#rip visuals

As was the case with the end of Season 7, SiIvaGunner kicked 2025 off through an explosive appearance at MAGFest; the music-and-game convention which annually marks some of the most prominent public appearances of the real-world SiIvaGunner team. I've written about this back on MAGFest 2019: SiIvaGunner Presents - High Quality Ripping, but getting to see behind the curtains for just a moment on these panels, vlogs, photoshoots and more is indescribably exciting every year. But panels aside, what I've now been looking forward to seeing most is Chipspace – where individual rippers hold their own sets to showcase their ripping prowess. As someone who's always followed SiIvaGunner as an outsider-looking-in, not knowing any of the rippers in person and only knowing a handful online, it's an unbelievably fun experience to see which kinds of personalities are attached to their rips, to see the passion that a rip often conveys be expressed firsthand through a standout performance. There were tons of fantastic sets this year, and I highly recommend watching the official compilation of them all over on SiIvaGunner2; but today, before I lose my mind thinking about it in isolation any further, I need to talk about legendary ripper Myeauxyoozi's set and the live premiere of Thanos Boogaloo Baby.

And yeah, you read that right; amidst incredible performances of classic rips, along the lines of vvsvlogs' performance of Mother, Father, TechnoMan last year, multiple of these sets also premiere all-new rips to their audience to really keep them on their toes. While lots of these new drops are just genuinely excellent rips, the ones that I always remember well after the fact are the ones that take advantage of their surprise factor to catch the audience off guard. One of my favorite examples is Heboyi's performance of Industry Baby Slander, which is a "slander" rip along the lines of Blookerstein's INDUSTRY KNIGHT (Beta Mix), but which had its visuals unexpectedly substituted for a version specifically poking fun at various MAGFest topics. This surprise factor has continued into this year (seriously, PLEASE check out JoeBro's set, it felt like a fever dream the entire way through) and just reinforced the age-old SiIvaGunner philosophy; even when you think you've seen through all of its tricks, you can NEVER truly predict what it's going to do next. And to truly get to the bottom of the incident this post is about, we'll need to take a few steps back and get to the core of that adage, to the day wherein it perhaps applied most; Season 4 Episode 1's Not Funny Didn't Laugh Day.

For what would become his last year of running the SiIvaGunner channel, Chaze the Chat sought to make Season 4 Episode 1 the most unpredictable season in the channel's run. The goal was to replicate the sense of reckless abandon that had helped define the channel back in Season 1, the chaos that had brought us rips like Battle Theme - Zeno Blade Chronicle X, Live and Ooooooooooooooh, Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday and many more. It's arguable how well the year ultimately succeeded at its goal – it was always going to be fighting an uphill battle given that the novelty present at the channel's debut was entirely gone, and it would ultimately see a shift in priorities with the exponential growth in scope of the King for Another Day Tournament. Yet for but a day, it felt as if the team had hit the nail right on the head; on the 10th of September, 2019, the focus was almost squarely on making rips as incomprehensible - and, by proxy - fucking stupid as possible. I think Sex - Steve Harvey should give off exactly the kind of vibe I'm describing, yet buried amidst the loud, absurd, barely-coherent postings, sat one video that stuck with me for far longer than I believe should be reasonable: Thanos Boogaloo.

Not because it stands out as meaningful or profound in contrast, to be clear; Thanos Boogaloo is just as brain-rottingly stupid as the rest of what the day had to offer, but was so in a way completely unique to it. The rip's audio is completely unedited – it is literally just playing The Messenger's Bamboo Boogaloo II (Bamboo Creek) as advertised – yet, only a few seconds in, the music is paired with an...interesting gif of hit Marvel villain Thanos busting it down. I recognize that there may well be a newer generation of terminally-online people unaware of just why Thanos in particular was used for this rip, so let me clarify; Thanos, years before Hatsune Miku, Peter Griffin, or Son Goku, was THE first proper collaboration to be put in Fortnite, with an item allowing players to outright transform into him for a limited time all the way back in 2018. Even as someone who had never played Fortnite and has no investment in the MCU, the energy around his addition was absolutely mind-melting; people were left and right laughing their asses of at the imagery of the cold, ruthless titan of a man that Thanos is busting it down through the exact same model-rigging as the cartoonishly exaggerated main player models; the very phrase "THANOS FORTNITE" became a shorthand for absolute absurdity, a catchphrase for brainrot, and mere days after his addition the online posting world would be forever changed by the legendary video Thanos dance. It felt, for a moment, to someone more terminally online than terminally in-theatres, as if Thanos himself eclipsed the MCU in popularity; a new shitpost based either on his appearance in the films or him busting-it-down in Fortnite appearing every hour of the day.

