#moralem

And so, we've reached the end of the year. Christmas, holidays, Season 8 of SiIvaGunner; all come to an end with the celebratory bang of fire in the sky. And for this blog, too, I knew had to end the year in something big; in a rip of cosmic, cataclysmic power. After finishing up the previous post covering PRIMEneria, I solemnly returned to my expansive archives with arms folded behind my back, my gaze passing across dozens upon dozens of possible rips left in the blog's drafts; each possible contenders for a future post. Requests, gimmicks, anniversaries, lore, good rips, bad rips, a collection of treasures gathered across one-and-a-half years of running this blog for the purpose of review...and yet deep down, I always knew what had to be done. Since the blog's very beginning I was aware of its existence, a rip with energy so potent that I never once dared to approach it, yet I knew that it could not be ignored forever. The rip is, indeed, perhaps the most vile creation the SiIvaGunner team has yet made, a weapon of torture unleashed upon us at the apex of Undertale's 7th anniversary celebrations. Indeed, it is the magnum opus of SiIvaGunner's 6th Season; Uncanny Approaching.

Take a moment to picture yourself, sat at the computer in the far away time of September 2022. You're a big fan of the SiIvaGunner YouTube channel, which had uploaded high quality rips for six years and have been an absolute delight to follow throughout. A large part of that investment has been the channel's close ties to one of your favorite games: Undertale! From the very beginning, you've noted that it's as if the channel and game have had a sort of brotherly relationship, with lots of rips like Locked in the Underground, Field of Love and Cringe, Aphex and more showing a fantastic understanding and reverence for the game and its soundscape. Earlier in the very same year, for the big Minecraft anniversary event you also followed quite attentively, there was a particularly resonant piece – Fell From a High Place (Reprise) – which made it ever so evident how much Undertale means to so many people all around the world. And now, it was September 15th, the celebration of the game's release in full swing; midway through the day, you notice the upload of and watch the impeccably made Jesus of the Underground, floored by the ripper's devotion to such a large project and amazed at the end results. This is a truly fantastic anniversary indeed! What could possibly go wrong?

Yet at the back of your mind, you recall rips that appeared as if to hint at the brewing of a greater evil to come. SiIvaGunner, like Undertale itself, has always had a dash of insanity to it, a pinch of the insufferable for the sake of comedy. None had captured that vibe better, perhaps, than Mad Mew Mew Becoming Uncanny, merging Undertale with a multitude of sources - chief among them, as featured in its title, the king of brainrot. Whilst commonplace enough today to become 2024's word of the year, I think it's reasonable to say that 2021-2022 or so were when this kind of content truly began to rise in notoriety. It can be hard to put a proper definition on the term; it's the kind of widely attention-grabbing slop that infests TikTok and YouTube shorts, which has gone through so many degrees of ironic and unironic evaluation to where nobody really seems to know what to think of it anymore. The face of brainrot changes by the month – CostCo Guys, Skibidi Toilet (hey there, Hidden Headtoilets (skibidi toree 2)!), Gegagedigedagedago –but to me, its icon shall forever be the legendary Uncanny Mr. Incredible; a series of edited images depicting Mr. Incredible from The Incredibles in increasing stages of grief. These images and the video edits made for them are truly some of the sloppiest slop you can find online, like an evil and fucked up extension of the age-old meme format of "Thing -> Bad, Thing -> Good", yet designed to where it could theoretically...go on forever.

This brewing, bubbling evil, already being toyed around with by the SiIva team in rips like Level 8 - Eversion HD, would only grow and grow throughout the year; the true power of Uncanniness yet to be wholly harnessed, it's potential for creating endlessly engaging slop yet to be fully understood. Until at last, the fated day came; Undertale's anniversary stood in the crosshairs of the canny, and the day would be remembered not for its festivities, but for its pain. For Uncanny Approaching.

