Some thumbnails from April Fools 2025 on SiIvaGunner
A few weeks ago I made a DeviantArt account to download a few resources for thumbnails for SiIvaGunner's "in-universe games" April Fools' Day 2025 event. I appreciated that those random resources happened to already exist, so now I've decided to post (some of) the thumbnails I made for the event to the same platform. The next time some fan wants resources for any of these, I'll hopefully have made it easier for them just as the random fans on DeviantArt years ago made it easier for me.
I did more thumbnails than these, but some of them were just touchups/crops/exports of existing assets that I don't feel like I put enough work into to post, and some of them were collaborations with other people where I provided a minority of the work.
The previews look compressed, but you can use the download button to get the uncompressed original files.
Some thumbnails from April Fools 2026 on SiIvaGunner
The followup but for this year's "AU Fools" event! Had a lot of fun getting to make a bunch of custom thumbnails again, and I figured I'd do the same thing again and post them all to DeviantArt to be freely used.
Season 9
No Album Release (Read More)
Relic Castle (OST Version) - Pokémon Black & White
Ripped by John Desumith
Been a while, hasn't it?
No, no, I won't be here rambling for too long.
After all, there isn’t really not much of an interesting story as to why I've been away from the blog for so long. Life got in the way, my time diverted, my stress annoying to manage, et cetera, et cetera. In the midst of making ends meet, finding new passions, exploring new things...the blog just kind of just, slipped through my fingers.
Even before that, though, SiIvaGunner itself has long been a somewhat fickle interest for me, an interest I've consistently felt somewhat..."othered", towards engaging with. It's niche in a way that's created a wonderful and tight-knit community of die-hards, a community that the channel itself has loved to leverage as I discussed on PRIMEneria, but one whose devotion comes at the cost of making it difficult for the more casual fan to thrive, discussion seemingly isolated to just said tight knit. Put simply, you're either knee deep in the sauce or unsure of what the whole ordeal is worth being so invested in. Those avid fans, like you and me, who are knee deep, are mainly confined to discuss with one another in one lone Discord server, isolated from the rest of the web, with the channel's reach as a fandom hardly ever escaping its confines despite the often-vast reach of the YouTube channel itself. As a result of all this, my attachment to SiIvaGunner was often one I’d love discussing in the moment, yet those moments slide away as fast as a Discord channel's messages move; a stream of bubbles blown, floating away, away, without ever breaking through the water's surface.
There's an observed pattern within the community that many of the channel's biggest creatively-producing fans, creators of YouTube videos and fanart, eventually just end up becoming regular contributors themselves, contributing back to the hardcore. Its, of course, not for no reason; due to the nature of the channel, those who creatively contribute to the SiIvaGunner fandom are effectively just a half-step removed from contributing to SiIvaGunner itself; but it, in turn, makes those contributions more directly aimed at core fans first and foremost and a wider web second. The core idea with all my SiIvaGunner projects, this blog and previous, has mainly been to put SOMETHING out there creatively in relation to the channel, but to specifically avoid teetering into works that only echo back toward those core fans, to make things that can make even outsiders unaware of the channel’s appeal at least GET one's emotional attachment to. Proud of my work as I’ve been, I now find myself in a funny situation… because in a weird roundabout sort of way, this past year I've now grown closer than ever before into becoming that kind of outsider – and I needed to find a way back into the channel’s trenches.
With all of that said… why, then, was it a random Pokémon BW rip, Unovan Sanctuary, that pulled me out of whatever “outsider” slump I could describe myself as being in?
