#smokythrill77

Look: It's a point I've made before and a point I won't needlessly harp on about, so let's get it out of the way: Season 1 of SiIvaGunner was, as most firsts tend to be, far simpler than what we'd get just a year or two later and beyond. But it was before SiIvaGunner came to be known for its lovingly crafted and detailed mashups like Hella Pummel, before the ludicrously in-depth projects like my rip :), before we'd start getting delicately authentic melodyswaps like Outertale of much of any original covers or compositions like Trial of the Heart. Back when the very idea of disguising video game music edits as normal, unedited music rips, was still something really novel. The novelty of the channel paired, with a lack of basically any set-in-stone recurring jokes other than Grand Dad, resulted in some true classics like Pikmin Park, Live and Ooooooooooooooh, Dr. Soulja - and, of course, My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil!.

Now, let's start with a bit of a disclaimer - there's obviously a whole bunch of baggage to unpack with the humor surrounding the Your Onii​-​Chan's Favorite Rips! album in general. 2016 was the absolute plateau of edgy YouTube humor being in the mainstream, right before LeafyIsHere, iDubbbz, Keemstar, Filthy Frank and all the others sort of petered out from YouTube's stricter moderation. It was, in no uncertain terms, the time where making fun of how weird anime could be was at its most trendy. The joke in My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil!, and the joke of almost all the rips featured in Your Onii​-​Chan's Favorite Rips!, is to reference the anime franchise Oreimo, one that's effectively built entirely around the theme of being attracted to your younger sister. Despite its incestuous contents, the series sports a poppy, happy-go-lucky, bubbly aesthetic - hence, prime material to make jokes about how bizarre it is for Japan to effectively glorify such taboo relationships. Now, this is far from the only risque topic that early SiIvaGunner chose to tackle, and even back then there were topics such as described in Stickerbrush State of Mind that were still seen as going "too far" - but many of those have faded away as distant memories overtime, rips which failed to gain much of any traction, only really remembered as an edgier footnote in the channel's legacy.

So then...what makes My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil! any different, worth highlighting here today?

Put simply, I don't believe its million-plus views come purely from Oreimo fans, or from people deep in the trenches who find references to weird anime to be inherently funny. I believe the views are there because of a far simpler, far more effective joke in play: the contrast between a song as bubbly as Oreimo's opening theme irony, and the vocals of E.G.G.M.A.N. and the character its attached to, is simply very funny. The original E.G.G.M.A.N. is sort of an industrial rock "anthem", where the titular doctor celebrates and glorifies his own destructive goals in a theatrical, self-aggrandizing, yet still aggressive way - an aggression that feels as if it disappears entirely without the track's original instrumentation. An aggression that, with the instrumentation replaced with the sugary sweetness of irony, turns into something purely theatrical, like a performance from a School Idol, a performance from the heart - which, given who Dr. Eggman is as a character, is obviously a very funny mental image. Pikmin Park was listed as one of the classic Season 1 rips above for good reason - it, too, plays on this same sort of contrast in songs used for a mental image that's simply too good not to get a chuckle out of.

This is a big one, and one that's been pretty hotly anticipated by the requestee. Lauren, otherwise "Yhenestik" on Twitter and other platforms, is unquestionably the biggest devotee toward a SiIvaGunner character that I've ever seen, and is in general a face I see a lot in the community's small social media presence such as here on Tumblr. The character of his affection is a really fascinating one, and one I'll devote some time to talking about today: John Notwoodman.

John is pretty much a pitch-perfect demonstration on how SiIva lore typically operates and evolves - a joke suddenly growing its roots into something we become attached to. The joke this time was pretty easy to understand - Season 3's King for a Day tournament needed a host, and the team thought it'd be funny to present this host as nothing but fan-favorite character Wood Man in a gameshow-esque bow tie, top hat and curly mustache. The fanbase, of course, went along with this sort of kayfabe during the tournament's running, and John Notwoodman was treated as his own character, despite only really existing to host this temporary, made-to-give-the-channel-something-to-do event.

Funny enough, though, the idea of there being multiple incarnations of the channel's defacto mascot was actually something that Wood Man himself jokingly hinted at back during his initial channel takeover at the prelude to Season 2. As Season 2 progressed, we got further confirmation that Wood Man indeed has the power to transcent dimensions and timelines, due to his status as a hybrid between a Figment and a computer virus. Us loreheads were already aware that John Notwoodman being a seperate character from normal Wood Man was a genuine possibility for the team to pursue - which is what ended up occuring during Season 4 Episode 1. It started with Unusual Circumstances - A SiIvaGunner Christmas Comeback Crisis Side Story, a lore video that lightheartedly depicts the context and resolution behind how the SiIvaGunner channel nearly got terminated at the end of Season 3. This video, beyond being an all-time favorite of mine on the channel, mostly just added fuel to the fire on whether or not John Notwoodman was truly a seperate character from Wood Man himself - if nothing else, it confirmed that the two were absolutely intertwined with one another and didn't just exist separately. Nevertheless, this brought new eyes to the character, and would result in their inclusion as a major character in both the third SilvaGunner Spooktacular Halloween Horror Special, and the legendary King for Another Day Tournament. Through Spooktacular III in particular, we now both had confirmation of John's status as his own character and a canon voice for him - the voice of the Announcer as to later be used in KFAD2. KFAD2, then, not only gave him plenty of relevance as the event's announcer and overall CEO, but gave him tons of time to expand as a character through the event's extensive back cover - the King for Another Day MOJO website, which has written dialogues between all of the event's characters. It's something I myself am still lagging behind on in terms of required reading, yet just from the pieces I've read its easy to understand how the event gave John Notwoodman even more life than he had before, as a lover of the dramatic,theatrical, and overall just having a good time.

