#siiva

Happy Pride!

One of the most fascinating aspects of SiIvaGunner, in being a long-term community built on leveraging outside sources, is in how said tributes morph into culture all of its own. Ten years into the channel's life, we still see the ongoing circulation of bits once made within a context far different from today, be it due to no longer being timely or being continued well past the relevance it once had to its originator. Think, for instance, of Chaze the Chat's fixation on Maroon 5 continued in rips like Welcome to 2021! They finally invented summers that hurt motherfuckers😂 only at sonicforces​.​com, or the entire Season 7 April Fools' event seeing the channel pay tribute to itself through rips like .​.​.​of 2023. But with rips like Fresh Bro-in-my-Bot [D-Type] of Bel-Air, something quite perculiar happens - where a joke once made in timely reference takes on a life of its own as an in-joke just for longtime fans.

In the days before SiIvaGunner, in the age of the splintered "SoundClown" community operating under their own channels, not many built dedicated followings all their own. But there were, of course, exceptions; many of you may well have heard some of Mowtendoo's legendary work, mentioned briefly on here long ago on rips like Ganja Man 9: Hash Blunt Hash (Shorty's Stage), and many more of you are likely familiar with the much-smaller following Triple-Q nevertheless had, which was directly paid tribute to within Planet Wisp Mashup Medley. But of these channels, few were given as much direct attention early in the channel's life as BotanicSage, a mashup artist whose output (looking past the plethora of Space Jam mashups) consists almost entirely of "unironically good" jams. Its the kind of mashups that still get ample views today, with several videos with multiple millions of views, many of which iconic and ingrained into the subconscious of the prior decade's internet users. K.K Good Day, 16BIT MAGIC, Pokemon GSC Is What I Like, it all feels part of that long-gone internet mono-culture that I wrote about on Colress Museum, where most everyone with even a passing interest in SiIvaGunner would inherently know who BotanicSage was.

Which is the point from which the bit began. While other artists in the scene either got straightforward tributes, or wound up like Triple-Q joining the team outright to continue in making rips like with RNR (Rip No Riffs), BotanicSage was different. His channel was already so widely recognized, already defined as one playing to the same niche as SiIvaGunner of making "unironically good" mashups...how do you make a tribute to that interesting? The secret laid right in SiIvaGunner's home turf - subversion! Akin to the double-whammies like Be Cool, Be Wild, and Be My Girl, the rips paying tribute to BotanicSage operated under a two-stage structure where its not just taking the "unedited video game music" and making it a mashup, but then subverting *what* that mashup is doing partway through its runtime.

When this trend initially started, this allowed the rips to really effectively gut-punch their target audience. Since BotanicSage's mashups were so ingrained in people's minds already, even if they couldn't already clock that a rip was in direct reference to one, it would often just sound "correct" right off the bat. After all, we'd heard rips like Dr. Soulja, which merely touched up an already-known mashup, so doing the same to BotanicSage mashups wasn't some unthinkable thing for the channel to do. And there's a moment, right before that subversion kicks in, where you feel good about yourself for "guessing" what the rip was going to be beforehand, or like you're an elite tier of SiIva fan for identifying BotanicSage mashups correctly. And then the twist hits; often made all the more shocking through leveraging particularly garish sources like Goomba Got Back or It's Everyday Bro.

And yes, Fresh Bro-in-my-Bot [D-Type] of Bel-Air pulls this off with aplomb just the same. Cosmic199X, whose work I've written about before with Season 7's Viva La LOWAS, is a no-nonsense good-ass-ripper, with a rich history spanning back to Season 2 and contributions to both VvvvvaVvvvvvr and TTGD, and has as a result been around the channel since the very start of this bit and the height of BotanicSage's popularity. But what really draws me to this rip in particular - beyond the finesse with which it *was* indeed executed - is the way the joke its building on has taken on new life so many years later. Case and point, the fact that there's even a possibility that someone reading this may not have known about BotanicSage before reading this says it all. That implicit understanding that the audience ought to be aware of what these rips are riffing on has tapered off, just as the idea of the internet mono-cultured has become a thing of the past. As, again, written about on Colress Museum, you can no longer confidently assume that the channel's audience KNOW the specific lore you're referencing, let alone when its to something effectively part of the decade prior. But while that often makes it harder for rips to find their target audience, I believe its only made the BotanicSage fakeout rips funnier in execution. Because now, what was once a swerve hidden behind the expected becomes TWO layers of gut-punching for the average viewer.

