#chickensuitguy

Look alive, everyone - Season 8 of SiIvaGunner has now officially premiered!

It may be a bit rich to say as someone running this blog, and with such deep investment into the channel, but...Season 7 really did bring me back into SiIvaGunner in a way I never quite thought would be possible. I'd sort of just accepted with Season 4, Season 5 and Season 6 that the channel had found a new direction: one that I was still VERY much a fan of, yet not quite the one that had "sold" me on the channel the same way Season 1, Season 2 and Season 3 did. I felt as if I was missing that energy of just...sheer visceral excitement for the future of the channel as a whole from the later-year seasons. There was instead a lot of per-event excitement, tons of little events to enjoy and still fun to be had in speculation of what could happen next, yet that aforementioned optimism still felt like it...missing, for a long time. And funny enough - last I discussed that feeling in particular was with Patched Plains Fusion Collab, a rip that Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab very much seems to be intentionally aiming to evoke.

Part of the reason that Patched Plains Fusion Collab works so well for me, and indeed why Season 2 has long sat as my favorite in the channel's life, is that feeling of raw forward momentum it conveys - the excitement of the entire fanbase thankful that SiIvaGunner hadn't actually ended, distilled into an anthem of so many different styles cheerfully pushing us forward. It was that sort of progress that, back when they were airing, I felt was sort of absent from Seasons 4/5/6 - the SiIvaGunner AI was still running things, Wood Man was still off effectively doing sidequests, and though the rips had obviously gotten better the cynical side of me couldn't help but feel a bit sad at how - for a lack of a better word - "predictable" it all felt. And to be crystal clear: A lot of those feelings have obviously changed for the better over the years. I love all of SiIvaGunner's Seasons nowadays, and I realized eventually that the prior-mentioned cynicism toward the new direction wasn't as fun as just, appreciating and LOVING the stuff to come out from the new seasons for the excellence that they were. And funny enough, I feel like that exact mindset is exactly what made Season 7 work so well for me.

Wheras Season 2 is one I remember for its feeling of constantly moving things forward at a rocket-speed pace, Season 7 excels by doing the complete opposite - the Year of Grand Dad is, at almost every possible turn, defined by its sense of self-celebration, a sort of "Sonic Generations"-type of tribute to the entire channel's life. Be it with RIP² as covered in SING A SONG ABOUT HOPES AND DREAMS, the entire incredible April Fools event I've alluded to within Violet Snow Memories, a newfound sense of chaos clearly inspired by Season 1 as shown in Hidden Headtoilets (skibidi toree 2) - yet with Seasons 4/5/6s newfound touch for genuine quality arrangements as found in rips like Forest of Tears. And, atop it all, the long-awaited continuation of the storyline last progressed back in Season 2 with the Christmas Comeback Crisis' eleventh episode. With such an incredible smörgåsbord of content on offer, it feels damn near impossible for me not to consider Season 7 my all-time new favorite.

And that optimism for the Season, that optimism for the future, is why Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab struck such a chord with me, with its release just a few days ago. With Season 7's ending, the status quo of the channel has been fundamentally altered in a way it hasn't truly been in a long while. For the first time ever, the long-present side character "Joke-Explainer™ 7000" is in full charge of the channel - her most prominent role ever despite having been around since all the way back in Season 1. I'll likely be dedicating another Season 8 post in the future to talking about her in particular with the same level of detail I did back in Vote Responsibly!!, but the context I'll provide for now is that her theme song, Magolor's Shoppe, has been a familiar, comforting tune to many a SiIvaGunner viewer since way back in Season 2. To see Patched Plains Fusion Collab not only get a spiritual successor, but one building upon a character and theme we've long grown attached to, means something so much to me and so many others. The added visuals, of her doing her duty with adorable Kirby-themed artwork as textboxes, are truly the cherry on top of an amazing collab.

Base song: Mr. Asyu - Haunted Dance

Boy that list of artists huh? Part of the magic of SiIvaGunner is that huge passion projects like this drop within the same schedule as every other rip, leaving it up to fans like myself to generate discussion over when things go crazy. It really isn’t often these days that an ordinary non-event rip truly blows up in the way this one did, sitting at almost half a million as of writing. But like, its well deserved!! It takes the basic concept of a mashup between Field of Hopes and Dreams and Vylet Pony’s ANTONYMPH, and turns it into a full-on tribute to the latter song, remaking the entire music video with all new visuals.

In that process, it creates a really fun new narrative of Noelle substituting Fluttershy in the original video as the “protagonist”, which creates a really fun new look into what the character is. A dorky, happy, proud and above all else SILLY little creature raised on the early 2000s internet culture. People inside and out of SiIva are in LOVE with this depiction of the character and I honestly can’t blame them, and the art used in the video is lovely in every sense of the word. Both as an Undertale fan and a SiIvaGunner enjoyer it’s been so fun seeing this strange mash-up joke turn into a full-on mainstay on the channel, bound to show up in the lore eventually. Not to mention the visuals are great not just for the way they pay tribute to Vylet Pony’s original video, but in how closely tied they still are to SiIvaGunner in-jokes: Its a love letter on all fronts

I do kind of wonder, at times, if We Are Number One could be considered my favorite joke on the channel. If nothing else, I do think it's the joke that's survived the longest on the channel without really growing stale. Compare it to something like The Flintstones theme, which is so overplayed on the channel that its now primarily used ironically in reference to its overplayed status - and that trend started like, five years ago at this point. There's other memes and jokes that I'm still quite fond of, some like The Nutshack feel like they ebb in and out of relevance when everyone's just about tired of them, and haven't really worn out their welcome as a result. We've been getting We Are Number One rips at a pretty steady interval since the end of Season 1, yet the team seemingly never runs out of unique ways to use its desperate pieces and instruments in. Ska Cha Cha (Rotten Mix) is but one of several excellent examples out there.

