#rip bundle

Did everyone enjoy yesterday's April Fools bit? I hope you did, it was a ton of fun - and if you missed it, you can use Raft Ride ~ The Story So Far to get yourself up to speed. But now its time to move past my own silly April Fools joke and back to the SiIvaGunner channel's bit - for the one event I've wanted to cover on this day for months now. In terms of these events, its hard to top just how excellently executed and well-rounded Mario's death event in Season 5 with Your Best Nightmario was - but for me, the event held last year just narrowly takes the crown for me. April Fools of 2023, the Season 7 event held 367 days ago (leap year!), is one of the most heartfelt, silly, and outright fun events the channel has ever had. And yes, I couldn't narrow it down - I HAD to feature three rips from it. Hopefully, you'll understand why.

To start, I think it needs to be established just how BIG this event was. There have been far larger in scope events on SiIva before - the King for Another Day tournament basically lasted from September to Thank You, Everybody! across several months and over a thousand videos - but April Fools 2023 is different. All 248 rips uploaded were done so not across months, not across weeks - but ALL DURING April 1st itself, within a 24 hour timespan. Now granted, 21 of those were Trailer Stringers for Garten of Banban (don't worry about it) - but it still speaks to the sheer bredth of the event itself. It was downright agonizing to think of just three, two, let alone one rip to feature on the blog to cover this event, because unlike with Your Best Nightmario or Grand Dad Metropolis - there's not truly one set of rips that best encapsulate everything about it.

Which, then, brings us to the event's theme, the main hook, one that compared to the above mentioned April Fools events from prior years, is quite subtle. You may have noticed that each of the three featured rips share a quirk in common in their title - a (Beta Mix), or in the case of .​.​.​of 2023, (Beta Mix) (Beta Mix). What's that all about? Well, Season 7 as a whole can be best described as a loveletter and celebration to the *entire* SiIvaGunner channel - this is a large part of what RIP² was about as I covered in SING A SONG ABOUT HOPES AND DREAMS and Return to Collision Clouds. It wasn't just cheering for KFAD, wasn't just remembering The Reboot, wasn't just being nostalgic for Season 1 - every inch of SiIvaGunner's history, obscure or popular, was brought up, remixed, paid tribute to, and so much more throughout the whole year, and the year's April Fools event was the greatest testament to it. We all slowly realized what that (Beta Mix) suffix meant - that each of the many, many rips uploaded that day, were *direct tributes* to the rips uploaded in the channel's past, elaborations upon or spoofs or alternate takes on these classic - or obscure! - rips.

And that side of the coin is what I think Our Sweet Parsley in particular captures brilliantly. Sonic Adventure's My Sweet Passion saw two absolutely classic rips be made of it during Season 1: The first, Our Sweet Passion, is made in the channel's earliest months and is one of the most concise examples of a truly good bait and switch, playing the track's instrumentals but having its lyrics be read aloud, dramatically yet with a confused inflection, by ripper How2BeEpic, emphasizing the bizarre word choices and writing to comedic effect. In the season's final months, Harmony Friends of Coconut Gun fame mentioned back in CG Man HD Remastered Edition, gave us My Sweet Parsley, a rip that sentence-mixes these same bizarre lyrics in YouTube Poop-esque fashion whilst still playing the original instrumental behind it all. Our Sweet Parsley, then, sees cookiefonster pay tribute to both at the same time in a rip I'm sure many of us thought possible, yet had likely forgotten about by the time Season 7 was upon us seven whole years later: a perfect fusion of the two. That's right - the lyrics of the YouTube Poop-ified My Sweet Parsley are read out with the same dramatic, quite-unfitting voice as Our Sweet Passion, and its arguably even funnier: Since there's no sentence mixing done, we get to hear first-hand cookiefonster's descent into madness reading off how Amy "had to shave it". And to really bring the point home of how much of a loveletter this entire event was, the aforementioned descent into madness is immediately followed by a bait-and-switch performance of the DK Rap with changed lyrics, directly paying tribute to Harmony Friends' Coconut Gun Rap. And then there's a sly reference to Thunder, Rain, and Lightning just after that - ANOTHER Harmony Friends rip from Season 1!!