And what makes that two-hit-combo work so well, is just how unassuming that first layer still is. There are so many classic rips in the channel's life, as I wrote about on Light Plane (Krabby Mix), Dr. Soulja and more, where the joke just feels so *correct* right when you hear it. Speaking myself as someone who hadn't heard the original Fresh Brobot [L-Type] of Bel-Air, Fresh D-in-my-Bot [BS-Type] of Bel-Air sounds like a classic rip right off the bat, the kind of mashup you'd expect to have been done years before already. Its a classic weird-funky mashup tune, paired with, as explained back on Man, why does every Bleck actor gotta rap some, a game that wears its weirdness on its sleeve; even without the BotanicSage knowledge, its a rip that simply SOUNDS right.

But the fucking twist, man - its so stupid, its so childish and silly, but it genuinely still catches me every time I listen - even with seemingly unassuming intro, it switches right as the vocals kick in to using hit 2012 forum weapon "The Fresh Prince of Dick Butt" as the source. The way the song is already sped up to match Brobot L-Type Battle's BPM, how relatively low in the mix the vocals are, paired with the genuinely somewhat-solid Will Smith impression those vocals have, coalesce into something that still catches me off guard on relistening as I listen. A lot of the comedy is, of course, carried by just how entertaining the original video is, with how the performer tries so hard to squeeze dick-in-my-butt into every section, made even funnier on the parts where there's so much room to exclaim as to make the declarations feel even prouder. But mesh it with a soundscape so intent on not giving you any room to breathe amidst its freakiness, and its amplified so many times further; all made possible just because of Cosmic199X's spark of brilliance on how to keep a 9-year old channel bit going yet further.

If there’s anything I genuinely treasure the early days of SiIvaGunner for, it is for just how thorough of a time capsule its been for the mid-to-late 2010s internet. This is a phenomena that will likely become more thoroughly researched in the years to come, but as someone who lived through the terminally-online spaces of 2014, 15, 16 and onward, one could very tangibly feel that age of internet use morphing into another. It wasn’t a net-negative transition, of course, but it was a change; and not just one marked by the end of funny MLG videos a la slider dank version.

Rather, it was marked by a mass influx of new users, by the kids watching basement-made YouTube content in the 2000s now growing up to make more ambitious things, and most importantly by everyone starting to carve out their own corners of the web rather than mingling within broader categories. And in a way, it was that sort of mono-culture in particular that was kind of key to the appeal of SiIvaGunner so early on. Think of a rip like Respect Your Elders (20X-Mix); today, a rip referencing such a specific event, from such a specific part of one specific Nintendo game’s competitive scene might’ve well flown under the radar for lots of the people watching. Yetevery time the channel made such a reference, be it to Chad Warden, the DK Rap, Keemstar, or even to Vinesauce itself – the origin to the whole channel’s bit – it was assumed that a vast majority of the channel’s audience would nevertheless catch on in an instant. This was, again, because of how online spaces operated at that time; these all fell into the same broad group of “Gaming Content”, a community which, large as it may have been, hadn’t yet been drawn into hyper-specific niches of the online world thanks to tools like Discord servers, and were all fed a similar bredth of channels on YouTube as a result.

Now, I chose to open my discussion of Colress Museum with such extensive preamble, because I believe that context is essential to why the rip has continued to stick with me as a good memory. Because ten years later, AlpharadTV is no longer a channel that EVERYONE in the “gaming content” community is aware of as a key figure; and that’s because such a community, loose as it was, now no longer exists. With the dawn of the Paul brothers in 2017, YouTube decided to push them as the faces of the platform to draw in droves and droves of new general-audience fans; cue a global pandemic at the start of the next decade, and YouTube went from popular distraction to a cornerstone of current day existence; EVERYONE is now watching YouTube, and everyone there now wants their space. I would never dare say this has made SiIvaGunner itself inherently worse; yet it was, coincidentally, around 2020-2021 where I began realizing, with rips like Satinpanties Symphony covering games like Friday Night Funkin’ amidst others, that the world of YouTube had grown so much as to where I was no longer keeping up with the trends being leveraged. Those who once viewed the channel as teens are now young adults, making the kinds of rips for their kinds of niche interests.

