#galacksy

(Note: MP3 embed is trimmed at the beginning as to allow it to be posted within Tumblr's file size limits)

I'm sure some of you were worried about where this week's post had gone. Worry not - I was simply biding my time for the day to arrive. Indeed, we have reached the 25th of July, a Thursday for some, and a national holiday for others. For today, we celebrate, grieve and toast to our dearly beloved, HHGregg. Today, it is Christmas in July, and time to at last cover The End of HHGregg.

For being one of my all-time favorite SiIvaGunner channel memes, I'm shocked at myself in how restrained I've been in covering rips using HHGregg's infamous red-tag-sale commercial. Sure, I spilled my soul out for the joke back with Nostalgic Blood of the Gregg ~ Old Source, and Everything Circus remains an all-time classic, yet there's still so much more to cover. In terms of jokes on the SiIvaGunner channel, I feel like HHGregg is one of the most developed ones, one with a legacy cherished by so many people on the team and off - and even a bit of a story to it that's been captured in full glory with today's rip.

Like sure, there's the obvious quirk that makes HHGregg stand out more than many other channel memes - the guy has an outright day-of-the-year holiday dedicated to him. As the infamous Christmas in July ad was what propelled HHGregg's moderately-annoying mascot into becoming a YTPMV star, July 25th on SiIvaGunner has become a sort of understated annual event for fans like myself, much in the same way that April 30th was with It's Gonna Be Me and guess what​?​?​?​?​?​?​?​?. Yet, of course, there's an underlying sort of sadness to HHGregg rips in particular due to the brand its attached to: the company that the ad's many YTPMVs are riffing on filed for bankrupcy in 2017, midway through Season 2 of SiIvaGunner. The store still exists now, bought by a parental company and turned all-digital, but the franchise as it was once known is all gone, with it's ill-fated mascot going down with it.

Of course, we don't really need to feel much remorse for the fall of an electronics boutique - but given the SiIvaGunner channel's way of personifying and giving life to in-jokes and gags the world over, it informs rips using HHGregg in a pretty different way. HHGregg rips on the channel had their biggest stride during the very same year that the chain went bankrupt, as if to suggest that the mascot was desperate to prove his own worth on the one place that still remembered him fondly. In the years since, we got sporadic shots of the guy here and there - and in my eyes, it at one point felt as if it all culminated with the rip エイチエイチグレッグ ホワイトハウスでチョー大変!, a fully-featured edit of Neon Genesis Evangelion's iconic A Cruel Angel's Thesis opening now starring HHGregg himself.

Yet, of course, as I've harped on about with rips like Shiny Smily TALE, Violet Snow Memories and Our Sweet Parsley, one of the most rewarding parts of following the SiIvaGunner channel lies in how the team never seems to forget about any of its zillions of uploads. No matter how much time passes, rippers love one another, the ideas they come up with, and the potential to build further on one another's ideas - it is a core part of YTP and YTPMV culture that's remained strong on SiIvaGunner since its very inception. The A Cruel Angel's Thesis rip above, by excellent rippers Ashley and GramBam36 of The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll fame, was a joyous celebration - a year later, as Season 6's sombre mood results in the Nuclear Winter Festival rolling around, a trio of rippers sees the perfect opportunity to finally put HHGregg to some form of rest. The meme's far from dead today, of course (check the channel right now) - yet, at last, with The End of HHGregg, it felt as if the funny paper roll man was finally ready to accept his fate.

The End of HHGregg, silly of a concept as it may be, executes that concept to a degree I don't think anyone was expecting. Second only to A Cruel Angel's Thesis, Komm, süsser Tod is an iconic piece that serves as the ending theme to the original NGE anime, one tied to feelings of bittersweet-ness, finality - at once able to reference one of the most classic HHGregg rips on SiIva, acknowledging HHGregg's bankruptcy, whilst tying itself directly to the ongoing Nuclear Winter Festival of Season 6. And that's not even getting into the rip itself!

The YTPMV work done here to sentence-mix and pitch-shift HH's various vocals to fit the melody of Komm, süsser Tod is, for lack of a better way to put it, downright remarkable. Despite a seemingly limited pool of voice lines to work with and a rigid framework of a melody, the guy only ever "sings" in complete sentences, with pitch shifting that manages to sound shockingly natural, still as gratingly chipper as HH tends to sound but still seeped in that vibe of bittersweet-ness that I discussed before. It goes through every beat and phase of Komm, süsser Tod without ever having the vocal samples sound forced, including the deeply inspired use of a layered, choir-like HH performance on several segments. Althewhile never forgetting the classic HH lines, the red-tag sales, the HD-TV and Whirlpool appliances, and of course, the Christmas in July. The cherry on top of it all is the intro to the song, before the main melody truly kicks in, as this little interlude sneakily includes a guitar now playing Deck the Halls just as featured in the most infamous Christmas in July ad - a sombre reminder of where it all began.

