#solid strgg

Though likely clouded by a lot of nostalgia, its long been my opinion that SiIva was at its most engaging during Season 2 and Season 3, due to how expertly rips and lore were woven together. Those who followed the channel live as it was uploading in 2017 will know exactly what I mean - almost every rip with a new joke gathered heaps of speculation over its importance to the lore, the profile picture and banners of the channel were always changing to reflect possible story events unfolding behind closed doors, and it just never ceased to surprise.

I don't think there's any better encapsulation of this excitement, this complete immersion into the state of the channel, than Become as Gadget. In the middle of the ongoing story of the Christmas Comeback Crisis, seemingly out of complete nowhere - the supposed villain of the story and at-that-time manager of the channel was dethroned by a bizarro version of famed cartoon character Inspector Gadget. And like a switch had been flipped, suddenly every single rip uploaded was an Inspector Gadget joke. This is what we'd usually call "Takeovers", but this one was different. There was no special anniversary being celebrated. After a day had passed, the takeover kept going. Two days. Three. Suddenly the description of the channel changed. The profile picture, banner. The Twitter account. Everything was being consumed by this demonic interpretation of Inspector Gadget as based on Mike Matei's all-time classic "Minecraft with Gadget". And in the midst of all this, Become as Gadget is uploaded.

And like, it's all still a joke, especially now looking back, right? Its a silly, basic punchline, mashing up super dramatic, emotional music, with a source as absurd and unserious as Minecraft with Gadget. But the emotions were at an ALL TIME HIGH for the channel when this was happening - I URGE you to check out the comments on this rip in particular to see what I'm talking about. Despite being six years old, there are comments as recent as this year still writing at length about how much this event, and this rip, hit them. At a point where the lore-to-rip engagement was at an alltime high, this 10-day stretch of nothing but Inspector Gadget felt haunting, like a curse placed upon the channel we all used to love so much.

The last post made me nostalgic for Season 1’s ending, so fuck it, here’s another rip from back then - the File Select Fusion Collab, a rip with close to 20 creators involved. What a “Fusion Collab” entails has changed quite a fair bit over the years, as the collaborations have grown larger in size with each year. Nowadays, they now tend to focus on individual artists rendering a specific track in their own style across a longer video, such as with Season 2’s Wood Man Fusion Collab. But with Season 1, the meaning was a lot more nebulous - they were almost all made under the direction of toonlink (otherwise goes by “tunedlink” and “toonlinkirl”), and were made more in the style of YTPMVs, having a base song to build off of with an everchanging barrage of styles and sources intermingling at once.

These were released every now and then over the course of Season 1 and were always appreciated, yet today’s choice in particular stands out among them. Being released during what was effectively presented as the ending of the channel, it has a unique kind of emotional baggage to it, it leans into celebrating the entire legacy of the channel and all of its inside jokes. The full-circle moment of getting Joel Vinesauce himself to narrate a section in the middle of the track was perfect - the person whose joke got the entire channel started, now gets invited to formally close it out, with a speech still very much rooted in that niche joke culture SiIva itself thrives in. And it just keeps going in that direction - the rip builds in a congratulatory, yet bittersweet way to truly signal that the channel is about to end, a giant thank-you letter to the entire community that had been fostered over the channel’s small 9-month lifespan.