#heboyi

Feel like it's been a while since I covered a Friday Night Funkin' rip, huh? As far back as June with Satinpanties Symphony, to my understanding. I'll admit that its a bit of a blind spot for me as a listener, as most of my FNF knowledge comes *from* SiIvaGunner team's exceptionally high-effort rips of the game and its many fan-made offshoots. In a way, the spirit of the FNF modding scene comes from the same place as SiIvaGunner itself - taking the bones of an official work, and inserting any little thing one can think of with that same level of quality. And in terms of quality, it seems that no fangame is more revered than VS Whitty - a project whose titular character is effectively accepted as part of the main canon already.

Whitty is still alive in our hearts <3 <3 celebrates the project and its fantastic music in a rather sentimental rip, as a mashup between lo-fight and Still Alive from the original Portal. The VS Whitty game has three songs that gradually devolve into madness and anger as Whitty gets closer to "detonating", and lo-fight is the very first one - the chill, pleasing back-and-forth at a steady tempo conveys no hostility between parties. And while I, to reiterate, don't really have much of an attachment to FNF beyond what SiIva has been doing with the game, its remarkable how the simple addition of Still Alive's instrumental and opening line by GlaDOS give the rip such a sentimental, bittersweet aura. The cherry on top is of course halfway into the rip, where Whitty and Boyfriend's vocal lead of lo-fight is broken up entirely for the two to instead duet the lead to Still Alive. A harmony between the two songs is reached despite having next to nothing to do with one another - and again, despite knowing so little about the FNF-verse and canon its hard not to grow a little emotional in the process of listening to it.

Right, okay, we've had a good streak recently of covering more "traditionally good" rips for the blog - arrangements and remixes like NIGHTMARESCAPE 〜Unrestrained HyperCam 2〜 (Final Boss Phase 2), genuinely good arrangements like mlp racism anthem (comix zone arrange), even the premiere of a new Season with the Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab. I think its about high time we change the clock to something "stupider" - the kind of rip that reminds you just how much SiIva is driven by the wild imagination, skill, and commitment-to-the-bit of its contributors. Only within a community like SiIvaGunner's will you get something like Corridors of Vine.

With memes as a whole, there seems to exist some sort of...invisible hierarchy that defines their public perception, that I've always found really fascinating. It's not impossible to understand why this hierarchy exists: Memes like the Hampsterdance in Wario's Hampster Mine, the Sparta Remix in THIS. IS. SOLEANNA. and more call back to a different, more innocent time in internet history, wheras memes like Despacito in Plains of Des-passing-to and It's Everyday Bro in It's Everyday Lake are oft met with comments like "I hate that I love this", or other similar sentiments. Memes generally follow a trend where, once one has worn out its period of inferred relevance - typically once it stops being a niche internet activity and spreads to marketing teams and unfunny people in general - its labeled as "dead" and unwanted, left as a relic of a smaller period of internet activity. That is, of course, unless it gets brought back into fashion by virtue of nostalgia and given some sort of new spin, as we've seen happen with Doge as of late - until that then too becomes co-opted by unfunny people (this time crypto-grifters) and the cycle begins anew. Yet part of what makes SiIvaGunner as a channel so great, is that very few of the memes it uses ever reach that state of abandonment: the team is so good at finding new, inventive ways to use memes as old as from Season 1, to where they rarely feel stale. And if they do feel stale - well, then that can ironically become part of the joke, playing into just how samey and played-out the joke is for a sort of ironic appeal.

All of this is to say, that I always find it immensely funny whenever the team decides - seemingly at the drop of a hat - to begin using memes that have been thoroughly labeled as dead for years by that point. A meme like the Harlem Shake didn't have so much as a pulse by the time Season 6 rolled around even past its sole revival to relevancy a few years back from being attached to Ajit Pai - yet The Harlem Shakeover of that very season was one containing over THREE HUNDRED rips utilizing the joke, next to none of which were made with the intention of sounding bad. Funny enough, then, that one of the first events we'd see during that same Season would be doing the exact same thing to a meme that's likely far more loathed than the Harlem Shake ever was - Damn Daniel, the core joke to Corridors of Vine.