Somewhere along the line, as the guy was continuing to melt the collective minds of the terminally online, we'd see the creation of an absolutely stellar, top-tier image, of the man standing proud with his massive meat hanging out. By the time this image released, Thanos' surge of popularity had already resulted in him appearing in the original SiIvaGunner King for a Day Tournament – the Season 3 one, covered back on How 2 Do Anything – yet as soon as word got out on how well-endowed he allegedly was, his return to the second contest came with an immediate redesign themed around his supposed salaciousness. It was the kind of joke that just kept building, one SiIvaGunner itself didn't even had to escalate themselves for the rest of the internet to instead keep building on top off; and, though his reign had very much subsided by the time Thanos Boogaloo came around, his popularity was still nevertheless fresh in everyone's mind. When the visuals kicked in, and I was made to see an absolutely iconic, low-resolution, low-runtime gif of the guy grooving to the tunes and throwing his ass back in excitement; it was a kind of joy that I don't know how to justify to you whatsoever. Keep in mind, the King for Another Day Tournament still had not happened yet at this point, this event was not themed around it or around Thanos whatsoever; and yet here he was, in a rip otherwise completely unedited, edited and played around with in a fucking hilarious fashion basically just to make a point about Bamboo Boogaloo II from The Messenger slapping so hard that even Thanos couldn't resist throwing it back to it. Certainly, it was far from the first rip with completely unexpected, attention-grabbing visuals – ​THIS RIP WAS MADE BY TEETH GANG haunts me to this day – yet the combination of the character utilized and the rip's unedited audio managed to make it stick out in my mind even all these years later, a testament to how much of a non-sequitur that the SiIva team are still able to make so bizarrely funny.

What I'm getting at with all this, with Not Funny Didn't Laugh Day, with Season 4 Episode 1, with Thanos, with Fortnite – is that that fucking gif of Thanos busting it down sexual style has been stuck in my brain far past the point where Thanos shitposting stopped being a hip and cool thing. Not Funny Didn't Laugh Day came and went, the King for Another Day Tournament would overshadow most of the rest of the year's events through insanely high-quality arrangements like Sunday Morning, and though rips like Sex - Steve Harvey and other absurdist Season 4 Episode 1 masterpieces like Snowball Park - Super Mario 3D World would continue to be referenced later into the channel's life, I rightfully presumed that my obsession with Thanos Boogaloo – a rip lacking entirely in audio material to even reference in so much as a leitmotif – would remain unfruitful, remain as naught but a quirky rip only I quite remembered so strongly. It isn't that I wasn't at peace with that, there's barely any rip to even reference with Thanos Boogaloo and it was moreso a rip that had wormed its way into my brain than one I had immense emotional attachment to...but, yes, by now, you've likely already pieced together the punchline. Six years after the fact, in front of a live audience in person and later on YouTube, Myeauxyoozi – a ripper who wasn't even active when Thanos was all the rage – put an absolutely gigantic smile on my face through his performance of a rip I never expected to see; Thanos Boogaloo Baby.

If you haven't seen this portion of the set yet by this point in reading, I emplore you, sincerely, PLEASE stop reading this post and go watch Myeauxyoozi's Chipspace set; I've timestamped the relevant portion here, but I encourage watching it in its entirety for the full experience. Having covered Myeauxyoozi on here multiple times beforehand for his comedic excellence on rips like Among Drip Drop Galaxy and Shaky Mountain, I can't exactly say that I WASN'T expecting the guy himself to be as charismatic and lively on stage as he wound up being. Nevertheless (and as you'll find me say in the YouTube Premiere chat), it needs to be said; Myeauxyoozi's white boy swag, even before the moment where my life was irreparably changed forever, is simply off the fucking charts. But then, of course, the moment starts its approach. A familiar chiptune-y soundscape fades into view, as our ripper grabs the microphone to make an important notice; that, due to the after-show nature of his set, the visuals he would've otherwise planned for the segment wouldn't be available – the visuals, of course, being "Thanos Dancing on screen". Did my ears deceive me? I thought for but a moment, before being met with another unbelievable follow-up to the disclaimer; to compensate for the lack of Dancing Thanos visuals, Myeauxyoozi boldly proclaimed that he would "do his best to do the same thing". I could never have been prepared for what would come next.