I suppose, at first, I was drawn to the familiarity of it all, y'know? After months and months of worry of so many things in life, after many months more feeling like I'd slipped out of what was going on with the channel anymore, tabbing into the Discord server every now and then but struggling to truly keep pace... it was sobering to remember that the channel continues to hold so much timeless appeal even ten years on. When I first started following SiIvaGunner in 2016, it was Nintendo music and Undertale, like with Tupac's Empty House; when I truly fell in love with it across Seasons 2-4, 2017 and beyond, it was Nintendo music and Undertale, done with ever-growing attention to detail by rippers I’d seen grow in prowess year after year, everything from Locked In The Underground to Outertale to Poké Village and beyond. That's of course not even mentioning how, as the years passed since, my inherent nostalgia toward both Pokémon Black & White, and toward Toby Fox’s music, has only amplified.
So sure, Unovan Sanctuary follows a tried-and-true formula for me, and it indeed features two arbitrary components that are reflective of the SiIvaGunner channel – Yippie. Yet, for as much as I was drawn to the rip through its comforting familiarity, I was only truly intrigued by noting its equal amount of unfamiliar ground. As the years have gone on, I’ve honestly fallen out of love with Toby Fox’s work, and still haven’t played Deltarune’s 4th Chapter; and as the SiIvaGunner channel has rolled on and on, my attentiveness toward its finer details of operating has loosened. As a result, I held no prior attachment to The 2nd Sanctuary theme used within the rip, nor had any prior knowledge of who ripper John Desumith was or his attachment to the channel. And the intrigue that sparked in me, tabbing through the Wiki, in researching, listening to the works of both artist and ripper, appreciating the attention to detail in the ripper’s rearrangement, truly brought back the spark of why I love writing this blog to begin with.
I have, for instance, spilled much ink already on how much I adore sensing a ripper’s passions reflected and emphasized in their output. The unabashedly self-indulgent rippers like Dead Line in works like vs SAYU (Based Version), the rippers with clear adoration for specific musical flavors like dante as heard on Eterna's Cocoon and 9来4s, the independently-driven projects like the Sonic CD Beta Mixes driven by rippers like Jass with Collision Chaos Good Future JP [CD Beta Mix], and so much more all contribute to the melting-pot magic of the channel’s output. In contrast to many of these, Johndesumith doesn’t keep a very public profile online, with no social media besides a Discord account, only talking in the SiIvaGunner Discord for sparse WIP-sharing of upcoming rips. And yet there’s so much you can learn about him just through perusing his output of rips – the frequent appearances of Chrono Trigger music, ripping of Pokémon music typically with an emotional bend, the prominent smattering of chiptune work particularly in his early catalogue... Like thumbing through the pages of a book, you can trace and sense the growth of his abilities, beginning already-proficient in the chiptune space through rips like Another Medium World and slowly learning to replicate the sounds of the JRPGs he seemingly holds the most love for. All of it, then, for the purposes of this post, culminating in melody-swapping music from Pokemon Black & White with a JRPG tune with as strange a time signature as The 2nd Sanctuary.
As far back as in 2016 with Hoopache, I can remember always being impressed with rips that dare to play around with uncommon time signatures; more still, I’ve become more and more impressed over the years with just how accurately and just how creatively the elements of the source Pokémon BW tracks are leveraged into the arrangements. Using Relic Castle in of itself is an inspired choice, but the choices made therafter in getting it to blend so seamlessly with a song with as out-there of a rhythm as The 2nd Sanctuary – a song I only learned about through its presence in rips to begin with – impresses me just as much as the sheer novelty of these kinds of rips used to impress way back in the day, despite how many times over that formula has been done since. It all comes together like a puzzle, with the background harmonies adapted directly from the source track, the gentle piano plucks that originally led Relic Castle’s melody, and it now playing parity with a repeating high-pitched sequence of notes, its sound slotting right in with the song despite not appearing directly in the source material. It is the definition of a creative liberty, much like the change in instruments toward the song’s bridge, using aspects of the whole Pokemon BW sound first and foremost rather than sticking solely to how Relic Castle sounded. And yet its restrained enough to still FEEL like Relic Castle to the core; the surprisingly funky percussion remains mostly untouched, which along with the background harmonies and choices of sound elsewhere keeps the song’s vibe squarely within the original desert-temple vibe. It is, then, that perfect blend of familiar and unfamiliar which drew me to the rip to begin with.
