#john desumith

Been a while, hasn't it?

No, no, I won't be here rambling for too long.

After all, there isn’t really not much of an interesting story as to why I've been away from the blog for so long. Life got in the way, my time diverted, my stress annoying to manage, et cetera, et cetera. In the midst of making ends meet, finding new passions, exploring new things...the blog just kind of just, slipped through my fingers.

Even before that, though, SiIvaGunner itself has long been a somewhat fickle interest for me, an interest I've consistently felt somewhat..."othered", towards engaging with. It's niche in a way that's created a wonderful and tight-knit community of die-hards, a community that the channel itself has loved to leverage as I discussed on PRIMEneria, but one whose devotion comes at the cost of making it difficult for the more casual fan to thrive, discussion seemingly isolated to just said tight knit. Put simply, you're either knee deep in the sauce or unsure of what the whole ordeal is worth being so invested in. Those avid fans, like you and me, who are knee deep, are mainly confined to discuss with one another in one lone Discord server, isolated from the rest of the web, with the channel's reach as a fandom hardly ever escaping its confines despite the often-vast reach of the YouTube channel itself. As a result of all this, my attachment to SiIvaGunner was often one I’d love discussing in the moment, yet those moments slide away as fast as a Discord channel's messages move; a stream of bubbles blown, floating away, away, without ever breaking through the water's surface.

There's an observed pattern within the community that many of the channel's biggest creatively-producing fans, creators of YouTube videos and fanart, eventually just end up becoming regular contributors themselves, contributing back to the hardcore. Its, of course, not for no reason; due to the nature of the channel, those who creatively contribute to the SiIvaGunner fandom are effectively just a half-step removed from contributing to SiIvaGunner itself; but it, in turn, makes those contributions more directly aimed at core fans first and foremost and a wider web second. The core idea with all my SiIvaGunner projects, this blog and previous, has mainly been to put SOMETHING out there creatively in relation to the channel, but to specifically avoid teetering into works that only echo back toward those core fans, to make things that can make even outsiders unaware of the channel’s appeal at least GET one's emotional attachment to. Proud of my work as I’ve been, I now find myself in a funny situation… because in a weird roundabout sort of way, this past year I've now grown closer than ever before into becoming that kind of outsider – and I needed to find a way back into the channel’s trenches.

With all of that said… why, then, was it a random Pokémon BW rip, Unovan Sanctuary, that pulled me out of whatever “outsider” slump I could describe myself as being in?

I suppose, at first, I was drawn to the familiarity of it all, y'know? After months and months of worry of so many things in life, after many months more feeling like I'd slipped out of what was going on with the channel anymore, tabbing into the Discord server every now and then but struggling to truly keep pace... it was sobering to remember that the channel continues to hold so much timeless appeal even ten years on. When I first started following SiIvaGunner in 2016, it was Nintendo music and Undertale, like with Tupac's Empty House; when I truly fell in love with it across Seasons 2-4, 2017 and beyond, it was Nintendo music and Undertale, done with ever-growing attention to detail by rippers I’d seen grow in prowess year after year, everything from Locked In The Underground to Outertale to Poké Village and beyond. That's of course not even mentioning how, as the years passed since, my inherent nostalgia toward both Pokémon Black & White, and toward Toby Fox’s music, has only amplified.

So sure, Unovan Sanctuary follows a tried-and-true formula for me, and it indeed features two arbitrary components that are reflective of the SiIvaGunner channel – Yippie. Yet, for as much as I was drawn to the rip through its comforting familiarity, I was only truly intrigued by noting its equal amount of unfamiliar ground. As the years have gone on, I’ve honestly fallen out of love with Toby Fox’s work, and still haven’t played Deltarune’s 4th Chapter; and as the SiIvaGunner channel has rolled on and on, my attentiveness toward its finer details of operating has loosened. As a result, I held no prior attachment to The 2nd Sanctuary theme used within the rip, nor had any prior knowledge of who ripper John Desumith was or his attachment to the channel. And the intrigue that sparked in me, tabbing through the Wiki, in researching, listening to the works of both artist and ripper, appreciating the attention to detail in the ripper’s rearrangement, truly brought back the spark of why I love writing this blog to begin with.