Look, alright, look. I know this is fucking stupid, I KNOW that I'm losing you at this point. I'm usually on here hyping up the excellence in ripper intent, in the emotional core, passion, the beating hearts found on rips like i love(d) you, Poké Village, Jesus of the Underground, Outertale; but I need you to understand just how fucking ingrained into my mind this period of Thanosposting, this first taste of widespread Fortnite-induced brainrot, and, most of all, that FUCKING gif of Thanos throwing it back all was. It felt like all the puzzle pieces were coming into place, years and minutes of foreshadowing at once paying off; Myeauxyoozi's indescribable white boy swag put to use to make the most pitch-perfect, point-for-point recreation of the Thanos dancing gif I could have ever imagined. It was immediately distracting me from the actual quality of Thanos Boogaloo Baby – which, to be clear, is a fucking excellent rip, an incredibly inspired mashup to finally give Bamboo Boogaloo II the rip treatment it deserved – to see this virus of my mind played out on screen in vivid, shot-for-shot detail. I PROMISE I was not alone in this shock; in the moment it all occurred, the entire chat lit up in flames in sheer amazement, the Discord pinging the man multiple times to ask just how the fuck he did that so perfectly. His response, word for word: "You study the gif you become the gif"

And again, I really want to reiterate that this should all not be explained whilst ignoring just how fucking good and funny of a rip Thanos Boogaloo Baby itself already is. Paying tribute to something otherwise so forgotten by the tides of the wider internet collective and seemingly SiIvaGunner itself felt like a complete left turn, and yet its return is, as was taught well beforehand with rips like Shiny Smily TALE and Violet Snow Memories, merely another part of the SiIvaGunner ethos – that NOTHING on SiIvaGunner is truly forgotten. The rip itself is just one of many many examples of Myeuxyoozi proving his ability to find the perfect balance between laughter and listenability, a jam similarly absurd in concept but fantastic in execution to Moriah Carey...but god, man, the live premiere, the PERFORMANCE, sold it all so many levels above what I could've possibly imagined. Myeauxyoozi's jamming continued all throughout the rip's length on the set, which was only highlighted by perhaps the funniest part of it all; the MAGFest staff which was helping maintain the after-show sets and its looping stock visuals found the affair so funny as to take it on themselves (unprompted) to bring up the original Thanos dancing gif live as the performance was happening. To the complete shock of all in the crowd, the student got to be reunited with his master – and for a moment, the entire world appeared so perfect, so beautiful.

(Note: MP3 embed is trimmed at the beginning as to allow it to be posted within Tumblr's file size limits)

I'm sure some of you were worried about where this week's post had gone. Worry not - I was simply biding my time for the day to arrive. Indeed, we have reached the 25th of July, a Thursday for some, and a national holiday for others. For today, we celebrate, grieve and toast to our dearly beloved, HHGregg. Today, it is Christmas in July, and time to at last cover The End of HHGregg.

For being one of my all-time favorite SiIvaGunner channel memes, I'm shocked at myself in how restrained I've been in covering rips using HHGregg's infamous red-tag-sale commercial. Sure, I spilled my soul out for the joke back with Nostalgic Blood of the Gregg ~ Old Source, and Everything Circus remains an all-time classic, yet there's still so much more to cover. In terms of jokes on the SiIvaGunner channel, I feel like HHGregg is one of the most developed ones, one with a legacy cherished by so many people on the team and off - and even a bit of a story to it that's been captured in full glory with today's rip.

Like sure, there's the obvious quirk that makes HHGregg stand out more than many other channel memes - the guy has an outright day-of-the-year holiday dedicated to him. As the infamous Christmas in July ad was what propelled HHGregg's moderately-annoying mascot into becoming a YTPMV star, July 25th on SiIvaGunner has become a sort of understated annual event for fans like myself, much in the same way that April 30th was with It's Gonna Be Me and guess what​?​?​?​?​?​?​?​?. Yet, of course, there's an underlying sort of sadness to HHGregg rips in particular due to the brand its attached to: the company that the ad's many YTPMVs are riffing on filed for bankrupcy in 2017, midway through Season 2 of SiIvaGunner. The store still exists now, bought by a parental company and turned all-digital, but the franchise as it was once known is all gone, with it's ill-fated mascot going down with it.

Of course, we don't really need to feel much remorse for the fall of an electronics boutique - but given the SiIvaGunner channel's way of personifying and giving life to in-jokes and gags the world over, it informs rips using HHGregg in a pretty different way. HHGregg rips on the channel had their biggest stride during the very same year that the chain went bankrupt, as if to suggest that the mascot was desperate to prove his own worth on the one place that still remembered him fondly. In the years since, we got sporadic shots of the guy here and there - and in my eyes, it at one point felt as if it all culminated with the rip エイチエイチグレッグ ホワイトハウスでチョー大変!, a fully-featured edit of Neon Genesis Evangelion's iconic A Cruel Angel's Thesis opening now starring HHGregg himself.