I mean, it obviously helps to start that Hideki Naganuma music already has a pretty fantastic, easily identifiable sound to it, a funky feel-good vibe with vocal samples all over the place. I've covered three We Are Number One focused rips in the past, with Chillin’ Like A Villain, We Are Number 4 (Golden) and...ahem: The expanse of meme in past was split, A fiendish trap has now been set; Behind a tree the villains sit, Terror of sport, the Robbie's Net. Now, the former two are excellent in their own right, presenting the original We Are Number One performance's full lyrics, progression and so on but with the whole new melody behind it. But the part of WANO rips that really, really grabs me, is what the latter rips hint at - full sections of the original song used play out, with instrumentation and vocal samples from WANO used to heighten the arrangement, intentions and progression of WANO be damned. In other words, when all the pretense of a mashup feel like they've been dropped, and WANO is purely being used as an instrument rather than a co-star.

*chef's kiss*

If there's any Season that deserved to be extended, I'm really glad it was Season 4. I'm sure its confused a lot of new viewers, but it makes a lot of sense when you consider what Season 4 was aiming to be. Its the tournament arc of SiIva, and just so happened to become SiIva's biggest ever project aside from the channel in its entirety. Thus, we have two parts to the Season - The contest, and the celebration. Wheras Episode 1 had everyone in suspense and hype over the incoming tournament, and fervently excited during the tournament itself, Episode 2 was a year-long celebration of the last year's events. In this celebration, none was more anticipated than the gold prize of the tournament - for DJ Professor K to become King for a Day.

Considering other takeovers on SiIva have recently begun lasting for a week or more, a single day may at first sound poultry in comparison. One 24-hour stretch of one rip an hour...that's 24 rips for winning an entire tournament of fierce competition. And sure, the winner of Season 3's smaller tournament did prove that expectation wrong with over 60 rips made for its takeover, but the second go around was a complete blowout.

Over TWO HUNDRED RIPS were created just for the takeover, and played all-day over the course of a 11-hour livestream that replayed three times. It was an absolute feast - a day literally without a dull moment. The team absolutely outdid themselves with this entire event, and it was indescribably fun to have a live chat react to each new rip for the entire 11 hour run. And todays rip is one I specifically remember being part of that chat for.

Its easy to forget, sometimes, just how much fun the bait-and-switch aspect of the channel is when its no longer actively fooling influencers online as much as it was in Season 1 and 2. These live streams are such a good substitute for that - I was able to see, live in chat, the chat light up in excitement over finally getting the premiere of a AIN'T NOTHING BUT A FUNKY BEAT rip, only for the melody to start up and effectively slap the entire audience in the face. The chat went from complete despair to being even more excitement than before once they realized just how good the rip was - a way too high effort mashup of the original song and various...Big Chungus memes.

Hot off the heels of covering his magnum opus, the next rip in line just so happened to be one requested by minindo himself, one that I'd somehow never heard before. That did genuinely surprise me, because it was effectively the grand finale to one of my favorite surprise mini-events: the celebration for Dat Boi! Remember him? Remember Koopa Street? Yeah, after a whole day of remembering this dumb meme from such a strange period of the internet, it was all wrapped up with Crank Dat City (2016).

Funny enough, this is actually the second rip of Crisis City from Sonic 06 I've covered, after THIS. IS. SOLEANNA. I think the strength of both rips is evident from just the first few seconds of listening - the prominence of the song's lead synth makes any replacement or addition to it way funnier as a result. In THIS. IS. SOLEANNA that was done to replicate the style of Sparta Remixes, and a month therafter Crank Dat City (2016) builds on it in the most natural way possible - Dat Boi's smashing steel drums setting the stage for a very funny rip right off the bat. Yet the rip doesn't ever settle into a groove, for as funny as that bit alone is. We've got segments of odd jokes from all over internet culture featured here, including a surprise appearance of Goomba Got Back before its hit album release in Season 7, a hint of letting the Bodies hit the floor, a segment with Big Shaq's Man's Not Hot...

Its hard to draw much of a throughline with these jokes, but if there was to be one...I feel like most of them fall into the category of feeling "forgotten" about, in that they're well past their prime time of being considered funny. Bodies was, much like Paralyzer of YACKER TOILET fame, an icon of the old internet, yet one that seems to have been left behind by the passage of time - similarly, Goomba Got Back at one pointed seemed like a...not-terrible and kind of funny way to respond to the criticisms Gaijin Goombah was receiving, but now looks incredibly immature and bizarre to look back on in retrospect. The list goes on, but Crank Dat City (2016) doesn't really linger on them too much, far more invested in fun celebration above all else.