And so, a decade later, a rip like Colress Museum might seem downright strange to have fond memories of, even a decade later. Being an early Season 1 rip, its hardly a high-effort masterpiece, nor did it lay any sort of foundation for rips following it to build off of. Alpharad’s popular, yes, but he’s popular within a sea of likeminded channels, one of millions of content creators. Yet in 2016, having something as silly as the Science Museum song, uploaded a half-year prior as a joke to barely 200K views, be adapted for SiIvaGunner, made me realize even at the time just how connected everyone was. Founder of SiIvaGunner, Chaze the Chat, has lived a completely different life from me, with many different interests, passions, and talents; and yet the ways of the 2010s internet made it so that we were drawn to so much of the same content as to form similar senses of humor and tastes on the online world.

It is fundamentally a little silly to place so much weight upon a rip as stupid as this, but it was a genuine cornerstone to making me realize just how much the internet has changed; and, in turn, realizing just how much the SiIvaGunner channel has grown. Because there were tons of viewers just like me who felt connected to SiIvaGunner, specifically because it was leveraging these online bits and jokes we were all following so collectively (does anyone remember YouTube Heroes! Anymore?), and those came to in turn be inspired to push the channel forward. There were tons of rips like Colress Museum back then, connecting the audience of YouTube viewers to the same kinds of bits they were all aware of, yet lying behind it all Chaze and others were always hoping and pushing the team to express themselves in ways more individualistic. Chaze himself is infamous for his insistence on Maroon 5 with rips like Everyday Goodbyes (SiIvaGunner Band Cover), but it always peeked through elsewhere as well, be it the enthusiasm for Sonic CD in rips like Collision Chaos Good Future JP [CD Beta Mix], or the love contributors like Triple-Q had for Love Live! and Snow Halation. Expressing that kind of individualistic love highlighted the worst part of the early-2010s YouTube – that being an outsider to such a degree, championing something not part of the mono-culture, made you cringe and weird, the reactions of which took shape as SiIvaGunner’s first-ever story in the Reboot; it laid the groundwork for the themes of the entire channel going forward. Cue the years to come, and more and more inspired fans came to be rippers championing their own interests, their own niches of the internet, and were finally met with the kind of passionate love they should’ve received all those years ago.

In summary, then, this post has been about a lot more than just Colress Museum. Yet it ultimately lies at the heart of defining a lot of how SiIvaGunner has evolved; highlighting the best and worst of the prior decade’s internet communities. Its ironic, its silly, its stupid, and yet it represents one of the many channels that bound the YouTube “Gaming” mono-culture together, a joke based on one of its core pillars of the time, the enjoyment of which reflected just how similar we all were at one point. We’ve all flourished in the years since, found new things to love, found ways to more openly express what we’ve always felt; yet its nice, at times, to remember just where we all came from.

A pretty simple observation one can make about the SiIvaGunner YouTube channel, now ten years into its life, is that it’s lasted this long through the quality in its video output. That’s a kind of no-duh thing to conclude, right? There’s a team that makes good stuff, the stuff is liked, and so we get more of the stuff, content produced on a conveyor belt; even if not for the purposes of generating revenue, it has nevertheless generated “social” revenue in increased viewers and subscribers. But as mentioned in my last post (Unovan Sanctuary) and more, a huge motivator for me in running this blog has been in exploring, and relaying, what’s said between those lines, how all of the dominoes fall, rather than how the individual piece looks whilst standing.

You can absolutely gain enjoyment just in individual rips, in just watching stuff like CCC episodes or the King for a Day Tournament, or following events all in isolation from one another. Many of these have the benefit of working near flawlessly in isolation, like the immaculately executed Disappearance of Super Mario event in Season 5, which I raved about on Your Worst Nightmario. And hell, this piecemeal approach is (by its very nature) undoubtedly the most accessible, the easiest way one ever could engage with a channel so vast in size, so borderline impenetrable as SiIvaGunner. But it needs to be understood that all ten years of the channel’s life are built atop of one another, echoing the past, laying out groundwork for the future, every piece part of of a greater tapestry, a history that enriches all that surrounds it in its totality (The aforementioned Your Worst Nightmario post even details this!). Having, myself, had the opportunity to follow the channel since very near its 2016 inception, I’m fortunate enough to be able to trace this history across the years, and to in turn be consistently rewarded for my attentiveness. Sometimes those rewards come in the form of great emotional resonance, with fanservice-y events like what happened over on PRIMEneria, but far more frequently it occurs through just getting to notice and appreciate whenever some well-liked rip I'd remember morphs into a full-on cultural focal point of the channel.