Even without playing the embedded video above, you've likely already put the pieces together of vaguely what sort of rip we're discussing here. A step above merely having images of Mr. Incredible react to captions with befitting music, Uncanny Approaching – as was foreshadowed in the aforementioned Level 8 - Eversion HD – features a selection of freshly-made images of Frisk, Undertale's protagonist, matching every stage of Mr. Incredible's canniness; and additionally, more than just a simple spiral downward, we're also treated to images of Frisk *gaining* canniness across escalating stages of celebration. The original Mr. Incredible Uncanny posting comes with a set standard of music tracks to pair with every image featured; similarly to the legendary Story of Undertale, each of those tracks are here rearranged in the sonic style of different parts of Undertale's vast soundtrack.

All of this in unison sets the stage for a genuinely high-quality adaptation of the braindead Uncanniness-posting; accolades already thrown toward the previously mentioned early appearances of Mr. Incredible Going Uncanny on the channel like Level 8 - Eversion HD. It is, indeed, perfectly befitting for the SiIvaGunner channel to take a concept so run into the ground by low-effort posters and to reenvision it into something truly grand...yet Uncanny Approaching goes many steps further beyond that simple milestone. Indeed, more than just music and images, more than just featuring every image for a one-and-done bit, Uncanny Approaching goes the full mile and features captions and Situations for our canny friend to react to; "you hop on your PC" -> "you see you friend connected on discord" -> "he sent you a message" -> "you decide to check it" -> "he invites you to a party after school tomorrow" -> "he says EVERYONE is invited!" and so on, and so forth. As you'll notice just from these brief excerpts, this "story" is written in a way that feels almost deliberately slow and painful, each snippet given a full Canny reaction, sometimes multiple identical ones in a row – althewhile also containing multiple grammatical errors and a general sense of slapdash-ness, perfectly capturing the feel of Canny-posting on TikTok and YouTube shorts; like super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont, its authenticity to the source material is to be commended despite the pain that it brings.

Pain is not an area unexplored by SiIvaGunner – one of my all-time favorite rips, Sex - Steve Harvey, occurred on a day pretty much entirely dedicated to it – yet the lengths that Uncanny Approaching goes toward inflicting it feels like a new level altogether. I've already set the stage for the lead-up to the rip, the absolute rug-pull of a surprise it provided after the beautiful Jesus of the Underground - yet I've been careful to omit one core detail. You're capable of seeing the runtime yourself right now just by clicking on the video embed, a gargantuan 37 minutes and 51 seconds; but back on its release, this video released as a YouTube Premiere, to be witnessed live in its entirety by an audience unaware of just how long they would have to endure it for. As someone who was there to see it all unfold, it was like seeing a prophecy come to life – the "Endless Slop" theory proposed in my mind during the months leading up to the rip was playing out in front of me, like a SiIvaGunner-branded precursor to that one AI Generated "Endless" Seinfeld parody. Only, of course, this was still a SiIvaGunner project, still ever so carefully teetering the line between slop and quality; the artwork still excellent, the rearrangements of all the Canny themes as fantastic as the same concept was back on Story of Undertale, and the story having some genuinely fun ties to the actual...well, story of Undertale.

And in a way, having all of those genuinely excellent qualities tied to a viewing experience as deliberately mind-numbing as this made the experience torturous in an even more special way. Later in the same day, we would get to see the images and music arrangements released in isolation from Uncanny Approaching through Enemy Approaching (Extended Version) (Short Version); yet before that released, if you wanted to hear just your favorite part of the Uncanny-posting's Undertale re-imagining, or explore the different pieces of art made for the project, you had to hunker down and sit through the premiere like everybody else. It's the perfect storm of slop and cinema; a blend of appeal and brainrot that draws you in with something compelling and keeps you stuck through a brainwashing regime of canniness. I've sat through the entire thing twice and I still don't believe I could tell you upfront what exactly happens in the story due to me outright zoning out of focus repeatedly both times; other than excellent quotes like "he look at you with evil intents, he about to grab you and turn you into a glitch man like jerry", "you get theb ox and run out of their as quick as you can", and "mom die", it's all become a noise of Undertale iconography and canniness.