Yet, of course, as I've harped on about with rips like Shiny Smily TALE, Violet Snow Memories and Our Sweet Parsley, one of the most rewarding parts of following the SiIvaGunner channel lies in how the team never seems to forget about any of its zillions of uploads. No matter how much time passes, rippers love one another, the ideas they come up with, and the potential to build further on one another's ideas - it is a core part of YTP and YTPMV culture that's remained strong on SiIvaGunner since its very inception. The A Cruel Angel's Thesis rip above, by excellent rippers Ashley and GramBam36 of The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll fame, was a joyous celebration - a year later, as Season 6's sombre mood results in the Nuclear Winter Festival rolling around, a trio of rippers sees the perfect opportunity to finally put HHGregg to some form of rest. The meme's far from dead today, of course (check the channel right now) - yet, at last, with The End of HHGregg, it felt as if the funny paper roll man was finally ready to accept his fate.

The End of HHGregg, silly of a concept as it may be, executes that concept to a degree I don't think anyone was expecting. Second only to A Cruel Angel's Thesis, Komm, süsser Tod is an iconic piece that serves as the ending theme to the original NGE anime, one tied to feelings of bittersweet-ness, finality - at once able to reference one of the most classic HHGregg rips on SiIva, acknowledging HHGregg's bankruptcy, whilst tying itself directly to the ongoing Nuclear Winter Festival of Season 6. And that's not even getting into the rip itself!

The YTPMV work done here to sentence-mix and pitch-shift HH's various vocals to fit the melody of Komm, süsser Tod is, for lack of a better way to put it, downright remarkable. Despite a seemingly limited pool of voice lines to work with and a rigid framework of a melody, the guy only ever "sings" in complete sentences, with pitch shifting that manages to sound shockingly natural, still as gratingly chipper as HH tends to sound but still seeped in that vibe of bittersweet-ness that I discussed before. It goes through every beat and phase of Komm, süsser Tod without ever having the vocal samples sound forced, including the deeply inspired use of a layered, choir-like HH performance on several segments. Althewhile never forgetting the classic HH lines, the red-tag sales, the HD-TV and Whirlpool appliances, and of course, the Christmas in July. The cherry on top of it all is the intro to the song, before the main melody truly kicks in, as this little interlude sneakily includes a guitar now playing Deck the Halls just as featured in the most infamous Christmas in July ad - a sombre reminder of where it all began.

That aforementioned vibe is, of course, emphasized greatly by Galacksy's incredible illustration for the rip, the literal End of Evangelion depicted as being the fall of HHGregg as a whole, in absolutely spectacular fashion. Like with i love(d) you and so so many other rips, it's so often these seemingly small touches that end up elevating rips to all-time classics for me, and it's a trait that The End of HHGregg's audio also eventually contributes to, in a way I truly don't wish to spoil for you all. Nevertheless, the key takeaway here is one that's evident right upon first listen: This is a DAMN impressive YTPMV effort that at once celebrates and mourns one of the YTPMV world's most cherished sources, yet pulling it off as if it were effortless. In celebration of YTPMV, of SiIvaGunner, of one of the channel's most immaculate of somewhat-too-hidden gems from Season 5, and of the very state of memes coming to an end - The End of HHGregg is everything one could ask for.

I'm sure this rip's been a long time coming for many - I know it has for me. I've had i love(d) you sitting in my drafts as far back as in March, but truthfully it's...daunting, to write about. Requested by two readers. Close to 200 thousand views on YouTube, and recently featured prominently in popular Clone Hero YouTuber Acai's "The Quality of SiIvaGunner" series. And the rip itself being an emotional gutpunch in a season filled with them, from a ripper who's already gutpunched me plenty with Wham! Into Dreams and The Paragoomba and the Wiggler. vvsvlogs, Vivi, I ask this with the most sincere gratitude possible - why must you do this to me?

Minecraft as a game has its emotional hooks in at least two generations of people - that much I think we're all aware of. A sandbox filled with endless possibilities, community, friends, individual stories of survival or of great creative endeavors, all wrapped in C418's hauntingly beautiful score, one I've discussed many times before with Fell From a High Place (Reprise), M-O-O-G City and Every Mob Wants To Rule My World. All of these rips are beautiful, yet they're all aiming to play with Minecraft's sound in some way - the former two rips are arrangement of its music with other games' instrumentation, and the latter rip is a melodyswap playing Everybody Wants To Rule The World. They all play on my senses in their own ways, they're all rightfully impressive - but nothing hits quite the same as Minecraft's own music, on its own terms. i love(d) you isn't aiming to impress or amaze - but it lands a full-on critical hit on one's heart through leveraging everything that's kept Subwoofer Lullaby alive for so many years.