There’s too many examples of this phenomena out there to even try to present concisely – the wiki has an entire page dedicated to “frequently-ripped tracks” which all underwent similar journeys – but I don’t think it’ll ever stop being endearing to see unfold in real time. A wonderful consequence of the channel’s collaboratively-run structure is that rips are just as likely to impress fellow team members as they are the audience, spurring on both parties to start creating tributes. Think, for instance, of the Mad Mew Mew rip phenomena, which began with naught but The Green Spy’s insane mind laid bare into just one rip on Mad Mew Mew Becoming Uncanny, only to spiral into many more tributes built with its same strucutre; all great SiIvaGunner touchstones like this, at one point, began with just a spark of creativity in one ripper’s mind. Hell, when this definition is applied more loosely, there are trends of this nature that generate more views, and are arguably more iconic to the channel than the examples I’m most fond of – Slider, Raft Ride, Friday Night Funkin’, et cetera. But, at least to me, the rips of the song White Wing Dynablade from Kirby Super Star stand out more than these many equivalents when they arrive, in large part due to just how quintessentially “SiIvaGunner” they feel, in spite of a comparative lack of frequency in appearances.

Before delving further into that last point, though, let’s first talk about what we’re actually dealing with. The high-BPM soundtrack of Kirby Super Star has long been iconic to online VGM-postings, long before even SiIvaGunner began, with songs like Gourmet Race playing part in some very early internet memes and tomfoolery. Both on and outside of SiIvaGunner, the soundtrack’s energetic feel has lent iself well to the age-old artform of YTPMVs, be it with Watching Spongebob and Kirby Super Star or Shaky Mountain, its evident that the game’s smattering of sounds and bouncy rhythms makes it the perfect canvas to paste one’s favorite internet memes onto in ways both creative and catchy. With the tradition being so well-honored, the craft so refined, Whitewing Dynablade hardly stands out just for being a YTPMV of Kirby Super Star – rather, it stood out for the direction it took within that classic framework. Like I’ve discussed on posts like 28 Saves Later, there was an odd feeling in the air of the channel in the months after the Season 1 finale. The channel’s sudden revival, meant to be momentary just to cap off 2016 with a bang, had now been extended well into the new year, and the excitement of the CCC was morphing together with a general sense of uncertainty, from both the audience and team, as to what the direction going forward would be. There wasn’t some great executive decision made as to what kind of rips would follow this shake-up in structure, but you began to slowly see rips cropping up that would subtly pay “tribute” to what we now would end up calling “Season 1” of SiIvaGunner, a clear line in the sand had been drawn between the Then and the Now. And sure, that particular feeling of nostalgia was something that was mainly focused on for Season 3, like with Trail on Powdery Snow Halation or CG Man HD Remastered Edition, but first sprung up as a sentiment right here in early 2017. And it was that burgeoning feeling, of a golden era now officially having passed, that Whitewing Dynablade was able to capture like lightning a bottle.

Lots of that celebratory feel, in fairness, comes just from JoeBro as a ripper flexing his well-trained muscle. The guy is classic-YTPMV down to the bone, and you can feel that in every beat’s usage of its chosen source. I love how the Megalovania part switches to a kazoo at almost the exact same pitch as to not be immediately noticeable, and I utterly ADORE how the measures of “Fu-Fu-Fu-Fuck”, followed by the slightly-shorter “Be-be-bees”, is then concluded by a quick “Fuck-Bees”, getting the entire two-word joke into the rip without feeling stretched. But these technical parts are not what make the rip special, since really this was all just part of JoeBro’s bread-and-butter skill. Rather, the magic lies within how the rip, in a matter of mere seconds, moves from Grand Dad, to Snow Halation, to Gangnam Style and The Nutshack, essentially giving you an intense, 40-secound crash-course tour of the channel’s history up to that point. And, like, even by May 2017, the audience listening had recognized that some of the jokes JoeBro was choosing to include, like Angry Joe and the Pokemon GO song, were already old-hat relics of “early” SiIvaGunner, not part of the classic cast of bangers anymore... so why were they here? Because they belonged in the rip just the same; because, just like the beloved bits they sat alongside, they were instrumental in getting the channel to where it was now. In getting to hear them all squeezed so tightly together, without any room to breathe between, it all felt like part of a cohesive whole.

