#shonicth

Yeah, okay, this is cheating in a lot of ways - this is not on the SiIvaGunner channel, and its obviously not even a rip. But I felt it necessary to commemorate, as I mentioned briefly in Because I Love You, its finally time for MAGFest once again, and the SiIvaGunner team is to host their own panel there tomorrow! And in the spirit of that, I want to just...talk about SiIvaGunner and MAGFest, at least for a little bit. Because the first two panels in particular, the ones that marked the beginning and end of Season 3, are some of my all-time favorite videos associated with the SiIvaGunner channel.

A big part of the identity and gimmick of the channel itself, as you're likely well aware, is the bait-and-switch - to present it as a faceless entity simply uploading video game music, only to instead feature jokes, shitposts, edits, and so forth. Part of maintaining that kayfabe, then, is to intentionally obscure who makes what behind the scenes, to keep the real people under wraps for those who aren't going to dig deeper, in order to further sell the illusion of being an official VGM upload. The team does of course still give credit when its relevant, as any rip can be featured on an album be given full credits there, but just that degree of separation alone between casual fans and ones willing to download an album has probably led to a few too many people being unaware of who made their favorite rips. Back then, I typically fell somewhere in the middle - I wasn't actively using music listening software and thus missed out on listening to albums for a long time, but was still aware of some of the big names you'd see in comments sections, saw some shoutouts from Twitter, the works.

Yet with the two MAGFest panels of 2018 and 2019 respectively, it felt like the first time that the magnitude of what SiIvaGunner is and how much it means to people was revealed to me for the first time ever. The uploaded recording of the 2018 panel, posted by Chaze's own account, features a shot about seven minutes in that turns the camera to the crowd - and it's an absolutely packed-full room of nerds just like me. And even though I've never been able to go to any of these MAGFest panels due to travel costs and complications...just seeing how many people truly do care about SiivaGunner, in such a tangible way, something more than a number...it resonated with me, yknow?

Beyond that, these panels are just such fascinating pieces of history for the channel, such good time capsules in so many ways - and that's in a lot of ways why I chose to highlight the 2019 panel in particular. Rather than discussing the upbringings of the channel, it features members of the team reminiscing and going through Season 3's timeline of events in particular, going into surprising detail into the thought process and direction the various pieces of the year took - while also giving insights into the production of the Christmas Comeback Crisis, King for a Day Tournament, and more. I feel like with the turn from Season 3 to Season 4 Episode 1, you can really notice that the idea of "hype" for SiIvaGunner content becoming so much more prominent, so much more deliberately handled by the team, which is made all the more evident by the King for Another Day Tournament reveal live on stage.

Man, look, it's an hour-long panel, and there's so many small things that I still remember from it, despite last having seen it five years ago. The members talking about their favorite rips, giving a round of applause to all the rippers who couldn't come join them at the panel or on-stage, the very funny last-minute rips made to "celebrate" the channel being terminated a day earlier (one of which I've embedded as the Bandcamp link), and even some slight discussions on what SiIvaGunner as a channel means to the team, what it represents, and what their goals have been overtime. And, of course, the fucking incredible PowerPoint hijinx with Inspector Gadget, which I am 100% going to take as confirmed canon that Gadget's level of sentience and awareness of the real world is just the same as Woodman's and The Voice.

I have, of course, been told a number of times that I overanalyze SiIvaGunner, that I'm uncovering depth that's clearly not intentional, looking too much into a silly meme channel. And sure, I'd admit that I do overthink things to a degree, anyone who read Vote Responsibly!! should be able to tell you as much. Yet its stuff like these in-depth behind-the-scenes looks, these moments of getting a face and a voice to attach to the works, that really just felt super validating to me even back then - that the intentions and goals of the channel that I myself had picked up on were in fact some sort of direction that the team itself were steering toward. And though Nape Mango does indeed declare in this very panel that "Everything is a coincidence with SiIvaGunner", I'm forever in awe at just how good the team has been at lining those coincidences up into something genuinely incredible.

In a few posts on here, such as on Medley Rush #7 and Sidelined Symphony, I've brought up and discussed the idea that certain rippers on SiIvaGunner feel immensely recognizable even without knowing the credits of who made what. A big part of SiIvaGunner's appeal from the start was that this mass output of rips of varying quality was pretty secretive about who was behind what, and only the fans who care enough to download the team's album releases (or check the Wiki) would be made aware of the rippers' identities. I'll wholly admit that, despite being a self-proclaimed SiIvaGunner loremaster, it took me until around the middle of Season 4 Episode 1 to actually begin paying proper attention to all of the behind-the-scenes workings. Even whilst I was in the dark in a lot of ways, though, there were a few names I was still keenly aware of through their notoriety and frequent mentions in the YouTube comments. There was channel founder Chaze the Chat, there were the shitpost legends like BotanicSage, Triple-Q and toonlink - and then, there was ShonicTH.

Out of the two dozen or so rippers that have stayed actively participant in SiIvaGunner since the very early days of Season 1, ShonicTH has always stuck out as particularly memorable to me for a lot of ways. While I comment on l4ureleye's stylistic traits as a ripper, or the various ways that Chaze the Chat would sneak his affection for Maroon 5 into half the projects he worked on, ShonicTH's legacy on the channel is comparatively pretty simple. The dude just loves Kingdom Hearts.

From an absolute onslaught of rips in Season 1 that adds The Flintstones or Snow Halation to music all across the Kingdom Hearts franchise, to his literal sole contribution to the channel in Season 7 being a rip of the exact same nature aptly titled Quickly meeting my yearly quota, ShonicTH's presence on the channel has since way back in Season 1 been immensely identifiable as just "the Kingdom Hearts guy". It reminds me of the rippers like Uncle Fill that I discussed in Violet Sky Memories - the ones where you get the feeling that, they enjoyed contributing to SiIvaGunner just to share their love of the game. And at this point, whenever I see anything Kingdom Hearts related on SiIvaGunner, be it individual rips, the Yoko Shimomura tribute album "Il settimo grande padre", seeing videos in SiIvaGunner's "Liked" playlist relating to the games, or whatever else it may be - it feels like its become a community-known truth that it can all be traced back to Kingdom Hearts.

And for a lot of these rips, particularly ones from Season 1, I don't really have much to say, other than that I'm really glad that ShonicTH is still having a great time doing what he loves for the channel. But in his vast resume of contributions, Trial of the Heart really stands out as a symbol of love above the rest - after two years of making edits to Kingdom Hearts music, it's a fully original composition by ShonicTH himself meant to emulate that very sound. And yeah, it definitely succeeds in its mission statement! Trial of the Heart sounds like an authentic battle theme from the series, althewhile sneaking in small, repeating chord progressions that sound suspiciously like the beginning to The Flintstones theme. Its reminiscent to A Battle of Grand Proportions in that sense, I suppose, as an original composition aiming to feel like a sort of battle theme for the SiIvaGunner channel itself - yet Trial of the Heart makes its one reference to the channel somewhat more subtle, and does mainly feel more like ShonicTH just testing himself on if he's able to make a song in the same style as the games he so loves.

For all the years I've followed SiIva, and for having been very much outside the core community for most of those, its always been sort of...reassuring, I suppose, to know that ShonicTH is still part of the team no matter what. Rain or shine, if there's rips to be made, ShonicTH still wants to contribute to show his love for Kingdom Hearts, and its clear to me that he's a dear friend to many on the team.