#donnietheguy

Y'know, funny story: a part of me genuinely thought I'd made this post already, and I had to double-check my posting archive three times over just to make sure. Because for as much Season 7 glazing as I've done on here, YO-Kai Direction is the kind of rip that absolutely deserves that love, as such a perfect rip from one of SiIva's most surprise breakout events in recent memory. Hell, last time I was covering the event in question, this rip only barely lost out from being covered instead of Beautiful Dreamer - but, in earnest, I believe two legends should indeed be able to coexist.

I've learned a lot from running this blog, but one of the biggest breakout surprises to me was learning just how incredible of a ripper DonnieTheGuy truly is. He joined the team around when I was paying less attention to the channel in general, and didn't exactly have a loud internet personality for me to learn of otherwise - yet rip by rip, from the blog's very first in Running Through Cookie Country to later-covered examples like Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier and Remember when this song was the one related to toilets?, I began realizing just how powerful the guy is. A master chef that works in the background, even working to provide tons of assets to help people get into ripping themselves, sharing samples, samples and much more. But even if I wasn't aware of all that, even if I wasn't aware of just how much of a menace he is even off of SiIva when it comes to Twitter shitposts (the Digital Circuit edit trend where he made like 20+ edits on his own for instance), YO-Kai Direction would've likely convinced me on its own of DonnieTheGuy's prestige.

I recall saying to myself back when I wrote Beautiful Dreamer that one of the reasons that I picked it over YO-Kai Direction was just due to how much I'd already featured YO-KAI Disco, and Yousuke Yasui's music in general, on here. 【＝３】e-MUNO Disco (vs. 音MAD AGENT) was effectively the rip that made me INVESTED invested in the art of high quality ripping, WA-HOO DISCO shows just how much Super Mario 64's sound can and has been pushed by the SiIva team, Siiva Lining just outright slaps - you get it. But we're now in the golden age of ripping quality, where it feels as if every rip made is touched by some benevolent gods ensuring that it does WAY more than it necessarily needs to in order for its proposed joke to work. Because like, YO-Kai Direction is an incredibly simple premise on the surface, mashing up the all-too-known YO-KAI Disco with What Makes You Beautiful by One Direction as part of the One Direction event. Back in, say, Season 1, that would've been the end of it, but there's so many small touches added by DonnieTheGuy that shows just how invested he was in utilizing One Direction's sound to the fullest.

And honestly, when the One Direction event began, I was initially a bit disappointed, as it took the place of the channel's annual "9/11 event", which had previously given us incredibly bait-and-switch events like what brought us SUNGORE in 2020. Initially I figured that I had no stake or familiarity with One Direction and so the event was completely out of my wheelhouse...but not only was I SURPRISINGLY familiar with What Makes You Beautiful in particular, I also had no clue that the team was so excited and ready to start using it. It gave me flashbacks to Season 6's Big Time Rush event which brought us Famous Surprise, only with even more people firing on all cylinders for it. Because again - in many other eras, YO-Kai Direction would've just been a mere mashup, but DonnieTheGuy goes the extra length to pitch-shift it all to something absolutely heavenly.

Without ever leaving that original pitch for the rip, YO-Kai Direction masters the art of escalation in a way that's so well done, it's hard to even notice with how well it fits in. It begins as a seemingly normal mashup with a slightly increased BPM speed of YO-KAI Disco being used as to match the One Direction song, but then at the second go around at the verse's melody it becomes more YTPMV-esque, editing soundbytes from What Makes You Beautiful into the melody of the source track, as if to communicate the two tracks merging - "You're insecure, but you walk-walk through the do-o-or!" is pulled off with just a slight stutter and pitch-shifting that's immediately noticeable if you're paying attention to it, yet fits so well as to initially sound just like an extension of the initial mashup. This then carries on into the bridge, before finally exploding in the chorus - wherein every part of One Direction's vocals are pitch-shifted to amazing effect. It's hard to put into word without repeating myself just how well done this build-up is, but the end result is obvious - a genuinely amazing listen.

Yknow, for as much as I like to go on and on about Season 2 being my favorite period of the channel's life - it may honestly just be due to my own personal investment being at its highest at that point. Its a herculean, damn near impossible task nowadays to actually try and critically evaluate a season of SiIvaGunner in retrospect, and most of what I go off of obviously just comes from my own experiences and memories. It goes to reason, then, that Season 5 is my least favorite season of the channel not necessarily due to any fault of its own, but just due to my own personal investment in the channel being rather low at the time. I say that, because with every rip I cover from the Season - now including Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier - I'm baffled as to why I'd ever consider the season anything less than peak.

When I have that discussion with other people (or just with the voices in my head), the reasons tend to primarily boil down to a lack of lore developments made during the year. Yet as I talked about way back in Knowledge of the Depths, even that feels like doing the Season a disservice, given just how enjoyable and, in a way, lore-crucial the audio dramas made during Season 4 Episode 2 and Season 5 wound up becoming. Which again makes me point toward my own lack of attentiveness toward the Season as the one to blame: because how else could I have missed out on how genuinely engaging and interesting the lore regarding Lady, Yankin', Masked Wolf and Astronaut in the Ocean was? And as the cherry on top - how could I have missed just how perfect of an ending to it all Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier wound up being?

