after him, and many can claim to be funnier - but Grand Dad will forever hold the title as the first ever figment of imagination to come out of the bubbling mind of SiIvaGunner [FILE-01]. As a result, he has come to be a symbol for the channel in its entirety, the very embodiment of the SiIvaGunner ethos, and something of a dear friend in the eyes of its creator.

In 2014, a certain streamer under the name of Vinesauce Joel was going through the motions of his typical streaming routine - playing games of the oddest variety, and bellylaughing at the absurd results they'd deliver. Even as part of this greater whole, however, Joel's reaction to 7 GRAND DAD immediately became a standout moment, a series of events so perfect that the comedic timing couldn't have been coordinated to be any better. A mumbling Joel clicks on the game bizarrely labeled as "Mario 7", and is to his great shock met with the imagery of a garishly discolored Mario, placed onto an equally garish blue background, as bold letters declare the game's name to be "7 GRAND DAD". Before Joel can even properly process the twist he's been subjected to, only letting out a reading of the game's name, the game twists all expectations once again: An 8-bit rendition of The Flintstones theme, originally from The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy, kicks in - prompting a bewildered reaction of "FLINTSTONES?!" from the thoroughly befuddled streamer.

This is a sequence of events you're all too familiar with if you're a fan of the SiIvaGunner channel, yet nevertheless a necessary one to properly recount to understand just how core Grand Dad is to SiIvaGunner: Through this one 15-second clip of one streamer's reaction to the unpredictable world of bootleg video games, a small subset of internet dwellers on the platform SoundCloud realized that they'd uncovered a whole new genre of derivative audio work. Mashups and arrangements were always alive and well on the internet, yet always delivered with upfront honesty: To play into their derivative nature as part of the reaction, to present these edits as if they were the nostalgic, authentic real-deal video game music that you grew up loving, only to have the edit serve as an unexpected punchline, was the kind of brilliant idea that just had to be capitalized on. Thus, in January 2016, one lone internet dweller by the name Chaze the Chat started the SiIvaGunner (then GiIvaSunner) channel, and uploaded "Wild Pokémon Battle - Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire". The bait-and-switch foundation that laid the groundwork for all of SiIvaGunner, all built upon the concept of a bootleg Flintstones game pretending to be the seventh entry in the Super Mario franchise.

In our world, Grand Dad's debut to the online world is now over ten years old, his legacy on the SiIvaGunner channel being that of a figurehead mainly representative of the simpler times that the channel has long since grown up from. Yet in the SiIvaGunner universe, to SiIvaGunner himself, Grand Dad is the beating heart of the entire channel, the first spark of imagination which binds his whole universe together. Every figment made since the channel's inception owes its existence to Grand Dad, and with every step SiIvaGunner underwent across his original 2016 run, Grand Dad was right there alongside him, an enduring voice in his head steering the channel onward. And even as his creator fell into a deep slumber, as The Voice Inside Your Head [FILE-03] set his plans into motion to extract SiIvaGunner's figments into the real world, Grand Dad was at the front lines of the resistance fighting in his name - and remains a symbol of hope for all figments caught in The Voice's tyrannical reign.

SiIvaGunner

"I haven't slept in so long. I forgot what dreams were like. Goodnight."

It's the aesthetic statue that started it all: The in-universe creator of the YouTube channel under the same name, and the primary channel host for Season 1 and (through his subconscious) Season 7, SiIvaGunner!

Initially going under the name GiIvaSunner, he was carved from a meteorite containing mysterious "Core" energy, bought by an equally mysterious collector in the Netherlands. The statue came to life and promptly killed its creator for reasons yet unknown, then hijacked his computer to start the GiIvaSunner YouTube channel in January of 2016. Three months later, after an attempted murder plot by the nefarious Angry Joe, the statue was left lifeless at the bottom of the sea until it was recovered by Chad Warden, upon which it regained sentience under the new name of SiIvaGunner. Chad Warden continued to aid SiIvaGunner in his ripping endeavors over the following months, and after much turmoil, at the end of Season 1, SiIvaGunner finally released his self-described magnum opus and went to rest for the first time in his life.

Wood Man

"but i can't say i havent had fun screwing with the channel in siiva's absence.

not to mention, im always free to just... hop out and chill in other universes.

its always fun to see other worlds and other versions of characters, right? maybe purgatory ain't so bad."