Nevertheless, Uncanny Approaching is a true testament to the will of the SiIvaGunner team; to commit to an idea as genuinely insane as this is on paper and continue through with it despite – or perhaps even BECAUSE – of how much the audience will suffer through it. I can only imagine how long it must have taken, past drawing the artwork and arranging the music, for the video to have been put together; for each section to have been penned and composed so specifically as to maximize the torture involved. Indeed, I understand it to where it was Myeauxyoozi in particular who was responsible for this script, working with Blookerstein's arrangement talent demonstrated on The expanse of meme in past was split, A fiendish trap has now been set; Behind a tree the villains sit, Terror of sport, the Robbie's Net. alongside the art talent of four of the SiIva team's best artists; and given Myeauxyoozi's previous contributions to the channel such as Among Drip Drop Galaxy, Shaky Mountain and being the channel's biggest provider of rips using Harlem Shake, there is no doubt in my mind that he is – said with affection – mentally unwell enough to have been the best possible writer for the job.

Boy that list of artists huh? Part of the magic of SiIvaGunner is that huge passion projects like this drop within the same schedule as every other rip, leaving it up to fans like myself to generate discussion over when things go crazy. It really isn’t often these days that an ordinary non-event rip truly blows up in the way this one did, sitting at almost half a million as of writing. But like, its well deserved!! It takes the basic concept of a mashup between Field of Hopes and Dreams and Vylet Pony’s ANTONYMPH, and turns it into a full-on tribute to the latter song, remaking the entire music video with all new visuals.

In that process, it creates a really fun new narrative of Noelle substituting Fluttershy in the original video as the “protagonist”, which creates a really fun new look into what the character is. A dorky, happy, proud and above all else SILLY little creature raised on the early 2000s internet culture. People inside and out of SiIva are in LOVE with this depiction of the character and I honestly can’t blame them, and the art used in the video is lovely in every sense of the word. Both as an Undertale fan and a SiIvaGunner enjoyer it’s been so fun seeing this strange mash-up joke turn into a full-on mainstay on the channel, bound to show up in the lore eventually. Not to mention the visuals are great not just for the way they pay tribute to Vylet Pony’s original video, but in how closely tied they still are to SiIvaGunner in-jokes: Its a love letter on all fronts

Yknow, for as much as I like to go on and on about Season 2 being my favorite period of the channel's life - it may honestly just be due to my own personal investment being at its highest at that point. Its a herculean, damn near impossible task nowadays to actually try and critically evaluate a season of SiIvaGunner in retrospect, and most of what I go off of obviously just comes from my own experiences and memories. It goes to reason, then, that Season 5 is my least favorite season of the channel not necessarily due to any fault of its own, but just due to my own personal investment in the channel being rather low at the time. I say that, because with every rip I cover from the Season - now including Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier - I'm baffled as to why I'd ever consider the season anything less than peak.

When I have that discussion with other people (or just with the voices in my head), the reasons tend to primarily boil down to a lack of lore developments made during the year. Yet as I talked about way back in Knowledge of the Depths, even that feels like doing the Season a disservice, given just how enjoyable and, in a way, lore-crucial the audio dramas made during Season 4 Episode 2 and Season 5 wound up becoming. Which again makes me point toward my own lack of attentiveness toward the Season as the one to blame: because how else could I have missed out on how genuinely engaging and interesting the lore regarding Lady, Yankin', Masked Wolf and Astronaut in the Ocean was? And as the cherry on top - how could I have missed just how perfect of an ending to it all Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier wound up being?

I've dissected and talked about Masked Wolf before in Aquarium in the Ocean and Snow halocean, as the figment who best fits the role of a true anti-hero within SiIvaGunner - an agent of chaos whose rips only occasionally bother to actually sound good, yet one we wound up loving despite (or because of!) it all. Yet as Season 5 began to truly ramp up, his role seemed to change from agent of chaos to necessary evil - as the only remaining figment capable of stopping the reign of hell that Lady's "Yankover" was subjecting us all to. No doubt SiIva has had its contentious, long-lasting takeovers before (Harlem Shakeover and Totally Shaaking Out Right Now, anyone?), yet nothing truly compared to the neverending downpour of hellfire cast upon us by one particularly crass rapper singing about her genitalia. And for once, it seemed as if the SiIvaGunner team agreed - Lady became, for all intents and purposes, the actual villain of Season 5, with her figment form reimagined as a full-on demon in need of imprisonment. And small nuggets of lore were being handed out week by week (nuggets that I, again, unfortunately glazed over back in the day), Lady's defeat wound up happening at the hands of HoBART, everyone's favorite mixer from the King for Another Day Tournament. Yet to me, Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier still sits at the most pure, befitting end to her reign - a battle between the Season's fallen angel and its lawless demon, set to the tune of a game whose entire hype cycle practically enveloped Season 5 in its entirety.