That aforementioned vibe is, of course, emphasized greatly by Galacksy's incredible illustration for the rip, the literal End of Evangelion depicted as being the fall of HHGregg as a whole, in absolutely spectacular fashion. Like with i love(d) you and so so many other rips, it's so often these seemingly small touches that end up elevating rips to all-time classics for me, and it's a trait that The End of HHGregg's audio also eventually contributes to, in a way I truly don't wish to spoil for you all. Nevertheless, the key takeaway here is one that's evident right upon first listen: This is a DAMN impressive YTPMV effort that at once celebrates and mourns one of the YTPMV world's most cherished sources, yet pulling it off as if it were effortless. In celebration of YTPMV, of SiIvaGunner, of one of the channel's most immaculate of somewhat-too-hidden gems from Season 5, and of the very state of memes coming to an end - The End of HHGregg is everything one could ask for.

And so, we've reached the end of the year. Christmas, holidays, Season 8 of SiIvaGunner; all come to an end with the celebratory bang of fire in the sky. And for this blog, too, I knew had to end the year in something big; in a rip of cosmic, cataclysmic power. After finishing up the previous post covering PRIMEneria, I solemnly returned to my expansive archives with arms folded behind my back, my gaze passing across dozens upon dozens of possible rips left in the blog's drafts; each possible contenders for a future post. Requests, gimmicks, anniversaries, lore, good rips, bad rips, a collection of treasures gathered across one-and-a-half years of running this blog for the purpose of review...and yet deep down, I always knew what had to be done. Since the blog's very beginning I was aware of its existence, a rip with energy so potent that I never once dared to approach it, yet I knew that it could not be ignored forever. The rip is, indeed, perhaps the most vile creation the SiIvaGunner team has yet made, a weapon of torture unleashed upon us at the apex of Undertale's 7th anniversary celebrations. Indeed, it is the magnum opus of SiIvaGunner's 6th Season; Uncanny Approaching.

Take a moment to picture yourself, sat at the computer in the far away time of September 2022. You're a big fan of the SiIvaGunner YouTube channel, which had uploaded high quality rips for six years and have been an absolute delight to follow throughout. A large part of that investment has been the channel's close ties to one of your favorite games: Undertale! From the very beginning, you've noted that it's as if the channel and game have had a sort of brotherly relationship, with lots of rips like Locked in the Underground, Field of Love and Cringe, Aphex and more showing a fantastic understanding and reverence for the game and its soundscape. Earlier in the very same year, for the big Minecraft anniversary event you also followed quite attentively, there was a particularly resonant piece – Fell From a High Place (Reprise) – which made it ever so evident how much Undertale means to so many people all around the world. And now, it was September 15th, the celebration of the game's release in full swing; midway through the day, you notice the upload of and watch the impeccably made Jesus of the Underground, floored by the ripper's devotion to such a large project and amazed at the end results. This is a truly fantastic anniversary indeed! What could possibly go wrong?

Yet at the back of your mind, you recall rips that appeared as if to hint at the brewing of a greater evil to come. SiIvaGunner, like Undertale itself, has always had a dash of insanity to it, a pinch of the insufferable for the sake of comedy. None had captured that vibe better, perhaps, than Mad Mew Mew Becoming Uncanny, merging Undertale with a multitude of sources - chief among them, as featured in its title, the king of brainrot. Whilst commonplace enough today to become 2024's word of the year, I think it's reasonable to say that 2021-2022 or so were when this kind of content truly began to rise in notoriety. It can be hard to put a proper definition on the term; it's the kind of widely attention-grabbing slop that infests TikTok and YouTube shorts, which has gone through so many degrees of ironic and unironic evaluation to where nobody really seems to know what to think of it anymore. The face of brainrot changes by the month – CostCo Guys, Skibidi Toilet (hey there, Hidden Headtoilets (skibidi toree 2)!), Gegagedigedagedago –but to me, its icon shall forever be the legendary Uncanny Mr. Incredible; a series of edited images depicting Mr. Incredible from The Incredibles in increasing stages of grief. These images and the video edits made for them are truly some of the sloppiest slop you can find online, like an evil and fucked up extension of the age-old meme format of "Thing -> Bad, Thing -> Good", yet designed to where it could theoretically...go on forever.

This brewing, bubbling evil, already being toyed around with by the SiIva team in rips like Level 8 - Eversion HD, would only grow and grow throughout the year; the true power of Uncanniness yet to be wholly harnessed, it's potential for creating endlessly engaging slop yet to be fully understood. Until at last, the fated day came; Undertale's anniversary stood in the crosshairs of the canny, and the day would be remembered not for its festivities, but for its pain. For Uncanny Approaching.