I've dissected and talked about Masked Wolf before in Aquarium in the Ocean and Snow halocean, as the figment who best fits the role of a true anti-hero within SiIvaGunner - an agent of chaos whose rips only occasionally bother to actually sound good, yet one we wound up loving despite (or because of!) it all. Yet as Season 5 began to truly ramp up, his role seemed to change from agent of chaos to necessary evil - as the only remaining figment capable of stopping the reign of hell that Lady's "Yankover" was subjecting us all to. No doubt SiIva has had its contentious, long-lasting takeovers before (Harlem Shakeover and Totally Shaaking Out Right Now, anyone?), yet nothing truly compared to the neverending downpour of hellfire cast upon us by one particularly crass rapper singing about her genitalia. And for once, it seemed as if the SiIvaGunner team agreed - Lady became, for all intents and purposes, the actual villain of Season 5, with her figment form reimagined as a full-on demon in need of imprisonment. And small nuggets of lore were being handed out week by week (nuggets that I, again, unfortunately glazed over back in the day), Lady's defeat wound up happening at the hands of HoBART, everyone's favorite mixer from the King for Another Day Tournament. Yet to me, Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier still sits at the most pure, befitting end to her reign - a battle between the Season's fallen angel and its lawless demon, set to the tune of a game whose entire hype cycle practically enveloped Season 5 in its entirety.

Back in Satinpanties Symphony, I mused over how Friday Night Funkin became a mainstay feature on SiIvaGunner almost overnight, and how it feels as if the two projects share a lot of DNA that make them a perfect fit for one another, in how they handle the idea of legacy. What better game, then, could there be to depict the encounter between these two legends that defined the season, than with the game that defined the year - coincidentally, one entirely focused on duels between rappers. That's not to imply that Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier isn't an absolute banger on its own - the melodic core of Ugh, paired with the implementation of both Astronaut in the Ocean and Yankin's backings into the back-and-fourth, creates a fantastic re-imagining of the song that's both endlessly relistenable and incredibly charming with the custom visuals. Yet its the same point I made in Take You To The Desert - with all that context in mind of all that led up to this battle, the knowledge of how much the community suffered under the thumb of both rappers yet came to understand one for his harmless-if-strange tendencies yet came to loathe the other...Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier becomes something genuinely legendary. Paired with so many small flourishes added on top, such as the original track's "Ugh" sample being replaced with Masked Wolf's opening "Astro", the reference to Lady's attempted Thanksgiving resurrection ritual in Twerkey (seriously), down to Lady being positioned as the player character to truly sell home how dominant she was during her reign...It feels like yet another one of those, for lack of another word, Perfect, rips.

The cherry on top of it all though is, of course, the ending. Despite the seemingly even back-and-forth in the battle, Lady is suddenly dragged back into the pits of hell, as Masked Wolf leaves her with his parting words.

Unfortunately, due to both real-life circumstances and managing this blog, I haven't been able to keep too up to date with this year's halloween event, The Cult of Proto storyline. Althesame, a new album is a new album, and immediately on release I downloaded it to see what fun stuff I'd missed out on. I had seen some stuff from it here and there already, like Bloody Freddy - which, fun fact, recently became the first rip on the blog to have its tentative name changed to an official one thanks to this album release! But Remember when this song was the one related to toilets? was REALLY the one that got me in going through the album, an endeavor so perfect yet one I never could've foreseen.

Okay, so, where to start with the backstory for this...there's a very particular YouTube series going around by voice actor and animator RainingKetchup, which voice acts, animates, and generally spoofs/pokes fun at the Omori Boy webcomic series - the predecessor to hit indie RPG Omori. One thing led to another, and suddenly a segment in one of these videos - of Mr Omoriboy himself singing a mocking Redditor anthem along with an army of wojaks (dont worry about it) - took off en masse in certain circles on Twitter. It was a perfect shitposting storm, from the pure absurdity of the clip out of context, to making fun of redditor/incel culture, to the endearingly sketchy animation-style - and, on top of it all, being a genuinely really fun tune to listen to with stupidly well-done vocals.

It's the kind of clip that I immediately expected to blow up in terms of getting edits, much like the recent influx of Jay Eazy Mega Man shitposts, yet its been bizarrely...low on output. Part of that, as I understand it, is that the song was simply pretty hard to work with before its stems were released (at which point the meme was unfortunately on its way out). But another part of it, at least to me, seemed to be that the concept for edits almost "plateaued" immediately, with the debut of OMORIBOY the PIRATE!!!☠️☠️☠️ - a YTPMV of a song from the Baby Felix Halloween Game Boy Color game, that has somehow reached HALF A MILLION views, almost doubling the video its source comes from. Its creator is UUN4, a frequent SiIvaGunner contributor behind rips such as Plains of Des-passing-to, and Baby Felix Halloween (and Felix the Cat in general) were already long-cemeted parts of SiIvaGunner history. With all that said, it's no wonder the meme ended up taking refuge under SiIvaGunner - though often times, like with Remember when this song was the one related to toilets?, it's entirely disconnected from its original spike in popularity as an Omoriboy YTPMV.