I've talked plenty about my musical illiteracy, and so I hope it doesn't come as a surprise that I've never really listened to world-renowed singer Billie Eilish. She's been on the radio, I've heard Bad Guy, but it was never a name I gave much more thought beyond seeing her discussed online from time to time. You can imagine the absolute awe I was in when I clicked on i love(d) you when it first went up, already expecting an emotional hit due to the Minecraft song used, only to get goosebumps from Eilish's vocals alone. i love you is the penultimate song from Eilish's debut studio album, the very same that Bad Guy was featured on - yet compared to that track's bass-heavy, almost seductive energy, i love you feels remarkably personal, with little more than an acoustic guitar and piano accompanying the openly emotional vocal performance. It's sincere in a way I don't hear enough music be, as if a diary translated into song, much the same emotion that Because I Love You conveyed yet with even greater magnitude due to the vocals in play.

i love(d) you, uploaded for 2022's valentines day, wields both of these forms of love - the connections many of us have to one of the most impactful games ever made, and the unfiltered emotion of i love you - to create something unabashedly beautiful. Mashups aren't a novel concept, mashups are nothing new - yet one glance at the comments tells me that I'm not alone in finding this rip in particular to have struck an incredibly sensitive nerve. Because there's a beauty to Minecraft that I think many of us oft forget about. It's a game that we all cherish, yet also one that's very easy to have left behind: we have adult responsibilities, we have school, we have other, shorter, more concise games, we have social media, we have friends, we have blogs...the solemn beauty of playing the game itself is, for many viewers like myself, not much more than a memory, something that can feel ever so difficult to recreate without feeling as if something's wrong.

We...I'm...not a kid anymore.

There was nothing about i love(d) you's concept that necessitated it to be more than just the mashup. There rip had no need for visuals that'd help convey the edit like with Plantasia 2 or Luna, mi Amor, no need to tickle the funnybone like with SUNGORE or the hundreds of other YTPMV rips on the channel. Yet, halfway through the rip, to the tune of Eilish's soothingly reverberating vocals, the background begins to change, not to a bit, not to a reference nor easter egg...but to Minecraft. To where all of this attachment began - to a far-off view of the game's beautiful landscapes as the sun begins to rises. That digital world that looks different for every player, yet the same in everyone's hearts - that place that, no matter how many years pass, how long its been since we last played, we all love. Its impact different to everyone, yet the feeling unanimous. It drives home how well the mashup works not just as a mixture of two deeply emotional songs, but as music tied to a shared experience: all of our Minecraft worlds looked different, all of our personal lives look different, but we've all played the game, and we've all had affection for it.

Every moment I spend thinking about this rip aches in some way. It's been well past two years since it was first uploaded, yet it continues to follow me as the years go on, my mouse drawn to it any time it reappears in my recommendations. In being featured on 2024's Now That's What I Call Quality! 3, I think the team holds much the same sentiment - even as the months pass, i love(d) you is the kind of rip that'll never fall out of favor, never stop meaning things to people. And realizing that it was made by vvsvlogs, the very same vvsvlogs who's already made me far too emotionally vulnerable on here twice before, has only made it mean that extra bit more to me.

I'm not a kid anymore. I know that. But I'll always be grateful to SiIvaGunner, the people behind it, and those who follow it along with me, for being able to bring me back to that state of mind when I least expect it.

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.

Anniversaries, anniversaries...how they come, how they go. This week in particular is a pretty special anniversary, not just for the release of hit game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but for the release of ME: My birthday!

It's surreal how vividly I still remember when I wrote Your Silent Reality for my last birthday, covering a SiIvaGunner rip that's sat with me long since I first heard it due to the emotional ties I have to the material it utilizes. I began this entire blog as a way to give me writing practice, and I'd like to think I've grown a fair bit as a writer in the time since; but nevertheless, even a year and a half since the blog's begun, my emotional attachment to Season 2 of SiIvaGunner remains as firm as ever. The channel's output has grown to be more impressive than ever before, and last year's Season 7 in particular has had me in a chokehold with rips like Beautiful Dreamer (late but- happy birthday Minindo!) and The Paragoomba and the Wiggler...and yet, I will always keep coming back to the rips of that second season, to the rips that defined my ride-or-die fixation to the channel, and to the season that more than any other gave me feelings for things I didn't even know I was capable of caring so deeply about. Indeed, in direct contrast to last year's birthday rip, Radical Halation was the kind of gift I never knew I needed, yet one I will never stop treasuring.