With SiIvaGunner himself in a deep slumber [FILE-01] and Chad Warden gone [FILE-02], the finale of Season 1 seemed like a perfect place to let the story end and for our heroes to rest easy. Yet ever since The Reboot, the seeds of something bigger had been planted, a growing mystery, awaiting to sprout into something far greater. In The Voice's [FILE-03] final moments, he placed a curse on SiIvaGunner's computer, part-virus, part-figment, and all organic, taking the form of the nicest robot master in town - Wood Man.

Wood Man's directive was simple: wait for SiIvaGunner to leave his computer, then allow The Voice to be resurrected from the code to SiIvaGunner's reality. Yet since his inception, Wood Man has been laid-back, independent, and unruly. Before resurrecting The Voice, he chose to take over the SiIvaGunner YouTube and Twitter account just for the hell of it, interacting with fans on Twitter, and just posting whatever was on his mind across both platforms. Despite being created as merely a tool, being given access to the SiIvaGunner channel made him realize how much fun there's to be had in the world - and eventually, through interacting with the figments which The Voice sought to terrorize, Wood Man called it quits and went rogue.

Part Proto Man and part Deadpool, through his virus/figment properties Wood Man has been able to communicate directly with us in the audience on several occasions, a voice chiming in from time to time just to talk in the midst of whatever story the channel may be undergoing. Althewhile, those same properties have given him the ability to move between dimensions and parallel worlds at his own behest, letting him take part in or even lead channel events over the years. With his trademark lower-case speech, he remains chill and lightherted in any situation, aware of his abilities to escape from any danger he may encounter - a trait that, eventually, began taking a mental toll on him. Season after Season, Wood Man realized more and more that his love of short-burst fun and escapism was keeping him from resolving the connections he'd left behind in his original universe - procrastinating that which truly matters to him under a facade of unbothered adventuring.

In many ways, Wood Man acts as a voice for the SiIvaGunner team themselves, a battle of many creative artists wanting to at once have fun, whilst living up to the expectations set so long ago. Yet Wood Man's story is not a tragedy: Though his sudden awakening at the start of Season 2 was initially met with a lot of backlash and resentment from fans (see here), the fans eventually grew to love him - and Wood Man, in turn, loves the SiIvaGunner channel and everything it does, with his face proudly adorning the SiIvaGunner Art Team and SiIvaGunner Fusion Records logos. Toward the end of Season 6, Wood Man came to terms with his need to face his demons, and passed the mantle of inofficial SiIvaGunner figurehead onward. Though our guide-in-spirit for the channel for close to six years may have left, the lessons and values that Wood Man taught are here to stay: and the spirit of SiIvaGunner, both in the team and with us as the audience, burns brighter in kind.

The Voice Inside Your Head

"Welcome, figments of the imagination. Welcome… to a terrifying reality."

Cunning, sinister, and all forms of manipulative, it's the Pizza-loving villain of the SiIvaGunner channel - The Voice Inside Your Head, or simply "The Voice". After Chad Warden [FILE-02]'s unsuccessful attempts to quell the SiIvaGunner fanbase's growing discontent, this sinister demon manifested, like a devil on his shoulder, to set things right by force. The Voice swept the channel into an alternate universe with the core running jokes changed entirely, in the hopes of better pleasing the fans' wishes. While Chad Warden believed in SiIvaGunner's [FILE-01] right to express itself in ways completely independant to the fans' beck and call, The Voice sees himself - and the SiIvaGunner channel - as subservient to the wishes of the crowd, willing to take executive control of the natural order to rid the channel of all its possible woes.

Even with this origin laid out, many things about The Voice's true nature are still unknown. He has the unique trait of being a human-figment hybrid, blurring the line between concept and reality, possibly due being extrapolated from Chad Warden's darkest thoughts of how to control the SiIvaGunner channel. Alternatively, The Voice may instead be a manifestation of the SiIvaGunner fanbase itself, with the many complaints and demands for the channel twisted into the shape of a tyrannical ruler able to enact it all by force. Whatever his origins, The Voice is an ever-persistent lifeform, surviving Chad Warden's sacrifice through the use of a secret virus left on SiIvaGunner's computer, all leading to the channel's revival at the beginning of Season 2, and the start of the Christmas Comeback Crisis.

Channeling the wishes of SiIvaGunner's earliest detractors, The Voice's strongest-held belief is in the necessary eradication of all anime and the characters born from it. At the same time, The Voice exists - like the very commenters he's inspired by - as a living contradiction, holding deep fondness for anime like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and expressing himself in the same kinds of exaggerated mannerisms for which anime is often derided. In The Voice's own words, he aims to eradicate anime from SiIvaGunner in order to improve it - in reality, however, the goal appears to be complete and total control of the channel for all of time, stripping SiIvaGunner of the very soul and artistic freedom that defines it.

