#tocinin

Boy that list of artists huh? Part of the magic of SiIvaGunner is that huge passion projects like this drop within the same schedule as every other rip, leaving it up to fans like myself to generate discussion over when things go crazy. It really isn’t often these days that an ordinary non-event rip truly blows up in the way this one did, sitting at almost half a million as of writing. But like, its well deserved!! It takes the basic concept of a mashup between Field of Hopes and Dreams and Vylet Pony’s ANTONYMPH, and turns it into a full-on tribute to the latter song, remaking the entire music video with all new visuals.

In that process, it creates a really fun new narrative of Noelle substituting Fluttershy in the original video as the “protagonist”, which creates a really fun new look into what the character is. A dorky, happy, proud and above all else SILLY little creature raised on the early 2000s internet culture. People inside and out of SiIva are in LOVE with this depiction of the character and I honestly can’t blame them, and the art used in the video is lovely in every sense of the word. Both as an Undertale fan and a SiIvaGunner enjoyer it’s been so fun seeing this strange mash-up joke turn into a full-on mainstay on the channel, bound to show up in the lore eventually. Not to mention the visuals are great not just for the way they pay tribute to Vylet Pony’s original video, but in how closely tied they still are to SiIvaGunner in-jokes: Its a love letter on all fronts

Look, I've been kind of racking my brain to try and remember...why I picked this one? Like, I knew I wanted a Season 7 rip to cover this week, and I knew I'd picked one but couldn't remember which one, but now...well, it's time for Nyan Cat I guess! Yet even without a speech prepared, its not difficult at all for me to say that 2023! YEAR OF THE PORTAL RADIO! is just, really funny.

I'm unsure if I want to truly label Season 7 as the *start* of it, but it feels like SiIvaGunner as of recent has had a lot of fun covering a bunch of different parts of internet culture, without avoiding any sort of them for any perceived nature of "cringiness". SiIvaGunner's always been a celebration of the internet, of course, but let's not forget that the entire core storyline of the channel began from a perceived notion that anime music, and anime in general, has no place on the channel - and only recently, the creator of Field of Love and Cringe made an excellent post covering the insecurities they had over what they felt "allowed" to like or not like when online. I feel like with the rips of Unregistered Hypercam 2's reign and the fallout of it, with everything that happened behind the scenes at SiIvaGunner over the course of Season 4, 5 and 6, things gradually became a lot less cynical, a lot of the team's rough edges were finally sanded off.

And now that it's finally getting close to wrapping up, I feel like Season 7 can truly be labeled as one of the most fun, silly, enjoyable times in the entire channel's life - a greatest-hits of everything that makes SiIvaGunner great, althewhile feeling more sincere and proud of the internet it inhibits than it ever has before. And that does also include rips like 2023! YEAR OF THE PORTAL RADIO!: completely disconnected from any event, from any Hypercam 2 silliness, it is just a pure tribute to Nyan Cat and the Portal series - in other words, a tribute to the early internet meme-posting days of the late 2000s. The marriage of songs seems so obvious that its incredible it hadn't been done before, and its pretty much everything you could've ever expected the rip to be, even down to the absolutely perfect visuals on top.

Okay, call it low-brow if you want - I think Gangster Mario and the entire event surrounding him is one of the funniest things this channel ever produced. So-bad-its-good content has long been a kind of cornerstone on the channel in all its different forms, but I don't think there's been an event that so perfectly captures it as MAR10 day of Season 4 Episode 2 - the Gangster Mario takeover. Rather than a heap of rips all using the same source a la the Harlem Shakeover, there was a wide palette available here. Be it making fun of oldschool internet culture, several different flavors of dorky Mario rapping, and a surprising amount of videos with visuals, it was hard to get bored of this event.

It felt torturous to just pick one rip from the event, and I'm likely to revisit it just due to how much of a highlight it was for the season - it single-handedly made Gangster Mario a mainstay of the channel's list of recurring jokes. So you can consider Caramariodansen to just be a taste test, a tease, for everything the rest of the event has in store: much like Dr. Soulja its a mashup that works so brilliantly despite appearing so simple. Just about any song mashed up with Caramelldansen is bound to be a little bit funny, but pair it with the ridiculous lyrics and instrumentation of, the very real song called Crank That Super Mario, and its a recipe for pure gold. The instrumentation in the rips is a magically-done combination of both source tracks, and even the vocals are selectively pitch-shifted to follow along with Caramelldansen's main melody - both songs play equal to one another.