Even without playing the embedded video above, you've likely already put the pieces together of vaguely what sort of rip we're discussing here. A step above merely having images of Mr. Incredible react to captions with befitting music, Uncanny Approaching – as was foreshadowed in the aforementioned Level 8 - Eversion HD – features a selection of freshly-made images of Frisk, Undertale's protagonist, matching every stage of Mr. Incredible's canniness; and additionally, more than just a simple spiral downward, we're also treated to images of Frisk *gaining* canniness across escalating stages of celebration. The original Mr. Incredible Uncanny posting comes with a set standard of music tracks to pair with every image featured; similarly to the legendary Story of Undertale, each of those tracks are here rearranged in the sonic style of different parts of Undertale's vast soundtrack.

All of this in unison sets the stage for a genuinely high-quality adaptation of the braindead Uncanniness-posting; accolades already thrown toward the previously mentioned early appearances of Mr. Incredible Going Uncanny on the channel like Level 8 - Eversion HD. It is, indeed, perfectly befitting for the SiIvaGunner channel to take a concept so run into the ground by low-effort posters and to reenvision it into something truly grand...yet Uncanny Approaching goes many steps further beyond that simple milestone. Indeed, more than just music and images, more than just featuring every image for a one-and-done bit, Uncanny Approaching goes the full mile and features captions and Situations for our canny friend to react to; "you hop on your PC" -> "you see you friend connected on discord" -> "he sent you a message" -> "you decide to check it" -> "he invites you to a party after school tomorrow" -> "he says EVERYONE is invited!" and so on, and so forth. As you'll notice just from these brief excerpts, this "story" is written in a way that feels almost deliberately slow and painful, each snippet given a full Canny reaction, sometimes multiple identical ones in a row – althewhile also containing multiple grammatical errors and a general sense of slapdash-ness, perfectly capturing the feel of Canny-posting on TikTok and YouTube shorts; like super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont, its authenticity to the source material is to be commended despite the pain that it brings.

Pain is not an area unexplored by SiIvaGunner – one of my all-time favorite rips, Sex - Steve Harvey, occurred on a day pretty much entirely dedicated to it – yet the lengths that Uncanny Approaching goes toward inflicting it feels like a new level altogether. I've already set the stage for the lead-up to the rip, the absolute rug-pull of a surprise it provided after the beautiful Jesus of the Underground - yet I've been careful to omit one core detail. You're capable of seeing the runtime yourself right now just by clicking on the video embed, a gargantuan 37 minutes and 51 seconds; but back on its release, this video released as a YouTube Premiere, to be witnessed live in its entirety by an audience unaware of just how long they would have to endure it for. As someone who was there to see it all unfold, it was like seeing a prophecy come to life – the "Endless Slop" theory proposed in my mind during the months leading up to the rip was playing out in front of me, like a SiIvaGunner-branded precursor to that one AI Generated "Endless" Seinfeld parody. Only, of course, this was still a SiIvaGunner project, still ever so carefully teetering the line between slop and quality; the artwork still excellent, the rearrangements of all the Canny themes as fantastic as the same concept was back on Story of Undertale, and the story having some genuinely fun ties to the actual...well, story of Undertale.

And in a way, having all of those genuinely excellent qualities tied to a viewing experience as deliberately mind-numbing as this made the experience torturous in an even more special way. Later in the same day, we would get to see the images and music arrangements released in isolation from Uncanny Approaching through Enemy Approaching (Extended Version) (Short Version); yet before that released, if you wanted to hear just your favorite part of the Uncanny-posting's Undertale re-imagining, or explore the different pieces of art made for the project, you had to hunker down and sit through the premiere like everybody else. It's the perfect storm of slop and cinema; a blend of appeal and brainrot that draws you in with something compelling and keeps you stuck through a brainwashing regime of canniness. I've sat through the entire thing twice and I still don't believe I could tell you upfront what exactly happens in the story due to me outright zoning out of focus repeatedly both times; other than excellent quotes like "he look at you with evil intents, he about to grab you and turn you into a glitch man like jerry", "you get theb ox and run out of their as quick as you can", and "mom die", it's all become a noise of Undertale iconography and canniness.

Nevertheless, Uncanny Approaching is a true testament to the will of the SiIvaGunner team; to commit to an idea as genuinely insane as this is on paper and continue through with it despite – or perhaps even BECAUSE – of how much the audience will suffer through it. I can only imagine how long it must have taken, past drawing the artwork and arranging the music, for the video to have been put together; for each section to have been penned and composed so specifically as to maximize the torture involved. Indeed, I understand it to where it was Myeauxyoozi in particular who was responsible for this script, working with Blookerstein's arrangement talent demonstrated on 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. alongside the art talent of four of the SiIva team's best artists; and given Myeauxyoozi's previous contributions to the channel such as Among Drip Drop Galaxy, Shaky Mountain and being the channel's biggest provider of rips using Harlem Shake, there is no doubt in my mind that he is – said with affection – mentally unwell enough to have been the best possible writer for the job.

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