You see what I mean, right? This was just one of the 240+ rips uploaded this day, but a ton of them had this same sort of love and care poured into them, no matter how shitpost-y they may seem from the outside. For me, the entire day was like being continuously rewarded for having kept up with SiIvaGunner so closely since its inception - yet more than the average use of the term "fanservice" implies, it all felt like it was done with the most genuine and wholesome, mutual respect between rippers behind-the-scenes. And, well, I say rippers - but part of the fun with the event was that it extended far past just rips! .​.​.​of 2023 is a (Beta Mix) version of a fucking *VLOG* of all things, the Vlog that channel founder Chaze the Chat recorded to announce the end of SiIvaGunner Season 2 and the beginning of SiIvaGunner Season 3. In other words, the equivalent of an update video, not anything actually core to the channel - yet still a video that die-hard fans like myself have long kept in mind since it was made.

I have no clue who "Kai Cenaze the Evil Gyat" is, but I want to thank them sincerely for creating the funniest rip I've ever seen out of one of SiIvaGunner's few completely-straightfaced videos, one that I mostly remembered for its very funny thumbnail. In some ways, it's the most classic of YouTube Poop, with sentence mixing and edits done purely for the silliness of "he's not saying what he's supposed to!!". But there's little nods to the fanbase's running jokes in the background - The Christmas Comeback Crisis development hell, the Rave.DJ sticker in the bottom right of the whole video, and so on - all the while, prominently, the entire video is coated in modern-day-YouTube content mill slop from top to bottom. A reaction video cam of Chaze the Chat, based on the Season 1 ending announcement The nutshack theme but the first nutshack is replaced with me ending the channel but edited to basically do nothing but say "uhm", constant reminders to like and subscribe, sensory-video sound effects - its genuinely absurd in a hysterical way to see such a tranquil, normal "olden days" YouTube video be slathered top to bottom in this kind of stuff - and it shows just how far this event went to fuck around with our past knowledge of the channel's history.

But, you know me - I'm a lorehead - and alongside all these videos, we also got the very special morsel of Christmas Spirit [FILE-07] (Beta Mix). I've long since accepted that a lot of things that happen on SiIvaGunner, especially nowadays, don't really have any direct ties to greater channel lore - that's completely fine, and its allowed the team to flex their creativity and individual skills in ways they couldn't whilst being ran under Chaze the Chat's administration in the first four seasons. Yet for this silly, downright pure-fun holiday event, Mitchell goes back to (Beta Mix) up one of the old Haltmann's Archives videos, the videos made during Season 2 and Season 3 specifically to condense and help convey old and new lore to the audience. It is, admittedly, not very serious, likely not even meant to be taken *seriously* - but it depicts a sort of glitch in the system, with the log changing from a researcher team's findings regarding "Christmas Spirit", to suddenly focus on a new, unknown substance called Fools' Spirit, a substance that appeared out of nowhere yet able to "warp and corrupt the space around itself". The testing is described as fruitless, yet as the log ends, we're shown a peek into the elusive testing grounds previously only described verbally - now covered in mist as pink as the Fools' Spirit, and evidently causing glitches to the actively-running SiIvaGunner experiments.

The rip is far simpler and straightforward than the abovementioned two - its less rip and more textbox - but I think its the initiative and attention to detail that really speaks to me here. The original Christmas Spirit [FILE-07] was well over five years old by the time this event rolled around, covering lore that hadn't been touched upon since the last main Christmas Comeback Crisis episode from just about as long ago - lore that, compared to stuff like Figments as covered in Bowser's Finale, is far less relevant to the channel's status quo. To find a way to bring back that old lore, repurpose it for the intents of this new event, and all the while having it tie together with the current state of the lore as well!!! You can see at the end, the laptop screen describes "Illucidity Active", describing the dream environment in which SiIvaGunner exists within during the entirety of Season 7 in particular. This Fools' Spirit then infests the laptop, and by extension SiIvaGunner's own dreams - giving us the entire April Fools events' gimmick to begin with! And hell, depending on how you read into things, it could even be viewed as - unintentional or not - foreshadowing for some of the great reveals made during the Season 7 finale, One Last Chance [Episode 11] of the Christmas Comeback Crisis.