While it’s not an “emotional” rip by any measure, no Outertale or The Paragoomba and the Wiggler, its holistic, celebratory nature gives it a similar vibe to something like Memey Hell or, more accurately, Bramble Blast Collab. Its tone is understated compared to those, and its not exactly a rip that was featured or revered notably upon its release, yet the concise way in which all the pieces gather at one point, to remind you of just how much you’d experienced in the past year, made it a difficult rip not to remember from those early parts of Season 2. As time passed therafter, then, it became all the more clear that I hadn't been the only one who’d seen the appeal in such a dense, concise celebration of channel history. Partway through Season 4 Episode 2, a rip with the title “White Wing Dynablade (Remastered)” was uploaded to the channel by fellow YTPMV-focused ripper Grambam36. This naming practice fell in line with what Season 3 had done before with rips like Fragile Snowman (Remastered), refining some early-channel jank with proper remastering of past work... yet in line with the creative energies of both Season 4 in general and Grambam36 himself, this supposed “remaster” – in truth called WWD 2020 – was a rugpull of a rip, an all-new threat operating within the same structure as what it pays tribute to. The rapid-fire jokes are still there, and it even opens with the very same start as before, Joel’s Grand Dad reaction, but it from there devolves into a celebration of Season 4 and beyond; Dat Boi, Big Chungus, and everyone’s favorite, D.VA Fart, shows up! And I don’t just say that with ironic inflection to make you cringe at its mention; I think this ability to create a super-condensed time capsule of the year, in turn almost inherently dating it for future references, through bits that would gradually be phased out entirely from the channel, is the precise magic spark that makes these rips work. Like so many parts of the original Whitewing Dynablade, WWD 2020 feels “dated” entirely on purpose.

I dedicate this post specifically to the original Whitewing Dynablade, but I really think all its variants are magic for that very same reason. Since WWD 2020, we also got one by Myeauxyoozi in White Wing Dynablade III, which served both as a tribute to the whole Season it was part of, but also as one to Myeauxyoozi himself, having made one hell of a legendary first-year run of contributions throughout Season 5 with rips like Among Drip Drop Galaxy. Season 7 saw a collaborative effort between athenamite, Ellie53 and DonnieTheGuy in White Wing Dynablade IV, which was then given a wonderful "fanmade" video version by fellow ripper DiamondBrickZ. With the video in particular, this fourth entry may very well be my favorite they’ve done, and I can feel myself withholding paragraphs upon paragraphs of affection already - yet it all ultimately circles back to the exact reason why these rips are so memorable to begin with. I love White Wing Dynablade IV, specifically, because its paying tribute to Season 6 and 7 of SiIvaGunner, which is probably still my absolutely favorite stretch of the channel’s whole life, the part during which I had the biggest emotional attachment to SiIvaGunner. As a result, hearing a high-octane little fanfare of all the sounds that defined those years is bound to get me feeling all warm in side.

Put on the page the way I do here, it might seem silly to ascribe terms like “emotional attachment” to 40-second videos with audio from IShowSpeed and Big Chungus. Yes, yes, I’ve been on here many many times before, arguing for the channel’s ability of actual emotional sincerity, the themes and narrative weight it holds in its more self-serious moments on The Life and Times of Wade L.D. and NIGHTMARESCAPE 〜Unrestrained HyperCam 2〜 (Final Boss Phase 2). But I believe Whitewing Dynablade, and specifically how its been able to live on for as long as it has in the channel, highlights the less evident form of emotional attachment us viewers are able to form with a channel like this. Nobody enforced, officially, that Whitewing Dynablade become the tentpole for a proper holiday for the channel, nor has the initiative to continue its legacy been led by any one ripper continuing to make these rips. Each one’s made by different people, and these continued tributes have never felt shackled by their mission to be as such, always releasing on different dates from the original, skipping 2022 and 2024 entirely, and most recently with White Wing Dynablade ~ 2025 Edition ~, we saw the nefarious and sinister Heboyi outright skip the whole joke of these rips entirely, all to pull off yet another layer of genuinely funny rug-pulling. But what all of these tributes have in common is that they came FROM somewhere, from having been affected by that original JoeBro rip in some way. A rip which, despite its seemingly basic fundamentals, came to resonate with enough of the channel’s audience to climb to a whole million views by Season 6. Somewhere along that rise, Grambam36 got the idea to iterate on it, and somewhere down further, I think other rippers realized just what a fun template it is for reliving the past year or two of high quality ripping.