Both of these appearances suddenly grounded the character in SiIva's canon with relations to Wood Man, Unregistered Hypercam 2, Meowth, and the various KFAD contestants - he became a character with a distinctly different set of priorities and goals than the Wood Man we know. Priorities that, as shown in KFAD2's finale, showed just how long Wood Man himself had left to go as a person. Wood Man may once have been averse to the idea of there being multiple incarnations of himself, yet he's able to see that their existence shows all the possible ways his own life may one day end up. Three seasons later, and we're still unsure just what path Wood Man will end up walking down.

Its officially the spooky month! To celebrate, I've prepared perhaps the spookiest thing a SiIvaGunner viewer could think of - low quality music! :OOO

In all seriousness though - as I've shown before with rips such as dame da nellerman and Sex - Steve Harvey, SiIvaGunner is filled to the brim with content not meant to simply be consumed as everyday listenable music. The aim of the channel, first and foremost, is to make people smile - and it can do so in any number of ways. The power of ironic shitposting is not one to be underestimated - especially when it has a surprising amount of effort actually put into it.

To this day I have no clue what actually led to the creation of 1, 2 Oatmeal, a bizarre and poorly-sung parody cover of Dream Land 64 from the original Super Smash Bros. (Itself an arrangement of Gourmet Race from Kirby Super Star). Its a strange piece of old internet that, thanks to everyone's favorite Super Mario 64 Funnyman - Simpleflips - has now become one of those things that just keeps appearing as donation-submitted music onto livestreams all over. I even have faint recollections of Chaze the Chat, SiIvaGunner channel creator, explicitly saying during Season 2 that he would never feature 1, 2 Oatmeal. Well, less than a year later, and we arrive here - 1, 2 Oatmeal (Actual In-Game Version). There's just something so fascinating about the lengths Smoky went to with this rip - the amount of effort placed to make the Dream Land theme sound exactly as off-key in the exact same places as the original video - without any lyrics to even attempt masking it. When compared side by side, its evident that actual research went into making sure the two lined up perfectly, and yet the end result is flat-out unpleasant to listen to.

Quite frankly, I don't believe words could do today's post justice. We've all had lengthy holiday celebrations with lots to eat and think about - the last thing you need is me rambling on and on about what's right in front of you. Peak is a universal language, one that our lord and savior Jake Paul understood all too well in making his 2017 masterpiece Litmas - and one Smoky understood all too well in making GREAT DABS - Jake Paul's Bizarre Adventure: Christmas is Lit. Peak is to be experienced, not to be spoken.

For as many memes as SiIva creates or helps popularize, be it Grand Dad, We Are Number One, Totino's Mania, and so on - there's just as many, if not more jokes that wholly eclipse SiIva in terms of popularity. A meme legend in the gaming community, shitposts of Todd Howard have been around long before SiIva's creation, yet only truly took off in 2015 thanks to his presence at Bethesda's E3 show. E3 in general is a holiday of sorts for the gaming community, not just because its home to a bevvy of announcements and trailers for upcoming games, but also for its unavoidable memetic quality - there's just so much SILLY shit that happens at E3, be it awkward live speeches, technical mishaps, ill-timed reveals, or the inevitable barrage of Phil Spence saying the word "gamer". The SiIvaGunner team are not ones to leave such fresh meme produce out to rot, and are always immensely quick on the draw when it comes to each year's E3 highlights.

But lets be real - out of all memes and jokes that spawn out of E3, I don't think there are any that even come close to being as timeless and eternally funny as Toddposting. Year after year, Bethesda show after Bethesda show, Todd is always there, always pushing and promising that THIS time will be different, THIS time the game will truly let you do all of those things that were promised last time. Coupled with the company's insistence on having you purchase Skyrim over and over, and its no wonder his name is so well known. And though Todd took over the entire channel for a brief bit in Season 3, it would take yet one more year for the magnum opus to be released.

Take Me Home, Country Snow is such a perfect instillation of everything SiIvaGunner is capable of doing, and of everything that SiIvaGunner IS. 2018 already solidified Fallout 76 as a complete catastrophy of a game, a symbol for just how many empty promises Todd Howard will do in order to get his game sold. By E3 next year, Todd's infamy was put front and center as he was made to step out on stage and admit the faults of his game. Take Me Home, Country Roads, as the anthem to Fallout 76, became laced in a sort of ironic melancholy, the realization that its idealized game was never going to truly happen...and yet here, its celebrated - mashed up with Snow Halation of all things. I discussed in Snow halocean that much of what makes Snow Halation rips so special is that they feel like a sort of inauguration ceremony for individual memes - a seal of approval that a meme has truly "made it" on the SiIvaGunner channel. The ever-consistent visuals, the insistence of having them only feature one joke at a time, and of course the per-rip "speeches" each joke provides near the last quarter of the runtime - it all gives these rips a sort of celebratory vibe. By this point, Todd Howard's meme status was wholly, unavoidably, cemented as part of SiIvaGunner.

All of this isn't even to mention the quality of the rip itself - the self-titled "Nuclear Winter" mix of American country vocals paired with cheerful, snow-clad idol pop creates a vibe wholly unique to this rip - Take Me Home, Country Snow creates an image of optimism and celebration that otherwise seems so foreign to Bethesda games within the wider gaming sphere. Yet that's just the thing - Todd Howard isn't on this stage for his achievements as a game developer, but for his legendary status within online shitposting. This rip celebrates everything we love about E3, and at this point feels like a farewell to the event as a whole.