You KNEW this day was coming. Surely, right? Its March 31st, a landmark day in gaming history. The day that Super Mario died. The day we lost him to time forever. And the day that spawned perhaps the greatest April Fools event on all of SiIvaGunner. For me, its no contest - Your Best Nightmario and Bowser's Finale, and the entire event they were part of, were the absolute highlight of Season 5.

The April Fools events held prior on the channel since their very beginnings with Grand Dad Metropolis had all been presented as complete surprises. That is perhaps a given - it is in the nature of a prank to be surprising - but it's also where the Season 5 event differs most even today, in that its theme was all but known to us well beforehand. Announced on September 3rd of 2020 as part of a bizarre marketing tactic to drive up demand, Nintendo had let us known that their newfangled Mario celebration releases in Super Mario 3D All-Stars and Super Mario Bros. 35, would both be delisted from sale after March 31st. Super Mario Bros. 35 stung in its own right - it is effectively lost media now as a digital-only, online-only game, but Super Mario 3D All-Stars contained three of Nintendo's most celebrated games, games that had no reason to stop being sold just for a cheap trick. Everyone rightfully denoted how scummy of a tactic this was to drive up sales, but more than that: the imagery of Nintendo celebrating Mario's birthday by killing his games - and by proxy, killing Mario himself - was a joke that online spaces just ran absolutely rampant with. And can you blame them? That IS funny as shit, and reframes Nintendo's slimy marketing into something that makes them look far worse. Because of the joke's sheer prevalence, I had the same thought as many others in the early days of 2021 - there was *no way* that the SiIvaGunner team were blind to the potential this gag had, and how well it lined up with their previous explosive festivities just a day after. By March 29th, they even teased the event's start with three daily rips of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, a game all about impending doom affecting the world in just three days, with each rip featuring the melody of one of the three 3D Mario games in the collection.

And sure enough, the day came. With March 31st, we saw a whole day of nothing but Mario rips and Mario-related jokes in other rips - a last hurrah for his life - all ending with Super 3D All-Stars Music S64 Game Over. Just like that, he was gone - faded from the video, faded from view. Yet few of us could've predicted just how dire things would get.

In SiIvaGunner lore, the term "Figment" refers to the personification a meme or joke on the channel takes, its characterized state - think Mr. Rental in Mr. Rental [B Side] ~ Out of Options or Inspector Gadget in Become as Gadget and throughout his two takeovers. When a figment based on a real human dies, it can easily be reborn - the human itself lives on in the real world, after all, and can recreate the essence of its Figment in a variety of ways. But when a purely fictional Figment dies...its erased from all history. As if it had never existed to begin with, all traces of it are wiped from memory, wiped from the very state of having ever existed. And under Nintendo's very own Gulliotine, this was the fate Super Mario himself succumbed to. As a result every single Super Mario-series rip uploaded in the channel's five-year run, be they Kart, Sports, Paper or just outright Super, was set to private on the SiIvaGunner channel. And as April 1st of 2021 went on, it seemed to be harder and harder to remember the name of that mustachioed man. Had someone like that...ever existed?

I'm certain a lot of what I'm writing here is familiar ground to many of you reading, but I really want to convey just how incredibly well-done this atmosphere was. Throughout April 1st, fifty-five rips were uploaded, many of which featuring games that seemed just...the slighest bit off. The opening to the classic Philips CD-i game "Hotel", where a lone Luigi talks to himself; The underwater music featured in the SNES Launch title "Super World" with a bizarrely-lopsided logo, and most prominently - games like Super M̸̌̊a̴͛̿█̸͌̑i̵̛͊█̷̾̓ 64, Super M̸̌̊a̴͛̿█̸͌̑i̵̛͊█̷̾̓ Sunshine and Super █̴̧̀a̵̤̐r̷̙̋█̶̰̆o̶͚̚ Galaxy, three games that were bound by a strange malfunction in their presentation, as if they're collectively...held back by something. Or someone.