Been a while, hasn't it?

No, no, I won't be here rambling for too long.

After all, there isn’t really not much of an interesting story as to why I've been away from the blog for so long. Life got in the way, my time diverted, my stress annoying to manage, et cetera, et cetera. In the midst of making ends meet, finding new passions, exploring new things...the blog just kind of just, slipped through my fingers.

Even before that, though, SiIvaGunner itself has long been a somewhat fickle interest for me, an interest I've consistently felt somewhat..."othered", towards engaging with. It's niche in a way that's created a wonderful and tight-knit community of die-hards, a community that the channel itself has loved to leverage as I discussed on PRIMEneria, but one whose devotion comes at the cost of making it difficult for the more casual fan to thrive, discussion seemingly isolated to just said tight knit. Put simply, you're either knee deep in the sauce or unsure of what the whole ordeal is worth being so invested in. Those avid fans, like you and me, who are knee deep, are mainly confined to discuss with one another in one lone Discord server, isolated from the rest of the web, with the channel's reach as a fandom hardly ever escaping its confines despite the often-vast reach of the YouTube channel itself. As a result of all this, my attachment to SiIvaGunner was often one I’d love discussing in the moment, yet those moments slide away as fast as a Discord channel's messages move; a stream of bubbles blown, floating away, away, without ever breaking through the water's surface.

There's an observed pattern within the community that many of the channel's biggest creatively-producing fans, creators of YouTube videos and fanart, eventually just end up becoming regular contributors themselves, contributing back to the hardcore. Its, of course, not for no reason; due to the nature of the channel, those who creatively contribute to the SiIvaGunner fandom are effectively just a half-step removed from contributing to SiIvaGunner itself; but it, in turn, makes those contributions more directly aimed at core fans first and foremost and a wider web second. The core idea with all my SiIvaGunner projects, this blog and previous, has mainly been to put SOMETHING out there creatively in relation to the channel, but to specifically avoid teetering into works that only echo back toward those core fans, to make things that can make even outsiders unaware of the channel’s appeal at least GET one's emotional attachment to. Proud of my work as I’ve been, I now find myself in a funny situation… because in a weird roundabout sort of way, this past year I've now grown closer than ever before into becoming that kind of outsider – and I needed to find a way back into the channel’s trenches.

With all of that said… why, then, was it a random Pokémon BW rip, Unovan Sanctuary, that pulled me out of whatever “outsider” slump I could describe myself as being in?

I suppose, at first, I was drawn to the familiarity of it all, y'know? After months and months of worry of so many things in life, after many months more feeling like I'd slipped out of what was going on with the channel anymore, tabbing into the Discord server every now and then but struggling to truly keep pace... it was sobering to remember that the channel continues to hold so much timeless appeal even ten years on. When I first started following SiIvaGunner in 2016, it was Nintendo music and Undertale, like with Tupac's Empty House; when I truly fell in love with it across Seasons 2-4, 2017 and beyond, it was Nintendo music and Undertale, done with ever-growing attention to detail by rippers I’d seen grow in prowess year after year, everything from Locked In The Underground to Outertale to Poké Village and beyond. That's of course not even mentioning how, as the years passed since, my inherent nostalgia toward both Pokémon Black & White, and toward Toby Fox’s music, has only amplified.

So sure, Unovan Sanctuary follows a tried-and-true formula for me, and it indeed features two arbitrary components that are reflective of the SiIvaGunner channel – Yippie. Yet, for as much as I was drawn to the rip through its comforting familiarity, I was only truly intrigued by noting its equal amount of unfamiliar ground. As the years have gone on, I’ve honestly fallen out of love with Toby Fox’s work, and still haven’t played Deltarune’s 4th Chapter; and as the SiIvaGunner channel has rolled on and on, my attentiveness toward its finer details of operating has loosened. As a result, I held no prior attachment to The 2nd Sanctuary theme used within the rip, nor had any prior knowledge of who ripper John Desumith was or his attachment to the channel. And the intrigue that sparked in me, tabbing through the Wiki, in researching, listening to the works of both artist and ripper, appreciating the attention to detail in the ripper’s rearrangement, truly brought back the spark of why I love writing this blog to begin with.

