#xarlable

It shocked me to realize that, four months into this blog's lifespan, I've still barely touched the SiIvaGunner channel's first big story event - Season 1's Reboot. To many, myself included, it was a turning point for how they consumed the channel: It escalated the channel from a joke or a one-trick pony into something truly worth taking seriously, with an ongoing narrative and stakes at play that many of us didn't even realize were possible.

So lets set the stage, briefly. We're about four months into the SiIvaGunner channel's life in 2016, and most things are proceeding just as they always have. Funny Flintstones! Funny mashups! Funny screams and funny melodyswaps, a grand ol' time all around. Yet one type of joke in particular - inserting Snow Halation from Love Live into various rips - has been receiving pushback from the audience at large as apparent by the dislikes and comments left on videos. So things are proceeding smoothly, most people are content, yet...there's a sort of unrest bubbling underneath it all, a rift between SiIvaGunner and its audience, between what the people behind the channel want to do and what the audience wants to receive. After a long buildup, the camel's back snaps in two, and the Reboot commences - in direct response to the neverending bitterness of those against Snow Halation's inclusion on SiIvaGunner as a whole.

The Reboot was simple in concept - the in-universe entity that runs the channel runs into a fatal error and restarts itself, only "refreshing" all of its jokes in the process with similar-enough equivalences. The Flintstones theme is replaced with The Simpsons theme - the "loudest orgasm" scream is replaced with the Howie Scream - Love Live's presence on the channel is replaced with IDOLM@STER, and so on and so forth. Even without the story videos laying things out and introducing us to The Voice Inside Your Head, the Reboot's statement was clear - as soon as SiIvaGunner stops doing what its team is passionate for in order to appease its fans, things *will* go awry. Being part of the community at the time (as a very new member right before the Reboot) was simultaneously enlightening and absolutely insane - we KNEW what we as a collective had done to deserve The Reboot, yet we had no idea what it would lead to or how to stop it. Needless to say, everything was pure chaos - SiIvaGunner had officially gripped me with its narrative and I was all in.

And that chaos is really why I picked I Saw a Brainwasher Today as today's feature. Compared to what we had before the Reboot, its so starkly different in style - its far removed from the typical Nintendo music that gave the channel its identity, its tone is chaotic and noisy due to the two songs mashed up, and neither of those songs had any presence on SiIvaGunner beforehand. Sure, in today's landscape its a pretty simple mashup of two similar-sounding themes, but its context painted such a different picture: it was the perfect instillation of everything the Reboot entailed and all the emotions we felt during it. Deep in the mix you can faintly hear the screams of some old SiIva memes, which adds tremendously to the atmosphere described - its a rip that's just flatly impossible to divorce from its original context.

And yet...here I am, sort of presenting the rip to you outside of that context. Hrm.

As you may have noticed, either through following this blog or through following the channel itself - SiIvaGunner has a LOT of tiny inside jokes, always spinning actively in gear with very few having been forgotten. At times it feels like half the rips uploaded are done as some sort of subtle gestures or reminders of an inside event, not just jokes we as the audience have grown accustomed to but calling back to history as far back as Season 1. Of these, one of the more underdiscussed yet always hilarious to me are Xarlable's Rock my Forum.

Ray William Johnson, we all know the guy, right? Used to be top of YouTube, was pretty influential in the grand scheme of internet funnymen, etc etc. Well, one thing led to another, and early on in his YTPMV-making career, a younger Xarlable made a YTPMV of Rock my Emotions by Kitsune² using samples from various RWJ videos. The result, Rock my Forum, lives on in a sort of infamy - both from being hit by a takedown from Ray William Johnson himself, and from being a really sub-par YTPMV with a lot of obvious - yet very funny - issues in hindsight. I'm speaking purely as an outsider here, mind, but it seems to me like the joke of its low quality caught on with not just people dunking on Xarlable, but his own friend groups as well.

Which is how we eventually end up here - LAST YTPMV​^​2 OF 2016 is one of RWJ's first appearances on SiIva, in a YTPMV done by Xarlable himself, very much in the same vein as Rock my Emotions. Its loud, its sample choices are weird as hell, it still has that damn flashing imagery from Rock my Forum - and its still REALLY funny to me when it realistically shouldn't be. This feels like one of those rips that's going to get me a lot of strange looks for even having it featured on the blog, even moreso than Sex - Steve Harvey - but I can't *not* feature it! It's Rock my Forum! It's one of the funniest, most deep-in-the-rabbithole jokes on the whole channel! Its arguably THE defining joke of Vvvvvvavvvvvr, one of the biggest SiIvaGunner fan channels! And on SiIva, even as Xarlable has effectively been off the team since the start of Season 5, it STILL keeps cropping up today in ever-more obscure ways! Sometimes, when Xarlable is credited for his contributions on projects like Paper Jams Credits Fusion Collab, he'll just casually be flipping in tune to Rock my Forum without it being called attention to.

I love SiIvaGunner, man. I love that rips like LAST YTPMV​^​2 OF 2016 are allowed to exist on the channel without any obligation for anyone to "get it" - its a dumb, silly joke for people like me to grow overly fond of - its been seven damn years and I still cannot get Rock my Forum out of my brain. Godspeed, Forum.