Your Best Nightmario stood out as the centerpiece of it all, with a title yet more bizarrely mangled than the rest - Super 👉█̸͌̑█̷̾̓😁̶̆͠☼̷̇̃👈̸̂͑█̷̾̓█̾̓ 64. Two fingers, pointing toward a desperate smile. It's-a-me. The rip serves as an incredible multi-stage arrangement of Your Worst Nightmare from Undertale, the boss music for Flowey the Flower. Its already incredibly befitting on the surface level - Undertale is at once one of SiIva's most prominently-ripped games, and a game very much about the state of living game characters have, the idea of how characters in games can affect you in a way that makes them worth remembering for all time. And though the rip is initially in line with the instrumentation of the original Ultimate Koopa theme, it uses the segmented style-shifting sections of Your Worst Nightmare to arrange music from other Nintendo platforming games - the ones primarily bound by featuring characters like Luigi, Peach and Bowser within them, but ones where I can't really place my finger on who their protagonist is. As a result of all these styles and the fervent, desperate, downright nightmarish pace of the music, paired with the full-on galactic-scale orchestral sections near the rips end, it truly feels like a hopeless struggle, a plea from an unknown hero to stay alive, to not be forgotten, to not be lost to the sands of time.

The sheer atmosphere conveyed throughout the entire event was primarily carried through these rips, of course, but it cannot be understated just how much of a part the comments section played in it all. There was no confusion - the buildup had been done so well, the gag established so clearly, that EVERYONE was on board with the day's theming in the comments, and "playing along" with the story's theme. Everyone reminisced and had fond memories of all these games - New Super Bros., Luigi: Superstar Saga, Super 64 DS, and more - yet we were all collectively wondering why things felt so different from before. It was the most fun collective gaslighting I've ever been part of.

As the day came to an end, Mario's fate seemed to be set - the entirety of April 2nd was silent, except for one rip that confirmed that even our beloved Gangsta Mario (see Caramariodansen) was lost. Yet on April 3rd, we were all finally met with Bowser's Finale, a direct followup to Your Best Nightmario by its very same ripper. Blookerstein, the legend behind 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., this time aided by Sarvéproductions of Goodbye To Love fame, created the absolute perfect way to round out the event - a return to the desperate battle that had once seemed lost, now with the music of Finale instead of Your Worst Nightmare to indicate the turning of the tides - that this legend, nay, SUPER MARIO, was not going to give up. This figment did not deserve to leave us - and Bowser's Finale was his last stand. The excitement in the air, in the comments section, was palpable.

Finale is already an incredible theme, and one that some of us even have some emotional attachment to in the context of SiIva - remember Aphex all the way back in Season 1? Bowser's Finale leverages those feelings, and the theming set up throughout the event as a whole, to incredible effect, with the same structure of going through the styles of various Mario music to rising dramatic effect. Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy - the first two using songs like Slider and A Secret Course that are beloved by so many SiIvaGunner viewers, the third hitting a emotional gutpunch in its orchestral instrumentation, and all three bound together as the games that started this whole thing, the games part of the 3D All-Stars collection. It is with no exaggeration a pitch-perfect rendition of this idea, better than anything I could've ever anticipated before the event began - once again only elevated through the sheer sense of community the entire comments section held through it all, cheering Mario on, collectively remembering his existence - fighting to bring this lost figment back to reality.

Y'know, I've been critical of Season 5 in the past - it is likely still the Season of the channel I was "least" invested in taken on the whole. That is in large part due to its lack of ties to the channel's ongoing lore, as it was focused primarily on self-contained events just like this one. But GOD, those events. I still see people online today who are less in touch with what SiIvaGunner does, who cite this event - "The Disappearance of Super Mario", as some call it - as the absolute peak of SiIvaGunner's output past the Season 1 finale. I wouldn't necessarily agree - but the event was undoubtedly unforgettable, at once an incredible execution of a long-anticipated bit, surprisingly emotionally gripping, whilst also being subtly tied to the very canon and theming of the SiIvaGunner channel itself. I chose to highlight Your Best Nightmario and Bowser's Finale in particular today, but I emplore you to go watch the entire event yourself through the fanmade YouTube playlists - if nothing else to see just how committed to the bit everyone involved truly was.

