#literallynoone

So remember back when I said in Goodbye To Love that I'd be providing some sort of further explanation to the Circus rips at a later date? Uh, yeah - that later date is today, and I still...don't really know how to properly explain it.

It all feels like a giant web of in-jokes that were never quite properly explained, culminating into a channel-long mainstay to the channel. SiIvaGunner presents itself as a place for listening to edited video game music, and it certainly stuck to that for...at least its first few weeks? That blurry line would get pushed and prodded with rips of "Nintendo Direct themes", rips of fake games like Battle Theme - Zeno Blade Chronicle X, and rips that didn't contain the original track supposedly being ripped at all for a complete bait and switch - all of it leading up to the release of Rip Squad, the first Circus rip ever, on March 16th, 2016. In just 37 seconds, it manages to be extremely memorable from just how good the execution is, with the beginning music box jingle, the coy transition out of it, followed by the hilarious skrillex-like dubstep drop edited to play the Flintstones theme. Given that the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise was still enjoying meteoric success from the original four games releasing across 2014 and 2015, yet lacked much of any music to rip on SiIva, to do this sort of complete bait-and-switch was a pretty fun workaround for a one-time gag. Yeah. One time gag.

Except, with just that one rip, NBGMusic had seemingly summoned a monster - due to the Circus theme technically just being the ditty playing at the first few seconds of the rip, any remaining runtime could be dedicated to doing exactly what Rip Squad itself did - quite literally anything on the planet, related to video game music or not. Circus thus became home to every kind of rip under the sun, with the very same song being ripped again and again and again with different "mix" names for each one to at least ATTEMPT to distinguish them. Trust me, "Chex Mix", as Chex Invaders dons, is far from the most absurd mix name out there, and given their sheer variety going to the Five Nights at Freddy's playlist alone is akin to playing a ripper-based game of russian roulette.

But then, let's return to Chex Invaders then - because with the unlimited freedom that Circus rips provided, not even asking rippers to come up with fake games to loosely attach their rip jokes to, they were free to go absolutely hog wild with whatever concepts they could think of. I praised Plantasia 2 yesterday for just how well the theming of its joke and game ripped matched together, yet Circus mix embody the complete opposite side of that spectrum, and take full advantage of it. The only tie that Chex Invaders has to your expectations is the dubstep-adjacent electronic music featured in it, which many rips taking after Rip Squad also did, but it's not as if that's at all a constant for Circus rips - that rule was broken by Chaze the Chat himself just a month after the Circus rips began.

No, Chex Invaders isn't playing on any sort of emotional attachment you may have to Five Nights at Freddy's, not any sort of expectations on the part of viewers upon clicking - it simply appeared in SiIvaGunner fans' subscription boxes like a face-down card, its true intentions unknown to those who didn't click it. Those who did, however, were met with one of the few contributions to SiIvaGunner by the excellent artist LiterallyNoOne, still going strong today with 245K subscribers on YouTube. And while I'm unfamiliar with their more numerous contributions to fan channel TimmyTurnersGrandDad (as mentioned in V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​a​-​V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​r), Chex Invaders alone proves their talents to me in its sheer quality. The base track Space Invaders by Teminite & MDK is played with in so many creative ways, from sections of melody-swapping in and out of one another, to overlaying vocals from other songs and clips onto the song, to full-on mashups, to moments doing all three in harmony...the amount of jokes featured, especially during Season 4 Episode 1, feels almost overwhelming! From the first four years of the channel's life, there's only a few channel mainstay jokes to NOT be featured here, from Flintstones to Snow Halation to CaptainSparklez to Megalovania to Inspector Gadget, yet it all ebbs and flows in and out of one another at such a befitting pace. A calmer moment in the song will play Fireflies, a more ominous section plays 8-Bit Beast's Haunted House (see Maroon 5 more like Maroon 8 hehehehehehe), the beat drop at one point is a single "op" from Gangnam Style - for having SO many different pieces of SiIvaGunner's long history in play, for being a rip made by just one person, it all fits together shockingly well, to where I almost forget that Space Invaders is a song that exists outside of this rip!