The cherry on top it all, though, was the realization I had in digging through John Desumith’s messages in the SiIvaGunner Discord server. Here’s a ripper who’s comfortable and well off within chiptune, a contributor without a shred of clout or online growth-statistics to his name, seeking advice on how to improve his non-chiptune work – how to further attain a sound pitch-perfectly accurate to a 16-year old Nintendo DS game. There’s nothing else to it, nor necessarily such demand for composers within that sound, nor any equivalent demand within the SiIvaGunner community for more rips of that ilk. It is, solely, one person seeking to improve their own creative craft for the love of said craft. So what if it might not reach all the people in the world? Hell, it might not even reach the average couple-thousand-or-so regular channel viewers, let alone become any sort of widespread meme phenomena. And yet, even as it sits in its own isolated, tiny corner of the channel, itself its own isolated chamber amidst a sea of content, it shines with so much love and attention to detail.
Perhaps, then, it was that realization – RE-realization, rather – that made me want to come back to the blog in any way I could. I obviously know that this blog, acting as a supplement to an already niche primary source, is never going to make me any kind of fame or fortune; yet I know, from the countless comments, additions, discussions and friends made through it, that its existence has, even in its aimlessness, had a genuine impact on people. Like many rippers, I originally began this project almost solely for personal use, as practice for my writing and as a way to organize my thoughts – yet much like how I’ve been so emotionally affected by passion projects from within the SiIvaGunner channel for so many years, I in turn have gotten to see how this stupid little project of mine has made rippers and fan alike ecstatic from so much of what I put out here.
The pressure I felt, in being afraid to come back to such an imposing, scary, demanding project like the blog, was pretty damn unwarranted, because I would never operate it in any other way than through the SiIvaGunner ethos. Doing what I love purely for the sake of doing it. And to see SiIvaGunner’s own contributors having continued following that ethos, no matter how played one a cynical soul may consider it to be, for 10 years and growing, brings me hope that I can continue to do the same.
For my few non-ripper followers basically because Undertale turned 10 years old this September and it's so important to ripping, VvvvvaVvvvvvr dedicated the whole month to Undertale rips, with tangentially-related sub-events. The event was called UnderFes, with the name and premise sort of being a riff on an old SiIvaGunner event called SummerFes, which was themed after Summer and had tangentially-related sub-events. (Get it?) As part of this event, we changed the YouTube banner several times, and now with the event being over the main point of this post is that I am going to talk about the banners that I created for the event.
To get things started, this was the initial concept image that I put together in 30 seconds during a VC:
This looks basically exactly like the Ruins banner.
Though I ended up deciding to create an extra banner for specifically the first room of the game to use before the main Ruins one.
This is the only time we'll see front-facing Vavr.
The Vavr sprites I did not make, they are reused from Vvvvvatale.
This banner along with the main one for the Ruins were as simple as finding a map for the Ruins, adding the Vvvvvatale sprites and then centering it.
Here's the main banner. It just kind of conveniently works out that there's already a long straight hallway in the Ruins so I didn't have to do anything.
Here is the first banner that actually took some effort. I got the tiles off of the Spriters Resource as well a some of the random scenery. This doesn't exactly represent any particular room, it's just supposed to be a hodgepodge of Snowdin-related imagery. That's the main philosophy I went with for these banners.
Before the Mr. Bean sprite was done I just added this second walking Vavr as a placeholder.
After creating this banner, I realized doing it all in an image editor would be too annoying and I had to look up some tile map tools.
This is sort of based on the room where the bird carries you over a disproportionately small gap, since it's the room with the most tile variants but it's not 1:1 or anything.
I couldn't find any tile mappers that weren't also kind of annoying to use so I ended up using them only for the base ground tiles, then adding the scenery on after.