Suddenly, the memories all come flooding back.

Ever since I started taking this blog seriously, I'd known what today's post would be. I've celebrated a good few events on here - Christmas, Halloween, Voiceless Week, and so forth. Yet for the second of February - the day of the sequel - there was only one event fit to be covered. The legendary Chain of Memories II Day.

I wanted to make sure, before the day of reckoning came, that I'd made a post covering long-time ripper ShonicTH, as he's very much at the core of this event and all that surrounds it. As I described in Trial of the Heart, ShonicTH was one of the first members on SiIva that felt recognizable from their output alone, due purely to just how prominent his love for Kingdom Hearts and its music was. Soon enough, that expression of love would extend into ironic shitposting, as we got exposed to what one could consider an inside joke turned channel meme. As a Kingdom Hearts megafan, ShonicTH was aware of a subset of the community on YouTube who would post "remastered" music uploads from Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, only for the remastering effort to simply be slathering the original tracks in heaps of reverb. That is of course terrible for the sake of remastering, but undeniably fucking hilarious for the sake of ripping to SiIvaGunner - it wasn't long until we'd start seeing reverberating rips of Chain of Memories posted to the channel, and not long therafter where a very iconic catchphrase would begun being spread in the comments of each one of them.

"LOL with all that reverb and also it being KH, I know exactly who made this one. Good stuff my dude." -SSB_Seal, SiIvaGunner YouTube Comments

In SiIva's later years, the idea of SiIva uploading rips that have no intention of sounding good is kind of just commonplace, be it with Sex - Steve Harvey or even Snowball Park - Super Mario 3D World. But what the Chain of Memories reverb in-joke would eventually culminate into, on ShonicTH's birthday on May 13th 2017, was an entire day dedicated to these rips: the entire game's soundtrack of 38 tracks were ripped and all posted to the YouTube channel at the exact same time, promptly flooding the sub boxes of anyone who wasn't prepared. Chain of Memories Day became the sort of thing I would tell horror stories about to my friends, the perfect example of just how thoroughly unpredictable SiIvaGunner was, and how fucking funny it was all along the way.

But that's the thing - it was, in some small way, able to be predicted. If you'd been following ShonicTH's imprint on the channel up until May 2017, and knew that it was his birthday, you could've at least been prepared for what was to come. NOBODY was able to be prepared for the secondcoming - Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories II Day.

Season 4 Episode 1's main mission statement, before being wholly engulfed in the King for Another Day Tournament, was to make a season more unpredictable and chaotic than anything the channel had been before. And on August 31st, we saw perhaps the best demonstration of those efforts - 69 rips from a made up sequel game, 28 of which were some sort of absurd spin on the theme song Simple and Clean, uploaded at the span of once per minute. To call this day a rollercoaster would be an understatement.

Because, like, as only the second rip posted across the event, Kingdom Hearts-type beat began as sort of giving us false hope. Compared to the rips of the Season 2 event, it was just a pretty neat trap remix of the Hollow Bastion theme, with little indicating the intents of the rips to follow beyond just being moderately trashy in the way trap music tends to be. That room for doubt would be soundly squashed in the minutes to follow, as every rip seemed to be getting worse than the last. Simple and Clean (Gamma Mix) is, in no uncertain terms, LITERALLY just noise, as four separate poorly-done covers of the original song are laid atop one another with a metric fuckton of reverb, as the culmination of three prior rips each adding one more garbage cover onto the pile. Simple and Clean (Omicron Mix) features a bizarre audio recording of a poorly done Donald Trump impression, pretending to hold a speech whilst actually just reading the lyrics to Simple and Clean, althewhile a Kazoo blasts faintly celebratory music in the background. The amount of layers of irony at play to be making one of the channel's first-ever jabs at America's most ridiculed man take place during an event like this is simply incredible, and its the kind of rip that's so thoroughly unfunny that it loops back to being comedy gold.