Damn Daniel is perhaps the closest we've ever gotten to having a meme that felt like a social experiment - a complete non-sequitor of a joke starring an average, marketable teen and his immaculate footwear. At the peak of Vine's age of randomness humor, the series of various videos on Daniel's Vans absolutely blew up - and immediately, there were cynics from outside of Vine, older internet dwellers mainly, who made a big point about how lacking-in-funny the videos were. Yet the guy, Daniel, made it onto the damn Ellen Show of all things within mere weeks after his debut, and in a way it kind of made Damn Daniel a symbol for everything considered wrong about Vine: its mainstream appeal and focus on short, memeable videos had created a form of shitposting that...no longer felt like they were part of a community.

That is, of course, just my summary of the opinions I gathered from all the way back in 2016 - back when SiIvaGunner itself was first revving up into gear. And I find it so incredibly befitting that it was during Season 6 that the Damn Daniel event occurred on SiIvaGunner - the Season all about letting go of the past. To have it begin with SiIvaGunner, itself a 2016 meme, acknowledging its near polar opposite made around the same time: A meme that was, for a solid while, one of the most wanted-dead memes of all, one that the internet as a whole frankly felt a kind of hatred toward during what would come to be a rather cynical, hateful year in general.

There's definitely an overarching aura of irony applied to the anniversary celebration's rips regardless, of course - part of the joke with Corridors of Vine is that its using a song otherwise so closely enveloped in emotion and vulnerability (one SiIva itself used to similar effect with 時の回廊 ＜ver. CCC＞), alongside a joke that's so bitterly remembered that its mere inclusion makes it difficult to take seriously. Yet Corridors of Vine takes itself as seriously as the concept could be, it is a genuinely fantastic YTPMV using several of the famous Damn Daniel Vines in conjunction with one another, resulting in an infectiously catchy combination of lead- and backing melody instrumentation. I do think the commitment to the bit worked excellently, and the comments of the video itself appear to agree with me - despite how beloathed Damn Daniel itself was, the time to properly acknowledge and accept it had arrived, and we were for once actually...enjoying the meme?

To circle back to the point made in the second paragraph here - the truth is, there are very few memes that wind up actually full-on dead for long. Dead memes as a concept are a label we put upon jokes we feel have ran their course, yet especially in the world of YTPMV there will always be people out there able to prove the naysayers wrong, even if the intentions are purely ironic. Ironic or affectionate, the end result is the same, isn't it? You've got a smile out of your audience through your work in adapting the meme! And through all the comments expressing their concerns over returning to the hellscape that was 2016s meme culture, those smiles - even through the barrier of the internet, felt as if they were shared by all of us. The entire event - and Corridors of Vine in particular - showed Damn Daniel a sense of affection it likely hasn't had since the days when the SiIvaGunner channel's name began with a G.

Here's to 8 years, Daniel.

Hot off the heels of yesterday's celebration, I felt it only right to follow it up with yet more celebration. Wheras SING A SONG ABOUT HOPES AND DREAMS was part of a celebration of SiIvaGunner as a whole, today we're looking at a somewhat different celebration: the premiere of Season 6, Bramble Blast Collab, is an enchantingly unique collab even amidst the channel's long history of doing them.

Kickstarted by our good friend tunedlink back in Season 1, collabs like the File Select Fusion Collab were initially labelled as just that - "fusion" collabs, a carryover from the Kirbtunes remix project they were imitating. These proved to be immensely popular and loved by the community, and so the "fusion collab" branding stuck around, eventually morphing into a whole new, more clearly-segmented form of collaborative projects. I'm yet to cover any of these on the blog, but Season 7's Shop Fusion Collab is an excellent example of these collabs - each segment lovingly crafted by teams of rippers with visuals to match. In comparison, the old style of fusion collab may seem a bit messy, a bit unfocused and noisy. But amidst that noise, these have always been able to serve as incredible celebrations of so many parts of SiIvaGunner all at once.