I didn't add the characters, so peep added them in for me. Well that turned out to be a mistake, since he doesn't know how to scale pixel art properly. However, if you're eagle-eyed you will have already noticed that I made the Waterfall banner 1x instead of 2x like literally every other banner. Yeah so in the midst of figuring out the tilemapper I just used the banner dimensions without remembering at any point that it was supposed to be 2x, which means the version of this banner with the characters looks even worse. So yeah, I just screwed up everything with this one.
A fun detail with this one was the Gaster door. Obviously I wanted to include it as one of the most notable Waterfall landmarks, I decided to put it up against the water where it'd be logically inaccessible.
I didn't make the Waterfall castle banner, so we'll skip that and go right to Hotland. From here on out I made sure to get everything right so there shouldn't be any screwups, aside from the fact that almost every banner after had its last revision done like the day before it went up.
The first pass of Hotland. I extended the Mettaton fake kitchen to add this poster of Mettaton that appears in another room. I was thinking about adding Fuku Fire and/or Gaster Followers, before I remembered that for some reason I decided it'd be better to not use any of the NPCs from the areas in the banners and only use the scenery. Because of that the only characters we see besides the ones representing the sub-events are the ones that were depicted in-universe (Mettaton's poster here, and the statue of Tem in the previous banner). I think that was probably the right move but I could see the argument for otherwise.
Final version of Hotland with the characters now that I'm adding them myself to make sure there are no mixels. Again, I did not make the character sprites, they were made by others. Here you can see I moved the Mettaton poster to the opposite side, this is because the edge of the kitchen was in the area visible on mobile and I figured it would make more sense if the Mettaton poster was visible instead of just the edge of the kitchen. Another detail is the brick with glue, this is basically because the Hotland banner was used starting with WayneradioTV Day, and an actual Wayne fan suggested I add the brick with glue from one of his videos, which I figured it's simple enough to sprite (and it was).
Also, just for fun I threw in this unused sprite for a higher part of the Core that was shown off in the Undertale art book. It still doesn't reach the top of the banner sadly but it's not like it matters since it's all in the unseen part of the banner anyway (welcome to Boundary Break). (technically, the whole banner can be seen if watching YouTube from a TV, but we never optimize for this and basically consider the top and bottom "unseen".)
Here's the one for the Core, which was actually kind of annoying to make due to the amount of tile variants. But there's not much else to say here, so moving on.
For New Home, I knew the Asgore castle view was basically required to be the basis of the banner but to keep up the gig of making it a hodgepodge of elements from the area I also added the furniture from the actual New Home part of it, recolored to match the colors. Also, the trash can featured on the right side is actually from New Home within Undertale Yellow which I just threw in since there wasn't much else to add and Undertale Yellow is generally cool.
I didn't do the Monika classroom banners so moving right to the Judgement Hall banners.
Alternate version of the Judgement Hall banner where the characters aren't shadowed out. This obviously doesn't look as cool which is why I never really considered this for use but I did render it out as I spent way too much time on the standing edits for the ones who didn't have them from the original spriters, before realizing I was just going to shadow them out anyway. (In fact, Steven's color sprite literally never got shown on the channel lol.) Main detail I'm sad about losing is that I had Monika looking at you instead of forward which I thought was a good detail.
Obviously later I added the front pillars + shadowed characters. In hindsight I probably should've aligned the top of this with the edge of the seen area of the banner instead of centering it but oh well.
For the Megalovania Day version of this banner I initially made an edit of Steven before being told I was just supposed to use Sans.
And here's the color version of that abomination...
Initial surface banner, I'm glad someone called this out as obviously being way too empty because I was almost too lazy to do it properly.
And yes, to extend the green I literally just scribbled.
Later but not final version. This was almost the final version, before Jerma got a proper back sprite, causing me to skuff together one for Wayne based on his front sprite. I did like how it paired Jerma and Wayne together as the only two not interested in the sunset, which is fitting because they're just guys and not fictional characters so they've probably seen a sunset before or something like that.