To say that the day was painful would be one thing, yet it was the kind of pain that felt like a genuinely unbelievable experience to be part of. After Simple and Clean (Mu Mix), I think most of us expected the event to be over, with the typical Snow Halation celebration video a la Snow Halocean and its many predecessors. And yeah, despite the dubious quality of the cover, Simple and Clean (Mu Mix) was still giving the event a sort of "final" feel, as the rapid uploads halted at a nice, sufficient 29 rips.

Only a few minutes later, the rips would continue as if nothing had even happened - we'd been utterly bamboozled.

Having lived through both the Chain of Memories Day events makes me feel like a genuine survivor of war, yet when looking back on the events in hindsight I can't help but let out a sickening, yet joyous cackle. And I wanted to put Simple and Clean (Psi Mix) as the headlining rip of this mess because how well it encapsulates that joyous side to it all - through the reverb and through the context, you can tell that Keeby10 was genuinely having a ton of fun preparing all these bizarre rips for the event. SiIvaGunner is a fantastic source for quality, amazing rearrangements, but as I talked about in Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday - as performed by Bob Dylan, there's something so thoroughly enjoyable about seeing the human nature behind the channel shine through from time to time. Simple and Clean (Psi Mix) isn't going in anyone's playlist of bangers, but it embodies so much of the fun that defined the event, and by extension so much of the affection that the team clearly hold for ShonicTH and his niche in-joke about Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories music remasters.

Part of what I enjoy about SiIvaGunner events is seeing all the different ways they can be interpreted by its rippers - how the team works within what's otherwise set up as restrictions. One of the most infamous examples of this, for instance, regards a certain rip from the Phineas & Ferb Takeover in Season 4 Episode 2 - a mashup between Fuck Love and Donkey Kong Country music that at first glance has no connection to the Phineas & Ferb show. Even still, the song used in the mashup was featured as the joke of a moderately popular Phineas & Ferb shitpost video, and said video was used as the prelude to the rip in question - despite XXXTentacion being seemingly entirely removed from Phineas & Ferb, the rip found a way to make itself relevant to the takeover.

Such is also the case with today's pair of rips, uploaded right alongside each other on the Valentine's Day 2020 event. This was the first time the SiIvaGunner channel properly held an event for Valentine's, and they went about it in a rather funny way - rather than focusing on love specifically, the day was themed entirely around loneliness instead - half making fun of incel behavior, half jokes about divorce, cuckoldry and all other forms of rocky relationships. It was a pitch-perfect event for just a day's length, and a lot of the rips uploaded slotted neatly into the above categories. Yet He4rt4che and 4SGOR3 were a bit more subtle in how they related to the joke, and did something really cool with their respective tracks in the process.

Heartache and ASGORE are, as I'm sure you're aware, the battle themes of Toriel Dreemur and Asgore Dreemur from Undertale, respectively. This immediately connects the songs to the event in a way - the characters were once married but had a falling out due to events that transpire before the player meets either one of them, and both are evidently left in a sort of shaky mental state because of it. The themes were intentionally made to share a similar melody and progression, yet they're made distinct in very specific ways - the different time signature and differing instrumentation combined give each track its own distinct feel despite their similarities.

What SonicHeroesFan1 did is, effectively, play around with making the tracks come even closer to one another in similarity, by switching the time signatures between them. Heartache, a track meant to sound unstable and uneasy in large part due to its 3/4 time signature, suddenly has a strangely different energy to it in He4rt4che, still with an overaching tone of sorrow and tragedy yet now sounding a lot more "stable" as it were. ASGORE, meanwhile, is given an almost jazz-like sound in 4SGOR3 when going from 4/4 to 3/4, as its more nimble feel meshes with the still just as powerful instrumentation to remain as confident as ever...yet perhaps a little more emotionally vulnerable? Its fascinating, really, to see just how these seemingly small tweaks - which still basically required rethinking these songs and their progression entirely - affect the listening experience so much.