#rhman

I feel like I don't talk about it enough on here, but I love SiIvaGunner's fusion collabs in just about all forms they've taken. Sure, I've expressed my preference for the older style of collab, with their chaotic and unpredictable, yet still cohesive, nature (File Select Fusion Collab is still one of my all-time favorite rips!). But that preference doesn't equate to any sort of dislike for the current style of Fusion Collabs, of songs being split cleanly into sections to allow each artist breathing room to do their own arrangement - I love these for their own reasons just the same, and am always giddy to see a new one release. To the shock of nobody whatsoever, Balcony Fusion Collab was an absolute shoe-in for a favorite rip of mine immediately upon listening to it for the first time.

By the start of Season 4 Episode 1, 0a lot of things had changed with the Fusion Collabs since they began in Season 1. They were, for a while, mainly used to denote big events and moments, like how Patched Plains Fusion Collab was one big fanfare for the start of the Christmas Comeback Crisis, or the aforementioned File Select Fusion Collab denoting the end of Season 1. We'd get more of them made for character birthdays, notably for the first birthday of SiIvaGunner mainstay character Wood Man, but eventually...I feel like the collaborations began to feel a lot more "personal" in style. With rips like Balcony Fusion Collab, it felt less like it was made to denote and celebrate some huge event, and more...just to give praise and love to one of the most important indie games ever made.

Hot off the heels of covering his magnum opus, the next rip in line just so happened to be one requested by minindo himself, one that I'd somehow never heard before. That did genuinely surprise me, because it was effectively the grand finale to one of my favorite surprise mini-events: the celebration for Dat Boi! Remember him? Remember Koopa Street? Yeah, after a whole day of remembering this dumb meme from such a strange period of the internet, it was all wrapped up with Crank Dat City (2016).

Funny enough, this is actually the second rip of Crisis City from Sonic 06 I've covered, after THIS. IS. SOLEANNA. I think the strength of both rips is evident from just the first few seconds of listening - the prominence of the song's lead synth makes any replacement or addition to it way funnier as a result. In THIS. IS. SOLEANNA that was done to replicate the style of Sparta Remixes, and a month therafter Crank Dat City (2016) builds on it in the most natural way possible - Dat Boi's smashing steel drums setting the stage for a very funny rip right off the bat. Yet the rip doesn't ever settle into a groove, for as funny as that bit alone is. We've got segments of odd jokes from all over internet culture featured here, including a surprise appearance of Goomba Got Back before its hit album release in Season 7, a hint of letting the Bodies hit the floor, a segment with Big Shaq's Man's Not Hot...

Its hard to draw much of a throughline with these jokes, but if there was to be one...I feel like most of them fall into the category of feeling "forgotten" about, in that they're well past their prime time of being considered funny. Bodies was, much like Paralyzer of YACKER TOILET fame, an icon of the old internet, yet one that seems to have been left behind by the passage of time - similarly, Goomba Got Back at one pointed seemed like a...not-terrible and kind of funny way to respond to the criticisms Gaijin Goombah was receiving, but now looks incredibly immature and bizarre to look back on in retrospect. The list goes on, but Crank Dat City (2016) doesn't really linger on them too much, far more invested in fun celebration above all else.

In the last few days, I've been slowly chewing my way through Volume Ruby in my free time - its been a really fun way to re-experience Season 7 and uncover a lot of rips I missed out on. I try to always stay up-to-date with the channel, but I'm not perfect: sometimes real life just gets in the way for a week, and I miss out on the big meme for a while until its buried amidst other rips later on. And unfortunately, that meant that I sort of missed the boat on the rips referencing Bottom G, Bumblebee, and the "Top G" himself. The smile on my face when I realized what Top G Alert! was doing was simply magic.

You've likely already heard way too much about everyone's least favorite convicted sigma male - Tate's an "influencer" in the sense that he spews vile and annoying rhetoric to his audience of young men to basically teach them to be assholes in order to succeed in life. His role as an obnoxious asshole is well known in just about every circle that actually follows him, and its led to a bevvy of mockery and parody of the guy: most famous of which being "Bottom G" from TikTok. He's an exceptionally talented dancer who happened to look near identical to Tate, and decided to play into that as a form of parody, performing flamboyant dancing to encourage a far superior "sigma" lifestyle to the world. Its hard not to find his energy infectious, and that carries over to the equally infectious song he's most closely associated with - Bumble bee by Norweigan pop artist Bambee, sped up in an eerily similar fashion to Caramelldansen.

After finally drawing all of these connections together - uncovering the rabbithole of Bottom G and finally getting up to speed with all of Tate's drama - it was oh so fun to realize that the SiIva team had been playing along with it the whole time, particularly with its rips of the fake game "Tate's Journey". Yet Top G Alert! takes the cake for me - Bowser's Inside Story is a game I hold very close to my heart, and I've even covered it on here before with Brothers ~ The finale is afoot!. In all the game's music, there's such a fun bouncy energy to the music, such bizarre yet always fun instrument choices and fun rhythms to go along with - and Top G Alert! mixes that instrumentation with the nightcore-ified Bumble bee song and vocals. Its a banger that I appreciate in the exact same way I do the original Tough Guy Alert!, through being simultaneously fun and silly whilst still having a really commanding percussion and overall progression. It grabs your attention and asks you to dance along, and RHMan did an absolutely incredible job translating that energy over with integrating Bumble Bee into the track.