I redid the extended mountains to make the whole thing feel less empty as well as extending the clouds. I didn't want to interfere directly with the central part so that's why the clouds don't connect.
The three mountains on the left are actually just taken directly from the logo for one of my cherished PS2 games, Downhill Domination. You can tell because they look way better than whatever I was cooking on the right side lmao.
Also, an /r/place amogus is there next to Jerma because he's the sus guy. The amogus is still on the banner in the final version but I moved it to another spot, it's no longer next to Jerma since he's properly looking at the sunset squished between the others.
Here's the actual final version, and also the current banner on the channel since we haven't switched back yet.
And that's pretty much everything I wanted to talk about. UnderFes turned out great and these were fun to put together, so I just wanted to have a place to point out some random details and stuff. Peace out
What are the chances of Toby Fox possibly being on silvagunner team, and how was “Raft Ride - Deltarune” released a second into Chapter 3 and 4’s release?
we have a sort of vow of confidentiality so these are sadly the exact kinds of questions i wouldn't reasonably be able to answer. i will say though that we've had a record of pulling off rips extremely quickly after things are released that i'm pretty proud of.
if the ripper behind "Raft Ride - Deltarune" (minindo according to the wiki) would like to share details of its creation, that's awesome, but i can't do any more than theorize. or i guess, ask. but you can also do that :)
Some thumbnails from April Fools 2025 on SiIvaGunner
A few weeks ago I made a DeviantArt account to download a few resources for thumbnails for SiIvaGunner's "in-universe games" April Fools' Day 2025 event. I appreciated that those random resources happened to already exist, so now I've decided to post (some of) the thumbnails I made for the event to the same platform. The next time some fan wants resources for any of these, I'll hopefully have made it easier for them just as the random fans on DeviantArt years ago made it easier for me.
I did more thumbnails than these, but some of them were just touchups/crops/exports of existing assets that I don't feel like I put enough work into to post, and some of them were collaborations with other people where I provided a minority of the work.
The previews look compressed, but you can use the download button to get the uncompressed original files.
I have to come clear. I am guilty of a crime. I do not like the Phineas and Ferb DS soundtrack. The lead guitar bwah sound is so stupid, and I can't believe that the composer uses it in like almost every song. Why? It sounds like a rabbid. Terrible. I've had to listen to this soundtrack many times over the course of my SiIvaGunner career, and it keeps coming back to haunt me. My so called "friends" mock me with the soundfont and its signature sound. And now? It is a joke. On SiIvaGunner. As part of the "tobal phone poop ferb ds" category of jokes. Who would do this? My mortal enemy. Heboyi. One day, Heboyi will be incinerated. Along with his three pathetic cats. And on that day I will finally be at peace, with no more of that stupid sounding "bwah" guitar. bwah bwah bwah its terrible I hope I never have to hear it again
do you have any sources you wanted to use for the longest time but had no good rip ideas with it?
Yeah, mostly "regular" (popular?) music I'm a fan of. Like I love a lot of songs by Bob Marley & The Wailers, but I've never included a song by them in a rip (apart from one part in Pollyanna Fusion Collab by TTGD.) I keep meaning to make an arrangement of "One Love", for example, but I haven't bothered yet... actually I have a very short list of VGM that already sound like they would work with reggae, and I would appreciate more suggestions.
It's the same with the albums I mention in this post:
do you have a song that isnt really your #1 of all time, but you just keep coming back to it every few months or so?
I can think of two big
Never used anything from either album in a rip yet, as far as I can remember. I made a few Boards of Canada rips or flacs but none of them are related to The Campfire Headphase.