While File Select Fusion Collab served to celebrate the good times had across Season 1, looking back upon all of its events and memes in a sentimental way, Bramble Blast Collab has always felt more...mixed, in its messaging. It has old memes, of course, be it Space Jam, Soulja Boy, or the introductory clip of Chad Warden's holy ghost, but...its filled to the brim with so much more, sources from the channel's recent history like Big Time Rush, Yankin' and Astronaut in the Ocean, amidst sources that are basically never seen on the channel such as Baldi's Basics and Smiling Friends. Its all delivered at a pace that's insanely fast even for the standard of these kinds of collabs - the result is a noise collage not just of SiIvaGunner's history, but of its possible future - the jokes we're yet to hear the full potential of, mixed in with small snippets of our old memories.

Althesame, it carries a slight sense of melancholy to it buried underneath all those funny memes: The track its built on *is* Bramble Blast, after all, one of the most emotionally poignant pieces of retro VGM out there. After rummaging around a zillion sources for most of the rip, the four-minute mark feels as if the song is breaking free of itself with the core melody re-emerging at full force, gradually built up by the increased prominence of the backing melody from the three-minute mark. Season 6, even as early as this, had the feeling of sorrow sort of engrained in it from the announcement of GilvaSunner - the original channel SiIvaGunner is made in tribute of - officially shutting down later that year. The fallout of which wouldn't quite be understood until I've won, but at what cost, but even as far back as the Season's premiere it was as if we were all gearing up for the inevitable.

I've been really excited to get to this post, because I only just recently discovered this rip whilst listening through Volume FF for the first time (amazing album by the way, possibly one of my few favorites?). Listening to the albums is such an interesting experience because there's no comment section or ongoing event to really help categorize what the joke of a rip is - the rip entirely sells itself, and it becomes a lot easier for me to pay attention even when I'd otherwise not get the joke. Regardless, I feel like Blue Mareep would've grabbed me pretty quickly even if the YouTube upload had been my first exposure to it - despite its source material, I'm absolutely in love with the rip.

But wait, what do I mean "despite its source material"? A few of you may remember a post from a while back - Five Dreams at Night 1.16 - where I discussed the somewhat-notorious YouTube figure Dream. Dream and his gaggle of friends together formed the "Dream SMP", a loose storyline that ran through a multiplayer Minecraft-server, effectively a tabletop RPG story within Minecraft. A lot of older, grumpier and more cynical internet users like myself and many SiIvaGunner viewers (the kinds of people who still watch YouTube Poops, basically) kind of wrote the whole thing off as rather cringey, content made for a different audience than us, and mostly got exposed to Dream through his various controversies. He's a figure that's fun to make fun of, and I went into that in the above post wherin I covered him before. Though Mask's presence on the channel in Season 5, it seemed to me that SiIva's stance on Dream in general was pretty much unanimously to make fun of him.

Yet, part of what I love so much about SiIva is that its a channel housing so many different people with so many different points of view. Sure, maybe I personally don't have any investment or affection for the Dream SMP and its ongoing narrative, and it looks a little silly from my POV - but then again, so does SiIvaGunner, and the narratives running on here have genuinely brought me to tears more than once. Blue Mareep is a pretty simple rip in concept - it's a Lacunosa Town-style arrangement of Blue, a song written in tribute and in reference to the Dream SMP. It's a soothing, chill little vibe discussing the friendship between Wilbur and his pet blue sheep, "Friend", and is genuinely a very pleasant listen even completely disconnected from the Dream SMP.