With ALL that backstor out of the way...the rip's just fuckin' funny. I've made no secret that I hold very dear affection for Paralyzer as a meme, and basically dedicated the entire post of YACKER TOILET just toward gushing over its place as a relic of old-internet and as a genuinely distinct and fun piece of music on its own. Remember when this song was the one related to toilets? is as straightforward of a concept as you get - it's a YTPMV of Paralyzer into the tune of the aforementioned Baby Felix Halloween song, Pirate Island, made to quite clearly evoke the spirit of OMORIBOY the PIRATE!!!☠️☠️☠️. Through that, it sort of calls back to the past and present internet age all at once, althewhile being genuinely very funny. I think its the vocals that sell it - sentence mixed almost exactly like the vocals in OMORIBOY the PIRATE!!!☠️☠️☠️ whilst still containing most of the words in Paralyzer's chorus.

That's right - the spooky season is upon us! With just a week away from Halloween, I figured it's high time we do another sort of "event" here on the blog, a themed week similar to voiceless week from way back in June. This will be a bit more broad, and I've already got a great lineup of rips on offer - rips all focused primarily on celebrating the Halloween spirit!

There's a good few reasons for why I chose Mad Monster Mansion Mashups​.​.​.​2! to be our premiere of the event, the foremost one just being that it's really damn good! The hyperactive nature of Banjo-Kazooie music allows the rip to change between a bevvy of jokes at a scarily fast rate, one every four seconds, all while retaining the spook factor of the original track. DonnieTheGuy and miiwii did an excellent job here, no doubt, but...what's that two in the rip title about?

This is where I'll need to step into somewhat unfamiliar territory, as this is in reference to one of SiIvaGunner's many "fan-channels", other YouTube channels that upload similar content to SiIva itself. Amidst these, one of the most notorious is known as "VvvvvaVvvvvvr", where the entire gimmick was that literally *anything* submitted would get uploaded regardless of quality. It's like the fan-made remnant of SiIvaGunner Season 1, a complete agent of chaos ran entirely by its audience, yet surprisingly it developed its own set of rather consistent in-jokes and memes. To my knowledge, it's a great place for fledgling rippers to get their start, and it even had some lore and such that I'm still not very familiar with. Althesame, the channel uploaded its own mashup medley of Mad Monster Mansion in 2019, with many of its own memes dominating it - Mad Monster Mansion Mashups​.​.​.​2! is, effectively, SiIva's own spin on it, three years later.

I think what's most fascinating about the sequel-status Mad Monster Mansion Mashups​.​.​.​2! holds is that it results in a lot of seemingly obvious SiIva-mainstays, that were also mainstays on VvvvvaVvvvvvr, were therefor omitted from this iteration. In fact, with only a few exception, MOST memes featured in this mashup are from the more recent years of SiIva's life - Astronaut in the Ocean, ANTONYMPH, Right Foot Creep, music from Friday Night Funkin', and so on. Much like the Season 6 premiere Bramble Blast Collab that I covered last week, it feels like a celebration of the new as a result - ironically slotting in perfectly with Season 6's overarching themes of moving on from the past.

Its kind of weird to be nostalgic for some kind of YouTube videos, isn’t it? When you picture nostaglia you tend to think of it in terms of these pieces of art or media that greatly impacted you, or shaped who you are today through their creativity. But just as big a part of that is just the overall vibe created through the masses of content you didn’t engage with much. For me and todays example, the dubstep/rave vibes of the early 2010s were just that: The skrillexes, the youtubers wishing to be as cool as possible through shitty dubstep intros, the “Pyrocynical celebrates 250K subscribers through a dubstep beat drop”, yknow? There’s a whole vibe to that, an earnestness in attempting to be cool in the dorkiest way possible, that has kind of faded since.

I think its that nostalgic feeling that drew me to this rip in particular despite not really being familiar with the particular song being mashed up here: Unity by TheFatRat. But just that feeling and vibe combined with a game I DID very much grow up with and am continually inspired by, shaped a rip that I still think about a lot, both as a genuine banger and an inspiration for what the channel often is at its most basic form. Even when the SiIva team aren’t slaving away for hours making these audiovisual masterpieces with Fusion Collabs, CCC episodes, or what have you, they’ll be reminding you of past times you cherish with simple one-person efforts like this one.

Hey everyone - Basically, I got bored earlier this week and decided I want to start shouting out one SiIvaGunner rip per day. Decided it’d be fun to post those here too - I wrote up a big explanation of what SiIvaGunner is and some thoughts on the track I picked but it all got deleted due to various shenanigans lol.

I’ve been doing this since the 17th of May so, I’ll post the backlog now and then start posting daily. Since the original post for this rip got booted, I’ll keep this one simple, but later ones will have a bit more elaborate thoughts on em attached. If you’re interested in listening through them, all posts will have the “todays siivagunner” tag on them.