Way back when I covered the rip Eterna's Cocoon, I wrote about how special it is to me to know that rippers on the team will continue to champion the works which have long since faded from public consciousness. Sure, SiIvaGunner leverages then-current events for comedy a fair number of times; a previous post on the blog's covered one such example in Lagplane, and one of the channel's most revered events back on Your Best Nightmario only came about as a result of a viral meme from that same timeframe. Yet just as often - if not moreso - the channel operates within its own bubble of time, with no care in the world for relevance or target audiences, a team making rips in huge part just for their own enjoyment. Take, for instance, the 1999 SquareSoft JRPG Chrono Cross; a game that, six years before its remaster in 2022, still existed as nary but a memory to many. Nevertheless, it was a memory treasured by two rippers in particular, a duo who had already impressed me time and time again throughout the channel's first two years. Be it Sog-Gee Ambiance, voiceless, Kass' Theme, or their previous collaborative work on 28 Saves Later, wheel able's stellar touch for arrangement and wolfman1405's unbelievable talents as a jazz performer are both some of the absolute highlights across the channel's early run. When the time came for one of the most important anniversaries relevant to the SiIvaGunner channel, the two took the opportunity to also honor a forgotten classic they both cherished – and in doing so, Radical Halation ironically became one of the first times I ever engaged with Chrono Cross. With the game's anniversary also just two days away, and the rip lying so close to my heart, I see no better time than to reciprocate that passion all these years later.

The sheer quality of Radical Halation should be made evident just a few seconds into listening; this is, as Wolfman1405 in particular specializes in, a ground-up cover and performance of the original Radical Dreamers ~ Unstolen Jewel theme from Chrono Cross. The original theme already had a shockingly acoustic sound to it for its era, really plucking at the emotions just a few chords in; that emotional rawness in the track may well have been the core reason why it was chosen to celebrate this anniversary in particular. Indeed, the anniversary I alluded to beforehand as being one of the channel's most crucial is that of the very song the rip title alludes to, the song that sits at the very emotional core of SiIvaGunner's entire being: Snow Halation from Love Live. I wrote back on Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix) that the Grand Dad meme is like the beating heart of SiIvaGunner's creative spirit, being the core that created the entire channel; by that same logic, I feel as if Snow Halation is like SiIvaGunner's *emotional* core, its "soul" for lack of a better term. Grand Dad may be the spark that sets new rippers into action even all these years later, but Snow Halation was the first thing that people got EMOTIONALLY attached to on SiIvaGunner – it was the core behind its first story arc of SiIvaGunner: Rebooted, it continues to effectively serve as the "protagonist" to the Christmas Comeback Crisis storyline – and its use throughout the channel continues to feel like a reminder of that same attachment, the one that the channel has to all of us. It's an openly sappy, almost overbearing song, yet one that represents so much about the love of remixing and rearranging that SiIvaGunner continues to focus on all these years later.

You take that emotionally-charged melody, put it in the hands of two stellar arrangers, and inject it into an arrangement of an emotional melody the soundscape of which said aforementioned rippers already appear to hold a close attachment to, and the end result is exactly what Radical Halation shows us. Throughout 2016, throughout the entirety of Season 1 of SiIvaGunner, we as the audience had gone on such an emotional rollercoaster regarding out attachment to the channel, its creatives, and its memes, with Snow Halation at the very center of it all; with the channel returned just in time for the holidays, it also happened to return just in time for Snow Halation's anniversary on December 22nd, ever so coincidentally aligned with the time upon which we were all wholly, earnestly in love with everything the song had come to represent. Many months before Season 3 and beyond would begin feeding irony into the discussion of appreciation for these melodies, right as the Christmas Comeback Crisis was just kicking into gear, and just long enough after the channel's return had occurred to make us truly accept that it was back, Radical Halation's release window struck gold in a way only truly comparable to the rips of the Season 1 finale a la Tupac's Empty House and THANK YOU FOR RIPPING.

I'm of course not aiming to frame Radical Halation as just being "the right thing at the right time"; beyond that emotional attachment, the simple fact of the matter still remains that its a hauntingly beautiful arrangement, even close to 8 years later. Radical Dreamers ~ Unstolen Jewel's beauty sinks in just from the acoustic guitar lead-in, and is only emphasized by the time the rip's true "twist" sets in, of its lead melody being that of a Snow Halation arrangement played on violin. The two halves form an incredible, inseperable whole; not confined by the restrictions of a mashup, the hand-made nature of this arrangement means that both the guitar and violin segments are free to fill in for one another, to emphasize the sounds of Radical Dreamers ~ Unstolen Jewel or the melody of Snow Halation to different degrees on a moment-to-moment basis. I particularly love the section after the Snow Halation melody first plays - at around 0:47, the violin seamlessly leaves the Snow Halation melody and instead takes cues from the source track, yet never stops feeling as if its all from the same arrangement, even upon returning to Snow Halation at 01:10. The rip throughout has the same feeling as the best and most carefully-constructed mashups of today a la Eazystep or Maroonbound whilst in reality being a completely new arrangement and performance.

