#uhc2

I worry sometimes that I talk up the atmosphere and feeling of Season 6 a bit too much on here. To me it is still undoubtedly SiIvaGunner's most underrated Season, a period of the channel where even I was beginning to tune it out yet was left enamored once I realized what it was doing - its meaning being something I've covered endlessly in posts like Totally Shaaking Out Right Now, Bramble Blast Collab, The End of HHGregg, and far too many more. The overall picture I've painted is that of a Season with a sort of dour moodiness to it the whole way through, an aura of something that's all about to change, a slow trickle towards the end - yet, like with any SiIvaGunner Season, it's never possible to make such a cut-and-dry assessment of things. That's part of why following the channel is so much fun: There can be a broad idea for what the channel is currently doing, yet so many rippers can put their own spin and interpretations on said idea as to morph it into something far more layered. Because while on the whole Season 6 represents the ideas of letting go of the past and moving on through a sorrowful lens, I Gotta Feeling, Sung by EVERYONE! spins that mood into something worth celebrating - a last hurrah, a final festival, and one big show to send us all off into the apocalypse.

With that context in mind, it really shouldn't have been surprising to me that multiple people wound up requesting this rip for coverage. Indeed, it's also one that I've had sitting in the back of my head for a very long time, as a faint memory of what it was like to follow the channel back toward the final months of Season 6. That feeling of things coming to a close was gradually creeping up on us - or at least, it had begun feeling that way to me - yet for the longest time we didn't quite get WHAT was happening, what terrible fate that we were supposed to be dreading. The Christmas Comeback Crisis? The King for a Day Tournament series? Wood Man? The SiIva AI? The SiIvaGunner channel ITSELF? There was a lot of uncertainty swirling around, yet it was a ride that we couldn't really do much about other than just go along - a feeling that was only emphasized more and more with the start of the Nuclear Winter Festival, or DoomFes.

As the festival went on, we got to see Wood Man and friends meet and pass all sorts of people in the nuclear wasteland, like a slow gathering of stars on the verge of fading - it was becoming more and more clear that the event wasn't just some inconsequential one-off like Season 5's WesternFes, but would be having...SOME sort of impact, a trip down memory lane but with a looming abyss at the road's end. And in the midst of all of those feelings, underneath the atmospheric artwork and writing being done throughout the entire event - I Gotta Feeling, Sung by EVERYONE! drops. A spark of such joy, nine days before Christmas Day, in the middle of the apocalypse. Where did this all come from?

Well, obviously, it came from the brilliant minds of rippers Vincent Mashups, Jp, Grambam36 - all three of which I've covered on the blog before with some of the channel's greatest rips, such as Gate Happy, Bowser is Coming. and SUNGORE. But more to the tune of the channel's lore and the narrative of Doomfes, the retro-YouTube aesthetic and seemingly boundless energy of childlike whimsy and joy always stems from one more of SiIvaGunner's many stars met along the way - Unregistered Hypercam 2 of the King for a Day Tournament fame. And while it's certainly an assumption to say that I Gotta Feeling, Sung by EVERYONE! was specifically made to be a tribute to Hypercam, I could personally think of no better way to represent him for this event, as the glowing spark of internet joy that helps keep the SiIvaGunner channel afloat.

And it's that spark of joy that the rippers captured so excellently within the rip in particular - I Gotta Feeling isn't quite on the level of old-internet anthem as songs like Never Gonna Give You Up or Dreamscape of How 2 Do Anything fame are, yet its still a song I vividly remember hearing tons of back in 2009-2011ish YouTube, a theme bumping with optimism and happiness for the days ahead. It might seem a bit odd to be using it for the context of a Nuclear Apocalypse event at first brush, yet nostalgia is hardly ever a purely joyous thing - for as much joy as I Gotta Feeling brings me, it is at once also a bittersweet joy, with an understated sadness over the fact that things have changed so much since those days 15-plus years ago. It's that bittersweetness, I feel, that I Gotta Feeling, Sung by EVERYONE! runs with.

The rip is built on having the song be performed by voice clips and sentence-mixings of a vast pool of online memes - yet unlike what you may initially expect, it's not kept isolated to just nostalgic early-internet memes. The song title isn't being facetious: Everything from Zelda CDi Ganon, to Gangnam Style, to Friday Night Funkin', to Smosh, to Crash Bandicoot Woah, to even a sprinkle of classic SiIvaGunner memes like We Are Number One. The rip is distinctly different from rips like Corridors of Vine or even most other Hypercam rips, which focus on nostalgia for one specific era of online culture - instead, I Gotta Feeling, Sung by EVERYONE! reaches across the entire internet for one collective, massive embrace, a hug the size of 20-something years worth of online jokes. It's a bit silly to get sentimental over, maybe - but that goes for the entire channel, doesn't it?

