#memmy

If you've been keeping up with this blog, you may have noticed that my coverage tends to somewhat slant toward the more emotional, the "deep" and hard-hitting stuff on SiIvaGunner, be it with rips like i love(d) you and Ascension to Apotheosis or with the entirety of my #character archives posts. I can't hide that a lot of my appreciation for the SiIvaGunner channel is emotional, likely in large part because I'm not a ripper myself and thus can't always properly appreciate rips for their craft alone. But I do try to diversify the blog's portfolio from time to time since, well, it would frankly be inaccurate to present the channel as being nothing but feature-length epics and carefully-improvised lore. Many parts of SiIvaGunner's evolution are driven by ambition, yes - yet just a many, if not more, are driven by boredom, messing around, and just flat-out being silly with it. And perhaps no ripper embodies this better than the one responsible for Welcome to 2021! They finally invented summers that hurt motherfuckers😂 only at sonicforces​.​com and precisely two hundred and twentythree (223) other siiva rips - Memmy.

Rippers like Memmy, and rips just like the above, represent a hugely important part to SiIvaGunner's core, the one that predates even the channel itself: the spirit of SoundClown. SiIvaGunner as a channel was born through the ongoing antics and fun of a couple of teens on SoundCloud, messing around with mashups and video game music purely to make one another laugh. Despite joining the team four years after the channel's inception, it feels as if Memmy has embraced this original spirit more than anyone else, as should be immediately evident by the name of Welcome to 2021! They finally invented summers that hurt motherfuckers😂 only at sonicforces​.​com alone. The titles of her rips are always like this, just a complete stream-of-consciousness bit written without a second though, and no matter how many years pass it stays as such an evergreen reminder of the silliness that persists within SiIvaGunner - a silliness that of course bleeds into the rips themselves! And so, while I've technically covered a chunk of her rips prior back on the Raftmageddon event on April Fools, with classics like lmao and request by raftride7000 pikachu x pachirisu amv- what makes rafts rideable, I think it's high time to actually dig into a proper rip of hers.

When I say "silly" or other such terms in today's context, I'm sure a lot of you immediately start to think along the lines of "brainrot" content or ironic shitposting, along the lines of we are number one but with outdated memes over it, Mad Mew Mew Becoming Uncanny, Corridors of Vine or plenty of the rips being made currently in Season 8. But I believe that's misrepresenting the topic a bit - even things made to be conceptually stupid through their source, can be wielded with finesse and ambition for remixing projects just like high quality rips often are. Beyond the obvious example of the SiIvaGunner channel in its entirety, a more specific example would be Season 5's "Disappearance of Super Mario" event: an event born from a running joke on Twitter, spun into one of the most solid and gripping channel narratives we've seen on the channel through the ambition put into it, like with what I wrote about on Your Worst Nightmario. No, I suppose "silly" isn't quite the right word to describe rips like Welcome to 2021! They finally invented summers that hurt motherfuckers😂 only at sonicforces​.​com - but rather, that they have a sense of...playfulness? Its vibes extend all the way to the imagery you get of the ripper themselves sitting with a music file open and just messing around to see what would happen - I couldn't tell you what scenario would lead Memmy to, in 2021, combine music from 2017's Sonic Forces with Maroon 5's hit 2014 single This Summer's Gonna Hurt like a Motherfucker, other than one wherein the ripper in question was just testing things out for the pure fun of creation in of itself.

And that's really what I've been getting at with this post in general, how important that spirit is to the channel, and for the well-being of the internet in general: That spirit of completely unbothered, expectation-less creativity. One of my all-time favorite ripper replies I've gotten on this blog came from the ripper venula on Hella Pummel, wherein they described adding an additional source to the rip out of no reason other than simply because they felt it would be funny and sound good. Welcome to 2021! They finally invented summers that hurt motherfuckers😂 only at sonicforces​.​com champions that spirit loudly and proudly - the mashup between Sonic Forces music and the aforementioned hit Maroon 5 single is a complete left-field idea, but Memmy goes all-in to make sure it actually results in a genuinely fun listening experience. It's partially due to the choice of Ghost Town in particular as the backing track, giving the rip a funky, bouncy backing that perfectly complements the sound of post-Overexposed Maroon 5, but This Summer is additionally pitch-shifted (and generally seems to be in a slightly lower key?) to match Ghost Town's slightly moodier tone. The connection with Hella Pummel only grows stronger once Ghost Town reaches its chorus, adding a piece of German pop music that I swear I've heard used in shitposts before yet couldn't even begin telling you a morsel of information about. But, sure enough - it sounds good, and doesn't even override This Summer's presence on the rip, instead just adding one more layer of sound to the backing track's highest point.