The visuals of the rip are of course just the cherry on top of it all. Viewers are made immediately aware that the rip is going to be something special not just through its audio, but from the cold-open visuals of pitch blackness fading into a view of the ocean from underneath the surface, the logo fading in just as the melody's played its first few notes. These visuals only change once Snow Halation is first quoted in the audio, changing from the undersea depths to the view of a beachside in winter, a quite literal mash-up of Chrono Cross' dreamy seasides and the snow-covered comfort of Snow Halation. None of this visual detail is particularly "necessary", it's not here to further a punchline; rather, in the spirit of rips like i love(d) you, the visuals serve to punctuate the emotional core of the rip. Visuals in any rip are a surprise, an often-time momentous occasion, and Radical Halation combines that knowledge with its purpose of celebrating Snow Halation's first-ever anniversary celebration on the SiIvaGunner channel to create a rip that, even with no ties to Chrono Cross at the time of watching, I just KNEW would be special back in 2016 just three seconds in.

All these years later, and a rip as special, profound and heartfelt as Radical Halation still manages to feel...forgotten about, in many ways, sitting at less than 25K views as of writing. In that sense, Chrono Cross may have been a more apt game to use for this tribute than its rippers initially thought; all these years later, despite its clear emotional core, the passion that went into it and the release of its remaster, the game remains a jewel swept away by the tides of the industry. We're soon nearing nine whole years of the SiIvaGunner channel's run, and with every day I run this blog I'm made all the more aware of how many gems just like Radical Halation continue to slip by the cracks, how much joy and love the channel's team crams into so much of its output despite never having any sort of guarantee that its audience will reciprocate that love.

But, even all those years ago, Radical Halation did reach me. And even so many years before the idea of this blog was even a consideration, before I was knee-deep in thought about the channel's existence and the people involved in its upkeep...I knew that I wanted to thank its creators. I knew that it was a rip that could only have been made out of outpouring love; love for a game years old, love for a channel that was still standing shakily, love for a leitmotif and its impact on an audience...and most of all, the love of creating and performing music outright.

You've probably noticed if you've been reading day-by-day just how comparatively high the frequency of Season 8 rips has been already, at slightly more than one covered per week on average. That's of course because Season 8 has far more catching up to do in terms of coverage here on the blog - perhaps to be expected, given that it has only been running for about a month wheras the blog itself is now pushing past 10 months of activity. But to be clear - I'm not going to have my intentions of covering Season 8 rips at a higher rate cloud my judgement on what rips end up on here. I'll write when there's something to write about, as there was with Satin PantE's, Willievan Afton Polkka, and indeed today's rip - Luna, mi Amor.

Readers who keep up what I do on this blog besides these posts may have already been made aware of this rip's existence by this reblog of its key artwork, with Animal Crossing villager Cherry holding a bouquet of maroon pansies. It's entirely reasonable that the reference is lost on you, as it was for me - yet the presence of such visuals in the rip, paired with the beauty of the rip's audio, invigorated me to dig deeper. What I found was yet one more reminder of one of the things I've hammered home on this blog as one of SiIvaGunner's most defining aspects, not only recently with Poké Village but at pretty regular intervals in posts like As Miku Collides. What I found was one of the most beautiful displays of the SiIvaGunner channel's ability to be a melting pot of all different walks of life, and in this case, even extending to different parts of the world.

Much like the joke of the rip itself, initially the people who created it stood as a big question-mark for me. Its not that any of them are inexperienced rippers and/or artists - far from it - but their activity has largely been on SiIvaGunner fan channels as covered in V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​a​-​V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​r. This includes Vvvvvavvvvvvr itself and TimmyTurnersGrandDad, but more notably - channels you may not have heard of, like SiIvaLatin and GiIvaLatinSunner. As you can perhaps tell by their names, these are channels defined not solely by their independent nature, but specifically by the culture and memes prevalent in Latin America. And sure, we've had some funny Brazil-related postings on SiIva, but its predominantly stuff like Os Barões da Pisadinha - a meme that despite its origins has received somewhat mainstream attention outside of the Latin American regions, making rips like Rainbow Baroad understandable and funny even to outsiders like myself. Barões are great, don't get me wrong, but Luna, mi Amor feels like a far more personal, genuine, and heartfelt act of culture exchange. A way to give us SiIvaGunner viewers, who are out of the loop with the beauty of regions like South America, a peek into just what we're missing.