I covered KFAD just two posts ago with Unhealed, and a big point I wanted to drive home in that post was just how much effort each and every ripper and contributor put into the event, in a way that still feels unbelievably impressive to this day. It's no secret that the King for Another Day Tournament absolutely ballooned in scope from its initial proposal, with tons of things added and changed last-minute to keep raising the bar even higher. And that scope is, again, the main reason why I cover the event so prominently when discussing Season 4 Episode 1, as its unprecedented scale and quality throughout eclipsed anything the channel had done up until that point (and, arguably, since!). Yet for as troubled as production reportedly was, as unchecked as that ambition might have been, its incredible to think that...most all of it still managed to stick the landing? And there's no better example of this in action, I find, than NIGHTMARESCAPE 〜Unrestrained HyperCam 2〜 (Final Boss Phase 2).

I think it came as a surprise to most of us, especially those who had followed the original King for a Day tournament just a year earlier, that the second contest slowly began to grow itself a sort of storyline. It wasn't much, and it wasn't in the forefront - but ones who remembered to check the King for Another Day MOJO website would get to see in universe "interviews" with the event's contestants, small little side stories in their time between matches, and full-on emotional beats of character development. As I mentioned way back in mines.ogg (unused) (and of course in Unhealed), a contestant like MissingNo wound up actually becoming a fleshed-out, fully-rounded character, more than just a vague concept attached to a source list. I truly salute the team who worked on the MOJO writing, being able to effectively improvise such an effective narrative and writing wholly unique dynamics and developments based on the per-match outcomes of the tournament. All of this all-around development, this investment into the entire cast of the event, and the excitement for the final match, made the surprise reveal to come so much more exciting - the reveal that the King for Another Day Tournament had a final boss to defeat.

Winner of the prior year's King for a Day Tournament and the in-universe host of the entire second tournament, Unregistered Hypercam 2 fell victim to possession by the mysterious "crown", set to be awarded to the Tournament's winner. Controlled by a still-unexplained sentient life found within the crown's ruby, the final match between DJ Professor K and Mariya Takeuchi wound up suspended - as this new monstrous force threatened to keep the Tournament running forever, eternally suspended with no resolution, yet another timeloop right alongside the one the Christmas Comeback Crisis already presents in the channel's main story. The Tournament calls for the help of both finalists, every other contestant - and the power of us, the viewers, to use the "MF LIKE BUTTON" from all the way back in Season 1's lore - to fight against and destroy the concept of eternal safety, the concept of maintaining stagnation for the sake of not losing those temporary moments of joy.

...look, I could over-analyze and dissect this finale as much as I want, about how pitch-perfectly each storybeat fell into place to truly connect the King for Another Day Tournament to the theming and narrative that the prior three Seasons had been so rigorously following, but...we're here to cover the theme of the battle itself. But I felt that all this context did need to be conveyed in some way - becuase NIGHTMARESCAPE 〜Unrestrained HyperCam 2〜 (Final Boss Phase 2) reflects the tone and energy of the entire event so pitch-perfectly, it amazed me to learn just how last-minute its production truly was. Princess Sylvysprit employs her expertise and familiarity with the Touhou series to arrange Dreamscape, anthem of the old internet that Hypercam represents, into a rhythmic, hectic, exciting melody, with a sense of dread overlaid on top of it all from the heavy synth covering it (see, there WAS a point in covering Nostalgic Blood of the Gregg ~ Old Source right before this!). It becomes a full-on back and fourth, triumphant higher-key brass responding to the droning eternity of Hypercam's synth melody - made even clearer as the melody and instrumentation occasioally changes to reflect the two finalists' own sourcelists. The amount of layers present in this theme are absolutely incredible, from the choir adding a sense of dread to the track's Hypercam-led sections, to the lone piano sounding as if the original Hypercam is trying to break free from the eternal spell he's been cast under, to the incorporation of the King for Another Day Tournament's main theme for the chorus - we may not see the battle play out, yet the music all on its own conveys a battle in such an engrossing, layered way.

In reading the request for me to cover How 2 Do Anything on here, I was made to realize something pretty big. For the 10-plus months that I've been running this blog, and for the amount of coverage I've dedicated to Season 4 Episode 1's King for Another Day tournament event, I've barely devoted any time to its Season 3 prequel on SiIvaGunner. I wrote about an excellent original piece made for it by dante and wolfman1405, FINAL DESTINATION, and I got to gush specifically about Anamanaguchi with Give Me The Fantasy...but I've hardly even touched on the tournament itself. I'm here today with How 2 Do Anything, and its remastered version, to try and resolve that issue - to celebrate the very first SiIvaGunner one-day king, and in some ways, a turning point for the entire channel.