If you wanna talk about memes though, there's plenty memes I like that I haven't used in rips, mostly just by chance. Sometimes it's hard to remember what I haven't used. For example I think I've only used Se Piscar Já Era (SORRIZO RONALDO!) like twice, once on Vavr and once on SiIva? But I love it as a meme, it's really funny and many of the rips using it are among my favorites. I just simply haven't thought of many ideas for it or even bothered to try.
will (atleast some) of the stuff in your birthday album make it on the channel? i listen to it all yesterday and there was some stuff i would love to add to my playlist
I think in the time between this ask being submitted months ago and finally deciding to get back to all my asks, a lot of them have been uploaded. I just made a playlist of the YouTube uploads that I know of, and I'll update this continually as I find more and more are uploaded to various channels:
https://mlemmlem.bandcamp.com/album/mmmmmm
Man, I adore this album. Still so grateful for it...
Today is my birthday.
In the past month some things in my life haven't been going great. I've been trying to turn it around… but recent news
did you have any sort of experience with music before you got into ripping
Not really. I had taken piano lessons for a really short time when I was younger and I did percussion (drums) in band in like fifth grade only, but that was about it. I remember that even in those piano lessons I cheated my way out of learning much by getting the instructor to put labels for the letter notes on both the sheet music and piano keys. I really don't know why he let me do that.
I went into making my first rips (vavr submissions) in January 2019 knowing really nothing about music theory, and it took me more than a year to understand (sort of) how keys worked. Understanding chords took even longer and was kind of a gradual process over years. Really they're not that difficult concepts to grasp, but I didn't bother actually reading and researching how they worked for the longest time. It was mostly just self-teaching and relying on inferences from other people posting in various ripping servers and referencing musical terms. So the moral of the story is yeah it's definitely worth it to do a LITTLE bit of reading! At least just search up "simple explanations" for how musical scales, keys and chords work. Please, it's not that bad I swear.
I only developed a sense for relative pitch sometime around 2022, I believe? For a while I couldn't tell when something was offkey. Since I definitely can tell now, I'm trying to rationalize this as that I always had the ability to perceive all those harmonies but didn't have a sense for where the "line" was for dissonance. (Probably applies to everyone?) I guess in practice that's not much different from just developing a better ear for music through sheer volume of practice. Same deal with mixing, I think 2023 was the year I reached the point of learning pretty much "enough" about how to mix mashups well, and had developed personal instincts and techniques for mixing. (Nevertheless, I still think I've gotten better every year, even if slightly.)
I don't think anyone is incapable of learning how music works unless they're deaf or something. I believe that completely. For some people it might come more "naturally" (quicker) than others, but just because it's slow for you doesn't mean you should give up. It definitely didn't come naturally to me, and especially in years like 2020-2021 I was in a bit of despair that I would never be able to have the same musical accomplishments as the other people I admired. But I guess since I just kept trucking through it, I gained enough experience and time to make even me into a decent musician (kinda stretching that word here cause my composition skills are pretty lacking, but hey, I'm great at being derivative!)
This has had positive effects outside of ripping too. Last year I took guitar lessons cause I wanted to learn a cool instrument, and what I had previously learned from my time doing ripping was instrumental in giving me a head-start on how all this works.
I'm no Nintendohead. Many think, probably reasonably, that the "ndo" is because of nintendo. It's not.
There's a totally different etymology to my username that maybe I'll post about someday later. It's not a very well-kept secret though, if you're inclined to go look
This is something I wrote for google-drive-submit, the final capstone in the Susie ARG project, posted on my Tumblr by request. It's a collection of a few thoughts that had crossed my mind since the project ended that I wanted to share. This is something I could talk about for a lot longer, so I promise to not take up much of your time.
I think this is obvious, but the vast majority of things discussed in the Susie ARG do not relate to CCC 12 at all. Susie says as much herself.
This naturally brings up the follow-up question: why do this at all? If none of this matters to the canon, why put so much time and effort into it? And I guess that's a question you can realistically ask of all of SiIvaGunner. Rips take time to become as high quality as they are, right? Why do it at all?
The artistic process is kinda mean like that. It's a lot of hard work for something that feels so… ephemeral. Dust that falls through your hands when moved wrong.