What makee Blue Mareep such a good rip isn't solely due to the chill source track - its the sound of Lacunosa Town itself! The track's DS-ified acoustic guitar sound paired with the gentle piano melody is some of the most soothing, nostalgic audio to me, and it gives Blue an entirely new kind of sound - still soothing and pleasant, but now completely void of the digital Lofi sound that originally defined it. The added sounds of Mareeps, Flaaffys and Ampharos' replaving the sheep Baa's really seal the whole package - it disconnects you so far from the original song, it feels as if...you're daydreaming away, at a Pokèmon ranch, no worries in sight...

About a week or so ago, I got a request to discuss some of the channel's storylines more in depth on this blog. The ongoing storytelling on the channel has always been one of its biggest draws to me, and at this point I've been following the lore for so long that I could write pages upon pages on speculation, interpretations, theories, et cetera. However, this blog is specifically about individual rips, so I'm only going to be discussing story events in relation to individual pieces of music. That may change in the future, but for now this is how I'll compromise.

In the midst of Season 4 Episode 2's All-Star Summer Festival, we were introduced to Woodyana Stones: Raider Made of Lost Bark, an Indiana Jones parody in the form of an audio drama starring channel protagonist Wood Man. This kind of storytelling was somewhat new to the channel, and is sort of the spiritual successor to the King For A Day tournaments of the prior two seasons: More self-contained stories featuring an ensemble of characterized memes, whilst still serving up small nuggets of lore here and there. Season 6 would later clarify that these events were Wood Man using his powers of interdimensional travel to visit alternate universes as a way to keep himself occupied before returning to SiIva's main universe. A cynic could call them filler, but that would be disregarding the insane amount of effort that's gone into each of these stories, and all of the weight they still hold, both as beíng genuinely quality and funny and in serving some very interesting pieces of lore for the channel as a whole.

The storyline that today's rip is from - Curse of the Fallen Angel - currently sits as my favorite, though I admit the others are also due for a relisten. For me, a big part of that is due to the intriguing lore concepts it introduces that were directly tied to the channel's ongoing status at the time. Masked Wolf's Astronaut in the Ocean and Lady's Yankin were two themes that had become feared by commenters after infecting the channel's regular uploads during Season 5. The reasons for this dislike are many and long-winded, so for the sake of summary: Think of it like The Bean from Season 1, a type of rip that had commenters work together to warn one another to move to different rips. What this audio drama does is establish these themes, "Figments" in SiIva lore, as "Cursed", holding some sort of abnormal dark power beyond that of normal figments. The audio drama sees Wood Man and a band of companions journeying to hunt down these Cursed before their powers can be used by "The Fallen Angel", referring to the most powerful Cursed of them all in Yankin'. One day I will go further in talking about Yankin' in particular, but trust me: Of all antagonists in SiIva lore, I don't think it would be exaggerating to say that she's the one the fanbase fears most due to her overwhelming presence on the channel in Season 5.

With the mood now set, what I love about todays rip in particular, Knowledge of the Depths, is the atmosphere its able to instill with this background knowledge in mind. It sets the stage to the third act of the audio drama, with Wood Man and c.o trying to find this accursed entity submerged deep underwater, with powers completely foreign to both the characters and us in the audience. Like most of the storyline's soundtrack, its a fully original composition, but uses elements of Astronaut in the Ocean's progression and vocals to keep its presence known. A theme otherwise only known on the channel for its low quality rips is now able to set a genuine mood of suspense and fear, with a sound akin to Kenji Yamamoto's Metroid music or Super Mario Galaxy's Drip Drop Galaxy theme. Its immaculate stuff!

It seems to be a running theme with the posts of Season 8 thus far to talk about all the possible new jokes that are growing in prominence on the channel. Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab covered a whole boatload of them in a medley nostalgically blending the old and new, while Willievan Afton Polkka was a deeper delve into one joke in particular, Stuck Inside. (By the way, a funny addendum: just a few days after KnightOfGames commented on that post saying there were more Stuck Inside rips to look forward to, we got another one - once again by KnightOfGames - mixing it with fucking PPAP of all sources. The guy knows no limits.) But anyway, in that aforementioned medley rip, there's one particular joke featured that stuck with me. A joke that, though its been featured in the back half of Season 7 already, I am vocally advocating for becoming the crowning jewel of Season 8. Because in case you weren't aware, 2024 is the year of the meat - The year of rips just like Fiddling with my meat and balls.