Back in Satinpanties Symphony, I mused over how Friday Night Funkin became a mainstay feature on SiIvaGunner almost overnight, and how it feels as if the two projects share a lot of DNA that make them a perfect fit for one another, in how they handle the idea of legacy. What better game, then, could there be to depict the encounter between these two legends that defined the season, than with the game that defined the year - coincidentally, one entirely focused on duels between rappers. That's not to imply that Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier isn't an absolute banger on its own - the melodic core of Ugh, paired with the implementation of both Astronaut in the Ocean and Yankin's backings into the back-and-fourth, creates a fantastic re-imagining of the song that's both endlessly relistenable and incredibly charming with the custom visuals. Yet its the same point I made in Take You To The Desert - with all that context in mind of all that led up to this battle, the knowledge of how much the community suffered under the thumb of both rappers yet came to understand one for his harmless-if-strange tendencies yet came to loathe the other...Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier becomes something genuinely legendary. Paired with so many small flourishes added on top, such as the original track's "Ugh" sample being replaced with Masked Wolf's opening "Astro", the reference to Lady's attempted Thanksgiving resurrection ritual in Twerkey (seriously), down to Lady being positioned as the player character to truly sell home how dominant she was during her reign...It feels like yet another one of those, for lack of another word, Perfect, rips.

The cherry on top of it all though is, of course, the ending. Despite the seemingly even back-and-forth in the battle, Lady is suddenly dragged back into the pits of hell, as Masked Wolf leaves her with his parting words.

There's a lot to be said about the frequently-ripped things on SiIvaGunner. I've already covered how rips like Wii Shop Bling paved way for the Wii Shop Channel theme becoming a permanent mainstay on the channel, and there are several other tracks like it that cemented their place on the channel in one way or another. Sometimes its out of popularity, like with the Super Mario 64 Slider rips, or out of a longstanding in-joke like with the Five Nights at Freddy's Circus rips (believe me, we'll get to those one day). But with a few exceptions, like Season 7s infestation of Raft Rides, a lot of these reoccurances stem from some sort of, long-running legacy so to speak.

Which is what makes the channel's direct ties to Friday Night Funkin' so interesting to me. The game effectively came out of nowhere at the tail end of Season 4, and without skipping a beat it started receiving regular rips as soon as Season 5 began. What set these rips apart was the effort that consistently went into them - visuals and charts were edited or made ground-up specifically to match the original game, like they were all-new songs to play in-game. On top of this, the rips were of course consistently bangers - it was a perfect storm that pushed FNF as an inseperable part of SiIva's identity in no time flat.

In the same way that FNF honors the legacy of Newgrounds, its always felt to me like the FNF rips on SiIva honor the channel's own legacy. Be it Gangster Mario, Among Us Drip, Astronaut in the Ocean - so many of the rips just feel tied to the channel's own foundation and community, especially in how it creates FNF character designs for these in-jokes. And to tie it back to these frequently ripped tracks I discussed earlier, todays rip highlights one of those in particular - Stickerbrush Symphony from Donkey Kong Country 2. A track less so heralded for its nostalgia or potential funnyness, but for its unbelievable quality despite the hardware its on. Its an important piece of music to a lot of VGM-invested people, and Satinpanties Symphony does it justice in spades. It stays authentic to the source track its building on and the game's general call-and-response structure between singers, even free-styling certain sections a bit to better fit FNF's pace, without ever losing the essence of the track its adapting. The serotonin that hits when both parties sing in harmony leading in to the chorus hits crazy hard, its honestly hard to listen to the track without a smile.