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.

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.

As one may be able to deduce just by my obsession with the channel as a whole, I have a strange fascination with absurdist humor, and really just stuff that's flat-out stupid in general. Believe me, it becomes harder by the day to stop myself from just going off the rails about Not Funny Didn't Laugh Day from earlier in the same season as this rip, arguably the channel's most unhinged takeover its ever had. But in the same spirit of stupid Vine humor, I today bring you Battle with Jeffinite.

It should be mentioned that, in a lot of ways, Season 4 Episode 1 was aiming to bring back the chaotic nature the channel had during its first season, similar but more all-encompassing than Season 3's Nostalgia Takeover. This was evident in a lot of areas, with the notable example for this rip in particular being how it was actually part of a small ARG on the channel. Season 4 Episode 1 hosted the third annual SilvaGunner Spooktacular Halloween Horror Special, and turned it into a full-scale murder mystery episode wherin several memes were framed as suspects of the murder through their rips. One of these suspects was Jeff the Killer, who through this GIF and others had his likeness merged with the very normal and funny Vine meme My Name Jeff. Basically - every rip with Jeff-like contents was a sign that Jeff the Killer might've committed the event's murder.

I am unfortunately speaking as an outsider here, as I wasn't able to participate in the ARG due to not being as invested in the channel during the event. But like I said, the Season's mission statement was a whole lot more all-encompassing than just the ARG nature, and so I'm able to appreciate the rips made during it for their absurdity and insane creativity althesame. Though I'm glad we've since moved past Season 1, it still feels very heartwarming to see it honored so often.

So, what actually is the rip we're talking about today? Its pretty simple really - take the intense EDM theme of Infinite's boss fight from Sonic Forces, and turn it into a full-on Jeffpocalypse. It took me a while to realize that the song isn't just using the isolated My Name Jeff clip as its audio source, but rather the fanmade "Trap Remix" of the song, which is then pitchshifted into the quickly repeating beats of the original track's melody. Having these two tracks coexist rather than using My Name Jeff's vocal samples really helps bring the two together, as its now neither full-on mashup or full-on YTPMV. And though I can't say I understand the choice to place Sonic sound effects into the mix leading up to the chorus, they absolutely help the beat sound all the more absurd-yet-banging.

Though the theme hasn't lived in my mind for long, and I'm still a bit miffed I wasn't able to pay too much mind to the event as it was happening...its almost just as magical to dig these treasures up years after their original context.

I feel one of the biggest challenges going forward with this blog is going to be keeping a balance between rips that are actively aiming to be outstanding and high effort, and rips that are just as effective in their simplicity. Its of course not wrong to celebrate these ambitious projects, but I want this blog to be kind of all-inclusive, representative of SiIva as a whole in a way. That being said, you'll have to forgive me if I ever run out of things to say on these simpler rips - the best thing I can often say is to simply admire the work for yourself!

This is thankfully not one of those cases, and works both as a super simple concept and execution alongside having plenty to say about it. Much like Mii Favorite Things, its building on the legacy of Wii Shop Channel rips spanning as far back as Season 1, whilst mounting several other legacies onto it. This was a time when a lot of people were genuinely getting nostalgic for both the Wii Shop Channel and Fallen Kingdom (or Viva va Vida if you prefer), and Steam Garden from Super Mario Odyssey and its musical connections to the latter track was still fresh in many's minds. Basically, it was this big hodgepodge of ideas bubbling in a lot of people's minds at the time, yet presented as just a pretty simple mashup.

And as I'll keep reiterating - what makes these kinds of rearrangements so special is that they're not automated in the least! Every lead instrument, backing track, harmony is always hand picked and tuned by the rippers, in this case to get a sound to be as similar to the Wii Shop Channel's theme as possible, althewhile sneaking in little musical cues from the Mii Maker theme in the background if you listen close. My favorite touch is one that the video's top commenter so cleverly spotted - this is explicitly a rearrangement of the Minecraft parody of the original song, Fallen Kingdom, due to a single pause's length not present in the original song. Its those kinds of brilliant details that make SiIva rips so distinct.

Yesterday, when I dubbed Season 4 Episode 2 the year of celebration, I wasn't JUST referring to the day-long celebration of the King for Another Day Tournament's winner - that energy extended into the Season in its entirety. The best place to point to is of course The SiIvaSummer All-Star Festival, a collection of over a dozen different events spanning two months time, clad in a summer-fun beach aesthetic and beautiful artwork throughout. Today, we have a rip from just one of those events - Dat (Soulja) Boi Day, an entire day dedicated to Dat Boi.

Yeah, Dat Boi! Remember him? From 2016? He got an entire event dedicated to him to celebrate Soulja Boy's 30th birthday, as a popular video using the Dat Boi meme used Crank That as its instrumental. As a result the two memes have sort of just...fused, on SiIva? The steel drums share double duty between the two memes, kind of like a clone character in a fighting game in a sense. Though mostly forgotten to 2016, the little guy got renewed love during this event and has been showing up every now and then since.