The joke of the rip, and by proxy the reference the artwork is hinting at, is to Mexico/Chilean musician and overall acclaimed artist Mon Laferte, and the single Amor Completo from her 2015 album Mon Laferte, Vol. 1. Luna, mi Amor is a melodyswap to this song - specifically having it be sung with the in-game vocalizations of the character featured in the artwork herself, Cherry - and the rip was so well done, that I felt a need to go listen to the original song. It's enchantingly beautiful and uplifting, yet at once a little bittersweet - the feelings of love, passion and true romance are completely understandable even past the language barrier. In that sense, I suppose Luna, mi Amor takes things yet one step further, beyond even what a rip like Moves Like K.K. did with Animal Crossing music as a source, in replacing those vocals to the explicitly unintelligible vocalizations of the Animal Crossing cast. The emotions in the rip can no longer be conveyed through vocalized words with meaning - no matter where in the world you live, Luna, mi Amor's beauty has to shine through in its music alone.

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.

With all the chaos and layers SiIvaGunner rips can often be under, its nice to cover something relatively "normal" for a change. There's all kinds of rips on the channel for all kinds of people, but universal appeal is not to be dismissed - SNES Mini Circulation is the kind of tribute that any fan of video games is bound to appreciate.

Well, I say that, but there is of course the elephant in the room - I'm sure not everybody you send this rip to will be aware of what Renai Circulation even is. And its honestly a bit of a shame its taken me this long to feature the song on the blog - like what I wrote about All Star in Shrek Days -Onions Ver.-, Renai Circulation is one of the big titans of mashups, perhaps not to the same mainstream extent as All Star has been, yet prominently althesame. I'm not sure if there's a proper meme-rooted reason for said frequency in use, other than it being a genuinely excellent song debuting as NicoNico Douga was steadily growing in popularity. Moreso than even YouTube, the platform lives and thrives on creativity and remixing, and I can only presume that the explosive popularity of said remixes bled over into YouTube - the end result, thus, being mashup videos like Everybody's Circulation sitting at 30 million views on the platform.

Truthfully, I don't know where this "everybody's" titling came from, but it too has been a part of the online mashup culture that SiIvaGunner took on, seen mainly in Season 1 rips like Everybody's Special Course - the "meme medleys", using a big party of sources to the tune of a recognizable core song. In that sense, then, SNES Mini Circulation is like a love letter in two different ways - a tribute to a huge pillar to the very mashup community SiIvaGunner owes its foundation to, and of course, to the part of the rip that's right there on the tin - The Super Nintendo, and SNES Mini console!

Livvy94 is one of those rippers that's been active since near the channel's beginnings, from midway through Season 1 to today - and both off the channel and on her own time, she specializes in Super Nintendo music in particular. I can only imagine how exciting the SNES Mini's release must've been for her as someone who's focused so specifically on the console for long beforehand - I can absolutely see where the wish to celebrate it would've come from! And really, beyond the fun Renai Circulation tribute, that is what SNES Mini Circulation is here to do - to celebrate the Super Nintendo, and in turn the vast variety of soundscapes under its roof. We don't get every game on the SNES Mini represented here, sure, but Renai Circulation also isn't an endless song - and I'm glad Livvy94 chose to ration out the per-game segments more deliberately rather than trying to cram in each game possible in it. Well, I say that, but we do also get a fun bonus appearance of Chrono Trigger at 2:26, whose bizarre absence from the mini console was a big talking point back before release.

But that leads into what's probably the main reason I love SNES Mini Circulation so much, all these years later - its just plain fun! That Chrono Trigger gag is placed right after where Renai Circulation uses a rewinding sound effect, playing off of Chrono Trigger using time travel, and the section itself pokes fun at Nintendo "forgetting" to include the game. Right before this, the rip is using the soundscape of Kirby Super Star, althewhile using footage from yet another historical relic of YouTube - the very first episode of Game Grumps, wherein the grumps played that very game. Little gags like that are pretty easy to spot, of course, I love when rip visuals are played with for comedic effect a la Goodbye to Love - but even with that aside, the energy the whole rip has is just downright FUN. Livvy94 displays proficiency with so many different styles of SNES arranging, from the Mega Man X sound I gushed about back in Guardian of the Ride Chasers to the more mellow sounds that made me fall in love with rips like Sog-Gee Ambiance, yet the rip transitions in and out of each section absolutely effortlessly.

Like, I find these "one-person fusion collabs" a la Staff Roll (SM64) Fusion to be incredibly impressive already, but SNES Mini Circulation just at once feels like it has so much fun and has so much confidence. For instance, near the end of the rip, EarthBound is revisited for a short Runaway Five performance, after the game had already being featured at the start of the rip, but its placed so perfectly to build up to the fast-paced ending, again a tribute to Everybody's Circulation, that it never stuck out as odd or noteworthy to me until the very moment I started writing this paragraph. Livvy94 pulls the whole thing off with such finesse, all just to celebrate her favorite little grey box.