#circunflexo

I'd like to wish a late happy Jay Eazy day to all who celebrate, I hope you spent your time together with your dogs like Mega Man fr fr

Okay, but, like, sincerely, I like many others have over the last year been completely enamored with all the edits and attention given to Jay Eazy, and the frankly hilarious promotions he does for his music. The guy's a rapper in a sea of others but is frankly a marketing genius - he attaches popular games and anime to his songs, such as Grand Theft Auto, Demon Slayer, or indeed Mega Man, and promotes them through TikToks that are so absurdly strange that your only logical reaction is to laugh. In 2023, he struck absolute gold, and Mega Man went absolutely viral - after, of course, it dropped on January 7th.

There's just something so inherently funny about Jay Eazy that's...hard to describe, especially if you haven't been down the rabbithole of edits people have done of the Mega Man promo video. Be it the setup of Jay Eazy dropping in on someone else's grief to promote his music whilst running away from them, The Very Perculiar Way That His Captions And Tweets Are Written‼️, or just the corny sound to the songs themselves - Jay Eazy is immensely fun to post about, and post about him SiIva did, just one day ago. January 7th, 2024, was dedicated entirely to the king of money smarts himself - and of all rips posted, You Are Book Smart became my favorite just about immediately.

The thing is, we've had a lot of rips, and even some events, kind of similar to Jay Eazy Day already. Rap mashup rips, from Yoshi's Cookie World to Loopdeloop Griddy, aren't exactly a rare sight on SiIvaGunner, and just earlier in Season 7 we received a sequel to Whip & Nae Nae Day, with amazing rips like Whip Fortress (coincidentally ALSO by circunflexo!). There's of course uniqueness to all of these rips due to the sheer personality and expressiveness inherent to rap as a music genre, but it does still mean that the rips that try to truly stand out from the crowd are the ones that end up sticking with me the most. And compared to a lot of the other hip hop rips on SiIva, the big benefit that Jay Eazy has enjoyed for me is that he's had a whole year to simmer in my mind - I know the bars to Mega Man completely off the top of my head through no choice of my own, at this point.

All that is to say, that Circunflexo's call to make a rip that specifically plays with the lyrics and flow of Mega Man, sentence mixing it into new bars entirely - is absolutely damn brilliant. You Are Book Smart, through the edits in the lyrics and the sheer whimsy in the original song's beat, transforms a song originally about bragging over riches and dames, into Jay Eazy proudly boasting about his intelligence in perhaps the funniest ways you'll have ever heard. The kind of monotone quality that Jay Eazy's vocals have lend themselves to absolutely fantastic, near seamless sentence mixing, and the jokes just write themselves from there.

"I'm book smart, I'm money smart - I'm more intelligent, Call me Mr. Smart Festival, I got hella books"

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.