The SiIva AI

"Read the channel description before it's all gone."

When SiIvaGunner began, the titular character served as a vessel for all the contributions submitted by the real-world team, acting as a bridge between the real and fictive world [FILE-01]. But as Season 1 came to a close and Season 2 began, this "vessel" role jumped from place to place - first, through Wood Man with his fourth-wall breaking knowledge of the real world [FILE-04], then through The Voice Inside Your Head [FILE-03] through a submission form for rips spread onto the SiIvaGunner YouTube channel, which was then finally hijacked by President Haltmann after his claim to the channel's ownership [FILE-05]. Yet Haltmann seemingly recognized the inefficiency of relying on voluntary submissions for the channel's output - the channel, in-universe, still lacked a true vessel, it lacked a being able to operate and evolve organically through the influence of its contributors. And so, development began on creating the perfect replacement to the still-resting SiIvaGunner - The SiIva AI.

At the beginning of Season 3, Haltmann's branding on the channel inexplicably vanished, instead being replaced with what appeared to be the very same profile picture, channel banner, video catchphrases and channel description as the original SiIvaGunner channel of Season 1 used. Yet viewers taking a second look would begin noticing oddities in this rebrand: Small graphical glitches in the images featured, spelling errors and strange capitalization across video metadata, and various bizarre tweets posted on the official account. With these hints, and the help of some Haltmann's Archives videos released over the course of the season, we'd soon come to learn that this was caused by the SiIva AI's implementation - taking the place of channel host as an imperfect yet growing replica of SiIvaGunner. And so, as the months turned to years, as events turned into seasons, the SiIva AI remained as the host of SiIvaGunner channel, his true nature left largely unacknowledged by the channel's output. It stayed as a bubbling mystery, one where its very existence was eventually only known by the SiIvaGunner viewers who had been there at the premiere of Season 3.

It would take until the tail end of Season 7 for the audience to see the SiIva AI properly in action - but in the years leading up to that point, the AI had been growing, event after event, into an entity all its own. In acting as a vessel to creative influence just like the original SiIvaGunner had, the AI's mind was able to grow in size exponentially, soon containing entire worlds of pure imagination, worlds arguably even more daring than what the original SiIvaGunner ever could have depicted. Tournaments, westerns, mysteries, beach-side celebrations and more - though it was created solely to replicate SiIvaGunner's ripping output, its exposure to the raw creativity and freedom of the SiIvaGunner team's real-world contributors appear to have given it far more imagination than ever could have been anticipated. And sure, a large part of the audience remained fully aware that this new channel host was artificial, a fake, and yet...after a while, it was hard not to feel some sort of attachment to it.

Chad Warden

"Hatred AIN'T SHIT to SiIvaGunner and means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to them.

And while I can't stop hate, I can sure as HELL encourage love."

The original savior of the SiIvaGunner channel and protagonist of its first story arc in SiIvaGunner: Rebooted, it's Chad Warden!

Based on the legendary online troll persona played by Anthony Pinto, Chad Warden in the early days of SiIvaGunner acted as a messenger and dear friend to the statue, communicating many thoughts and feelings from the SiIvaGunner team directly to the audience. Primarily appearing to defend the use of Snow Halation in various rips, his interventions into the natural order of things eventually initiated SiIvaGunner: Rebooted - the event wherein SiIvaGunner's true worth, value, and its connection to the fans was pushed to a new limit.

To save his statuette friend in the name of high quality and artistic freedom, Chad gave his in-universe life for the sake of returning SiIvaGunner to the natural state of things at the end of the reboot. Based on a tweet from SiIvaGunner himself, it appears as if Chad's death caused the memory of him to disappear altogether, taking on Figment-like traits before his demise. It's even possible that the Chad we knew had always been somewhat figment-like: an event in Season 2 toys with the notion that the Chad Warden we'd known, the one that had twice in the past saved SiIvaGunner's life, is far different from the Chad Warden as we know him in the real world, as part of internet history. Perhaps, through exposure to SiIvaGunner and his neverending passion for quality, Chad Warden was changed into the one we saw in Season 1 - the dear friend who, behind the veil of his loud mouth and rude demeanor, wishes nothing but the best for the world of high quality rips and the people creating them.