#kfad2

The history/origins of Placeholder-chan

MAGFest 2019: SiIvaGunner Presents - High Quality Ripping

Season 3 Featured on: MAGFest 2019

Presented by Nape Mango, Omknee, ShonicTH, Chaze the Chat, Harmony Friends, Trofflesby, Craz Xexe, Agent

*slamz handz on table* CRINGE IS DEAD POST ANDROID HYPERCAM ON MAIN [THIS ISNT MAIN THIS IS A SIDEBLOG BUT SCREW IT]

so yeah i made an “android”/humanized design for hypercam since his canon design will probly be hard as frick to draw

and im rlly proud of it!! funky lil guy

[ALSO this is ur sign to plz listen to the king for a day/king for another day tournamentz okthxbye-]

Well thank you! And, yeah, I pretty much grew up watching GMOD and YTP constantly and even today I still come back to those a lot when I'm restless and taking a break from work, and I think there's genuinely a lot that can be learned or discussed from them as uniquely 21st Century art forms.

I've been rewatching a lot of Raxxo's content lately and I think it was his content in particular that kind of convinced me that the "GMOD/SFM - Grand Guignol" analogy wasn't nearly as much of deranged word salad as I assumed it was, because in all honestly, if you had to try and condense his videos into a genre or definition or something of the sort, what the hell else can you possibly call this that in any way comes close to describing what you experience?

Like, all of his videos are described as "GMOD animated in SFM", because SFM is usually associated with more straightforward dramatic content while GMOD has been cartoon madness from the start (and it's fascinating to watch just how tame even the early Rubberfruit videos are compared to the kind of stuff Eltorro64 or Dr Lalve are putting out), and Raxxo is the latter in the style of the former.

And his videos are not just a non-stop barrage of brain-breaking, because they have weirdly dramatic pauses, and moments of straightforward action, or simple sentence mixing, and there's continuity between his videos, and incredibly smooth and natural gestures following by the characters stretching and deforming like jello monsters on the next second as their screams warble to drown the soundtrack and then everything's back to normal, and then they start doing things that kinda even make some sense as a narrative, but you cannot even begin explaining properly why, and I've watched these so many times that I even kinda start to see what makes sense and what doesn't, even though literally no one other than Raxxo is ever going to guess why he made the choices he did, and god these jokes must have taken hours if not days to render, why does the scretching Soldier head saying "Sputnik!" shows up in everything he does, and oh did I mention he also makes up the soundtracks he uses himself and they don't match in the slightest most people's perception of his content?

And for the finale of the Soldier Dispenser saga he created maybe the most batshit collaborative animation effort on Youtube, which is about an hour's worth of 200 animators all creating their own little batshit mini-stories in reference to his own and, seriously, who the hell could have possibly predicted something like this existing back when computer game Team Fortress 2 was announced in 2007? Or when Youtube was created?

Who could have possibly predicted something like this existing at any point in human history? Where else could anyone possibly experience this much audiovisual chaos anywhere? I can't even bring myself to watch the video in full again, but that this exists at all, and that it's far from the only one of it's kind, and that Team Fortress 2 fan content has spiraled so hard past anything the creators could have possibly predicted that it has self-sustaining meme ecosystems (Remember when smexuals were a thing? Or the Freaks?), that it's still fucking going 15 years past the game's debut, is, it's kind of a lot, is what I'm saying.

Like, I'm speaking as someone who studies a lot of pop culture and combs through it's most obscure and weirdest recesses to find stuff to write about, I'm still just as baffled by how far these things have gotten as I was when experiencing it for the first time. And you can find a lot of stories like these digging through Youtube Poop and the specific styles of certain creators or certain developing memes for franchises that grow and grow and permutate.

Think about what has to have happened to make a video like iteachvader's What'll It Be? happen.

Long John Baldry, blues musician extraordinaire, voiced cartoon villain Dr Robotnik in a Sonic cartoon. Said Sonic cartoon and performance was lucky enough to survive through Youtube clips. People noticed one of said clips of his performance has him saying a word that sounds like penis in a funny way, so they start making jokes about it, and parodies, and then literally hundreds of parodies popularizing the concept as a source of comedy, some of which take the form of music. Said music is done by cutting, remixing and splicing audio from said performance over music beats, which can be a PAINSTAKINGLY LONG PROCESS as someone who's tried doing that several times now, all this to make something with "Poop" in it's name (which I guess isn't that different from pulp writers spending weeks and months breaking their fingers to put out a novel's worth of content every month, for newspapers and magazines that were literally going to be used as toilet paper later)

These parodies catch on a bit and die out for a bit, until iteachvader comes along, and he proceeds to build a career not just by making funny parodies of said cartoon, but also knocking out genuinely really, really good musical parodies, editing voice clips of said performance to make it sound like the villain's singing (and additionally, he also creates his own tunes, and he's shown that literally every sound he uses is taken from the show, which is just, absolutely mind-boggling effort). He's also created over the years a running joke of Tails being Dr Robotnik's son that people liked enough to ask for more, and then we come to the video above, which is a song about Dr Robotnik spoiling his son Tails asking him what he'll want, which is not at all in line with how the two characters are canonically. And said remixes would eventually get remixed even further, even with crossovers with other characters or musicians, and so forth.

And that is the story of how dozens of creators working separately, and with little intent other than goofing around, single-handedly revived a dead man's music career, as the voice of the fan reinterpretation of a animated adaptation of a videogame villain, popular to the billions if not dozens of billions of views over a decade in the making, on a broadcasting platform said man didn't even live to see being created.

I think sometimes we like to think of ourselves as advanced and jaded enough that nothing surprises us anymore, and if we went back in time and showed an iphone to our great-grandparents they'd start screaming in sheer confusion. And, maybe they would, yeah, but imagine if you were Long John Baldry at any point in his life, even after he finished recording his lines as Robotnik, and someone showed up to you and explained that all of this was going to happen to you, to your voice, to your performance. Imagine if you were one of Valve's lead developers working on Team Fortress 2 during the nine years it spent in development, and someone showed you Raxxo's work and Soldier's Dispenser Quest and just, everything that had happened to characters you hadn't even fully created yet.

I imagine Long John Baldry would have taken it well enough eventually, by all accounts he was a fun person who loved to try new things, and he was an openly gay British vocalist in the 1960s when it was literally illegal to be gay in Britain, so I imagine nothing could possibly rattle his cage that deep in the long run.

But can you honestly tell me you wouldn't freak out at least a little trying to understand just what exactly the future was showing you? Can you honestly tell me your cynicism and world-weariness would be worth anything in the face of all this knowledge about what the world was going to do with your creations and work?

Can you honestly tell me, just now, that you have any idea what the hell is your legacy or reputation as an artist, or even what your art is known for, going to look like in a decade or two from now? And that things aren't going to get weirder than they are now?