Look alive, everyone - Season 8 of SiIvaGunner has now officially premiered!

It may be a bit rich to say as someone running this blog, and with such deep investment into the channel, but...Season 7 really did bring me back into SiIvaGunner in a way I never quite thought would be possible. I'd sort of just accepted with Season 4, Season 5 and Season 6 that the channel had found a new direction: one that I was still VERY much a fan of, yet not quite the one that had "sold" me on the channel the same way Season 1, Season 2 and Season 3 did. I felt as if I was missing that energy of just...sheer visceral excitement for the future of the channel as a whole from the later-year seasons. There was instead a lot of per-event excitement, tons of little events to enjoy and still fun to be had in speculation of what could happen next, yet that aforementioned optimism still felt like it...missing, for a long time. And funny enough - last I discussed that feeling in particular was with Patched Plains Fusion Collab, a rip that Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab very much seems to be intentionally aiming to evoke.

Part of the reason that Patched Plains Fusion Collab works so well for me, and indeed why Season 2 has long sat as my favorite in the channel's life, is that feeling of raw forward momentum it conveys - the excitement of the entire fanbase thankful that SiIvaGunner hadn't actually ended, distilled into an anthem of so many different styles cheerfully pushing us forward. It was that sort of progress that, back when they were airing, I felt was sort of absent from Seasons 4/5/6 - the SiIvaGunner AI was still running things, Wood Man was still off effectively doing sidequests, and though the rips had obviously gotten better the cynical side of me couldn't help but feel a bit sad at how - for a lack of a better word - "predictable" it all felt. And to be crystal clear: A lot of those feelings have obviously changed for the better over the years. I love all of SiIvaGunner's Seasons nowadays, and I realized eventually that the prior-mentioned cynicism toward the new direction wasn't as fun as just, appreciating and LOVING the stuff to come out from the new seasons for the excellence that they were. And funny enough, I feel like that exact mindset is exactly what made Season 7 work so well for me.

Wheras Season 2 is one I remember for its feeling of constantly moving things forward at a rocket-speed pace, Season 7 excels by doing the complete opposite - the Year of Grand Dad is, at almost every possible turn, defined by its sense of self-celebration, a sort of "Sonic Generations"-type of tribute to the entire channel's life. Be it with RIP² as covered in SING A SONG ABOUT HOPES AND DREAMS, the entire incredible April Fools event I've alluded to within Violet Snow Memories, a newfound sense of chaos clearly inspired by Season 1 as shown in Hidden Headtoilets (skibidi toree 2) - yet with Seasons 4/5/6s newfound touch for genuine quality arrangements as found in rips like Forest of Tears. And, atop it all, the long-awaited continuation of the storyline last progressed back in Season 2 with the Christmas Comeback Crisis' eleventh episode. With such an incredible smörgåsbord of content on offer, it feels damn near impossible for me not to consider Season 7 my all-time new favorite.

And that optimism for the Season, that optimism for the future, is why Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab struck such a chord with me, with its release just a few days ago. With Season 7's ending, the status quo of the channel has been fundamentally altered in a way it hasn't truly been in a long while. For the first time ever, the long-present side character "Joke-Explainer™ 7000" is in full charge of the channel - her most prominent role ever despite having been around since all the way back in Season 1. I'll likely be dedicating another Season 8 post in the future to talking about her in particular with the same level of detail I did back in Vote Responsibly!!, but the context I'll provide for now is that her theme song, Magolor's Shoppe, has been a familiar, comforting tune to many a SiIvaGunner viewer since way back in Season 2. To see Patched Plains Fusion Collab not only get a spiritual successor, but one building upon a character and theme we've long grown attached to, means something so much to me and so many others. The added visuals, of her doing her duty with adorable Kirby-themed artwork as textboxes, are truly the cherry on top of an amazing collab.

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.