I have, for instance, spilled much ink already on how much I adore sensing a ripper’s passions reflected and emphasized in their output. The unabashedly self-indulgent rippers like Dead Line in works like vs SAYU (Based Version), the rippers with clear adoration for specific musical flavors like dante as heard on Eterna's Cocoon and 9​来​4s, the independently-driven projects like the Sonic CD Beta Mixes driven by rippers like Jass with Collision Chaos Good Future JP [CD Beta Mix], and so much more all contribute to the melting-pot magic of the channel’s output. In contrast to many of these, Johndesumith doesn’t keep a very public profile online, with no social media besides a Discord account, only talking in the SiIvaGunner Discord for sparse WIP-sharing of upcoming rips. And yet there’s so much you can learn about him just through perusing his output of rips – the frequent appearances of Chrono Trigger music, ripping of Pokémon music typically with an emotional bend, the prominent smattering of chiptune work particularly in his early catalogue... Like thumbing through the pages of a book, you can trace and sense the growth of his abilities, beginning already-proficient in the chiptune space through rips like Another Medium World and slowly learning to replicate the sounds of the JRPGs he seemingly holds the most love for. All of it, then, for the purposes of this post, culminating in melody-swapping music from Pokemon Black & White with a JRPG tune with as strange a time signature as The 2nd Sanctuary.

As far back as in 2016 with Hoopache, I can remember always being impressed with rips that dare to play around with uncommon time signatures; more still, I’ve become more and more impressed over the years with just how accurately and just how creatively the elements of the source Pokémon BW tracks are leveraged into the arrangements. Using Relic Castle in of itself is an inspired choice, but the choices made therafter in getting it to blend so seamlessly with a song with as out-there of a rhythm as The 2nd Sanctuary – a song I only learned about through its presence in rips to begin with – impresses me just as much as the sheer novelty of these kinds of rips used to impress way back in the day, despite how many times over that formula has been done since. It all comes together like a puzzle, with the background harmonies adapted directly from the source track, the gentle piano plucks that originally led Relic Castle’s melody, and it now playing parity with a repeating high-pitched sequence of notes, its sound slotting right in with the song despite not appearing directly in the source material. It is the definition of a creative liberty, much like the change in instruments toward the song’s bridge, using aspects of the whole Pokemon BW sound first and foremost rather than sticking solely to how Relic Castle sounded. And yet its restrained enough to still FEEL like Relic Castle to the core; the surprisingly funky percussion remains mostly untouched, which along with the background harmonies and choices of sound elsewhere keeps the song’s vibe squarely within the original desert-temple vibe. It is, then, that perfect blend of familiar and unfamiliar which drew me to the rip to begin with.

The cherry on top it all, though, was the realization I had in digging through John Desumith’s messages in the SiIvaGunner Discord server. Here’s a ripper who’s comfortable and well off within chiptune, a contributor without a shred of clout or online growth-statistics to his name, seeking advice on how to improve his non-chiptune work – how to further attain a sound pitch-perfectly accurate to a 16-year old Nintendo DS game. There’s nothing else to it, nor necessarily such demand for composers within that sound, nor any equivalent demand within the SiIvaGunner community for more rips of that ilk. It is, solely, one person seeking to improve their own creative craft for the love of said craft. So what if it might not reach all the people in the world? Hell, it might not even reach the average couple-thousand-or-so regular channel viewers, let alone become any sort of widespread meme phenomena. And yet, even as it sits in its own isolated, tiny corner of the channel, itself its own isolated chamber amidst a sea of content, it shines with so much love and attention to detail.

Perhaps, then, it was that realization – RE-realization, rather – that made me want to come back to the blog in any way I could. I obviously know that this blog, acting as a supplement to an already niche primary source, is never going to make me any kind of fame or fortune; yet I know, from the countless comments, additions, discussions and friends made through it, that its existence has, even in its aimlessness, had a genuine impact on people. Like many rippers, I originally began this project almost solely for personal use, as practice for my writing and as a way to organize my thoughts – yet much like how I’ve been so emotionally affected by passion projects from within the SiIvaGunner channel for so many years, I in turn have gotten to see how this stupid little project of mine has made rippers and fan alike ecstatic from so much of what I put out here.

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.