I have, for instance, spilled much ink already on how much I adore sensing a ripper’s passions reflected and emphasized in their output. The unabashedly self-indulgent rippers like Dead Line in works like vs SAYU (Based Version), the rippers with clear adoration for specific musical flavors like dante as heard on Eterna's Cocoon and 9​来​4s, the independently-driven projects like the Sonic CD Beta Mixes driven by rippers like Jass with Collision Chaos Good Future JP [CD Beta Mix], and so much more all contribute to the melting-pot magic of the channel’s output. In contrast to many of these, Johndesumith doesn’t keep a very public profile online, with no social media besides a Discord account, only talking in the SiIvaGunner Discord for sparse WIP-sharing of upcoming rips. And yet there’s so much you can learn about him just through perusing his output of rips – the frequent appearances of Chrono Trigger music, ripping of Pokémon music typically with an emotional bend, the prominent smattering of chiptune work particularly in his early catalogue... Like thumbing through the pages of a book, you can trace and sense the growth of his abilities, beginning already-proficient in the chiptune space through rips like Another Medium World and slowly learning to replicate the sounds of the JRPGs he seemingly holds the most love for. All of it, then, for the purposes of this post, culminating in melody-swapping music from Pokemon Black & White with a JRPG tune with as strange a time signature as The 2nd Sanctuary.

As far back as in 2016 with Hoopache, I can remember always being impressed with rips that dare to play around with uncommon time signatures; more still, I’ve become more and more impressed over the years with just how accurately and just how creatively the elements of the source Pokémon BW tracks are leveraged into the arrangements. Using Relic Castle in of itself is an inspired choice, but the choices made therafter in getting it to blend so seamlessly with a song with as out-there of a rhythm as The 2nd Sanctuary – a song I only learned about through its presence in rips to begin with – impresses me just as much as the sheer novelty of these kinds of rips used to impress way back in the day, despite how many times over that formula has been done since. It all comes together like a puzzle, with the background harmonies adapted directly from the source track, the gentle piano plucks that originally led Relic Castle’s melody, and it now playing parity with a repeating high-pitched sequence of notes, its sound slotting right in with the song despite not appearing directly in the source material. It is the definition of a creative liberty, much like the change in instruments toward the song’s bridge, using aspects of the whole Pokemon BW sound first and foremost rather than sticking solely to how Relic Castle sounded. And yet its restrained enough to still FEEL like Relic Castle to the core; the surprisingly funky percussion remains mostly untouched, which along with the background harmonies and choices of sound elsewhere keeps the song’s vibe squarely within the original desert-temple vibe. It is, then, that perfect blend of familiar and unfamiliar which drew me to the rip to begin with.

The cherry on top it all, though, was the realization I had in digging through John Desumith’s messages in the SiIvaGunner Discord server. Here’s a ripper who’s comfortable and well off within chiptune, a contributor without a shred of clout or online growth-statistics to his name, seeking advice on how to improve his non-chiptune work – how to further attain a sound pitch-perfectly accurate to a 16-year old Nintendo DS game. There’s nothing else to it, nor necessarily such demand for composers within that sound, nor any equivalent demand within the SiIvaGunner community for more rips of that ilk. It is, solely, one person seeking to improve their own creative craft for the love of said craft. So what if it might not reach all the people in the world? Hell, it might not even reach the average couple-thousand-or-so regular channel viewers, let alone become any sort of widespread meme phenomena. And yet, even as it sits in its own isolated, tiny corner of the channel, itself its own isolated chamber amidst a sea of content, it shines with so much love and attention to detail.

Perhaps, then, it was that realization – RE-realization, rather – that made me want to come back to the blog in any way I could. I obviously know that this blog, acting as a supplement to an already niche primary source, is never going to make me any kind of fame or fortune; yet I know, from the countless comments, additions, discussions and friends made through it, that its existence has, even in its aimlessness, had a genuine impact on people. Like many rippers, I originally began this project almost solely for personal use, as practice for my writing and as a way to organize my thoughts – yet much like how I’ve been so emotionally affected by passion projects from within the SiIvaGunner channel for so many years, I in turn have gotten to see how this stupid little project of mine has made rippers and fan alike ecstatic from so much of what I put out here.