Amidst the vast sea of internet personalities, IShowSpeed is certainly one of the loudest: a 19-year old streaming video games shirtless in his bedroom seemingly blew up overnight for his erratic, over-the-top reactions and genuinely fantastic knack for the dramatic and improvised comedy. As a result, the guy is an absolute goldmine of funny clips and bits, and much like someone like Jerma985 and Going Somewhere Jerma?, it was bound to inspire some rips by proxy. Hell, I'm half convinced it was IShowSpeed's infamous stream of the Talking Ben game that inspired the use of Talking Ben as a source in Mad Mew Mew Becoming Uncanny: as far back as Season 6, Speed's influence was spreading onto the SiIvaGunner channel. Yet he was missing that...X-factor, that special sauce to make his legacy one to be remembered for all time. He was funny, sure, but was he stuck in people's minds yet?

And then, in late 2023, in a frantic response to being jumpscared by Chica in a Five Nights at Freddy's game, he accidentally "showed his meat" to his entire stream. A new legend - IShowMeat - was born.

On the one hand, I am incredibly out of touch with whatever Speed gets up to - most of what I'm telling you here is only my take on things from the small snippets I've seen online. But the meat incident truly escalated like nothing I've seen in recent times - the absurdity of the reaction that resulted in its reveal, Speed's own reaction to what he'd done, and of course - the tounge-in-cheek song released by Speed's own dad making fun of the incident, I Show The Meat. This was the last thing needed to make Speed a regular on SiIva, as rips using I Show The Meat and various IShowSpeed clips together have become a recurring trend - one that, due to all that I've talked about and the genuinely fun qualities of I Show The Meat as a song, I'm absolutely enamored with.

I had a vast array of options available to me for this post, to forward 2024 as The Year Of The Meat. Yet as Big Sus Chocobo showed all the way back in the blog's beginnings, I have a very exploitable soft spot for fun uses of Final Fantasy's Chocobo theme, and Fiddling with my meat and balls thus became the one meat rip I kept returning to. That is also, of course, because the rip is just genuinely well made and funny - I Show The Meat's simple but recognizable beat already infuses a new energy to Fiddle de Chocobo, and the song's vocals are done to absolute perfection, utilizing parts from another Daddy Speed song in I Love Bowling. It becomes a sort of call-and-response dynamic, with the Chocobo theme's main melody utilizing I Show The Meat and the breaks and segments inbetween using I Love Bowling - yet the two songs sound so similar that it flows from one to the other incredibly seamlessly. Despite the completely different melodies of all three songs, the lyrics are edited just enough to fit whilst still being completely audible: In other words, it's the kind of rip that is incredibly easy to sing along to. Plus, yknow, there's just something incredibly funny about hearing a song about showing one's meat layered on top of such a silly fun-time melody as the Chocobo theme!

IShowSpeed only appearing this prominently on the channel due to a big embarrassing incident sort of reminds me of the Minecraft YouTuber Dream, with rips like Five Dreams at Night 1.16 and his entire event during Season 5 effectively poking fun at him for something that was...quite harmless, in the long-run. SiIvaGunner touches upon and references a big number of YouTubers, and I think this kind of playfulness is the perfect way to go about things. Because even though I'm not much of a fan nor much of a detractor of Dream or IShowSpeed, it is absolutely hilarious to follow the creative ways that their infamous moments have been used for laughs by the SiIva team. Fiddling with my meat and balls digs deeper into Daddy Speed's list of songs to make something yet funnier, but still remains completely understandable to goobers like me who just think the phrase "I Show Meat" is incredibly funny. In my eyes, having that flexibility whilst remaining funny is a telltale sign that the joke is here to stay.