So, first of all - the King for a Day Tournament. Halfway through Season 3, the SiIvaGunner channel was suddenly prevented from uploading videos for a week's time, but were still able to make community posts and tweets. The team was given the perfect opportunity for a channel shake-up, an opportunity to rethink what SiIvaGunner could be, and began thinking of ways to have the channel engage more directly with its viewers. Sure enough, that eventually landed on the idea of a "tournament arc", an event wherein viewers would both submit ideas for contestants to be featured, but then vote between the qualified few to crown a champion - with said champion then getting the reigns of the channel for an entire day of rips. Takeovers had become a regular occurrence on the channel ever since Season 2, be it the Inspector Gadget takeover with Become as Gadget, or the Santana and Rob Thomas takeover with Haltmanna feat. Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 - each of these, as you can tell, brought with them a bevvy of rips tied to the character hosting the channel, and have in some cases become legends on the channel in retrospect. Thus, each submission to the tournament was of a character who represented a specific kind of rips, a "source list" as it's now since been called - and the voting came down to which kind of rip the viewers would most want to see on the channel for a day's time.

Truth be told, I wish I had been more involved with the fanbase at the time of KFAD1's unfurling, I can only imagine how exciting the discussions must've been during the unveiling and lead-up on Discord and Twitter. Yet as a big lorehead, a big part of the appeal of the original King for a Day tournament for me was specifically the characters each contestant was represented through. Season 3 was right when the Christmas Comeback Crisis (the channel's main storyline) had begun slowing down, with a lot of the lore additions made being supplemental rather than advancing the core story forward. Even though King for a Day wasn't connected to this main story, it was nevertheless a sudden explosion of character - and characters! - added to the channel, a good amount of which would continue to be relevant outside of the tournament's confines. Like, this was the debut of Ajit Pai on the channel, who basically had his own little narrative spun across his first appearance, A New Threat and Totally Shaaking Out Right Now - this was the debut of Geno, the tragic fallen star of DEARLY BELOVED... who we'd later catch back up with in the Season 6 DoomFes event - this was where we got JOHN NOTWOODMAN as the event's host who I rambled on about in Vote Responsibly!!....and it was, of course, the debut of everyone's favorite, Unregistered Hypercam 2.

Even though I was disconnected from most fan discussion at the time, I'm certain I wasn't alone in having Unregistered Hypercam 2 as my favorite of the tournament right from his unveiling. A source list consisting of every anthem of the old internet - Paralyzer, Dreamscape, Bodies - all wrapped up in a completely original character design, the most Little Guy thing you'd ever seen? Frankly, I was sold right away - and with each example rip made under his name, it seemed we'd only be made more sure of our choice. Throughout his run, and after his victory, it was as if How 2 Do Anything became the little guy's anthem - a modern, reimagined take on the theme that taught us all so many things across the early internet's scuffed YouTube tutorials.

I've covered some rips by Scribble1k on here before, notably the fantastic Guilty Eyes Creeper mashup, but King for a Day and its sequel gave rippers the unique opportunity to shine through full-on professional-grade rearrangements. I've always been partial to the themes that Hypercam brought with him to the channel, you may recall I've covered Paralyzer specifically twice already with YACKER TOILET and Remember when this song was the one related to toilets?, but I'm just as attached if not MORESO to the legendary Dreamscape theme that How 2 Do Anything is arranging. Just the three opening piano chords alone strike such a raw nostalgic nerve: its instrumentation is as far removed from Dreamscape as you could come, yet there's no other song that sounds quite like that, it introduces the theme as an old memory to be recalled through Hypercam's presence - an age of the internet lost to time, brought back all these years later after being buried away for so long. The arrangement itself goes in swinging soon after that, a main melody carried through a heavy electronic, almost dubstep-esque vibe - yet it never wholly loses that sort of melancholic tone set up by the introductory piano. The noise and distortion of the arrangement conveys almost a sense of the Dreamscape theme being at battle with the rest of the internet's noise, almost akin to Your Worst Nightmario, yet its a battle that turns into an incredibly sick listening experience, a balance of light and dark.

It's all topped off with a full-circle piano ending, and a small vocal signoff from guest contributor eva twin, whisking the theme away with a proud reaffirmation - "You can do anything...". And sure enough - the little guy did it!! Through a tough bracket and a close final dual with Splatoon's Off the Hook (hence, OtH Was Robbed), Unregistered Hypercam 2 wound up becoming the tournament's champion - and, in the process, has become an outright mainstay character on the channel. He got to have his Windows Movie Maker-core, day-long takeover, filled rips like Never Gonna Give Up Mahjong, and got to appear as the host of the King for Another Day Tournament, playing a vital role in its storyline and surprise final boss with NIGHTMARESCAPE 〜Unrestrained HyperCam 2〜 (Final Boss Phase 2). He's a core SiIvaGunner cast member, and all of this started with just an idea, a figment of the imagination cast into SiIvaGunner's email address for a silly tournament arc. One that was so successful and beloved by the fanbase, that it shaped the entirety of Season 4's two episodes - and in turn shaped much of Season 5 and Season 6 to boot.