Susie had a few things to say about the channel, the overarching canon, and its people. She said almost everything she desired to say… except she left one straggler she didn't wrap up in time. Kind of a shame really, I think it's one of the more important ones.
It's hard to say what that piece would've looked like if it was finished, but after consulting with Susie, I'm sure it would've looked something like this:
"My father said to me that that things tend to repeat themselves, given enough time. Sentience creates understanding, and understanding creates symbols, repetition, abstraction into things we can understand. How fitting, I suppose, that there are plenty of quotes like this…
Have you ever thought about where that lighthouse shows up? It's different every time. To SiIvaGunner it's a landmark of his home, to the AI universe it's a connection to the AI mainframe, to all those other little universes it's one thing or another; and of course, to you it's iconography, a picture to be adapted. Endlessly exploitable, as the deftest symbols tend to be.
I can't help but notice these types of things everywhere… somebody says a random phrase here - "intriguing", "nice", "reverb", there's a million examples - and it manages to travel across the universe and back again. A character talks over here, and their idea shows up somewhere else. Mr. Rental exists in one world, and a place is named after him a universe and half a planet away. Ideas conglomerate, and reform, and repeat; and one domino can add onto what anything means if it's the right time. This isn't a unintended side effect of the system, that's just how these things are here, a world of repeating and combining ideas together.
Then again, in the real world - your world - SiIvaGunner himself is a repetition of symbol, no? His better half. And he, in turn, is a repetition of someone else, who probably was inspired by someone else… so I suppose this was inevitable, in a way."
Out of a morbid curiosity, I decided to go back and look at my first reaction to the release of Prologue and Episode 1 of the CCC in 2016, since I'm lucky enough to still be in that Discord server. It was the kind of reaction you would expect from a 13 year old: making jokes, making unrelated jokes, bad jokes, jokes, so on. But don't misunderstand me - I was excited, and I was glued to the screen.
Fast forward, now - it's 2024. I just turned 21. Episode 11 has finally released, and it's a stellar job, genuinely. I'm in the middle of conceptualizing the Susie ARG, a project dedicated to the nuances of this thing that's been a part of my life for so long... and here I am, making the worst joke ever about how Haltmann couldn't just get Susie with a piano from Super Star Symphony. And putting it onto my pitch document! What am I doing?! Am I stutipd??? I feel like the "what would you tell your past self" thought is pretty cliche, but I'm not sure how I would tell my past self that I'm just doing a higher caliber of the same stupid shitposting he was. I think he'd find it funny, though.
SiIvaGunner's lore has never been the most popular thing on the channel. It feels almost condescending to explain the main reason why in detail - SiIvaGunner's main export is high quality rips. People aren't really coming for the story.
But I think there is a second reason worth addressing: SiIvaGunner lore is hard to follow. This is also obvious, but I think the reason it started getting hard to follow is more nebulous and interesting. My current reasoning is that the characters stopped having predetermined story arcs and started living lives, if that makes sense.
Wood Man is patient zero of this. His defection from his predetermined box was relatively simple - an offscreen penchant for movie making. This turned Wood Man, an otherwise dumb side character completely fabricated for the sake of his master's bidding, into, like, a guy.
Wood Man & Robbie Rotten turned him into a more complex person, with something from him that we hadn't seen before and he hadn't told anybody. He discussed the time dilation, and everything that implies, and how the world's time moves along. Then he got teleported to The Lost Rip, and the whole predetermined box fell apart completely. He escaped being a dumb side character, and got to do his own thing. He started knowing people offscreen, he started filming more movies, having the chance to hang out and be somebody and mature. He started living. Until… well, you know.
Wood Man's whole deal is emblematic of the tricky thing with the wielding of the passage of time in correlation to real life - the longer time has gone on, the more opportunity our side characters in the SiIvaGunner world have had to live their lives outside of the script and break their boxes. Dr. Andonuts spent so much of his time working, being a character behind the scenes, until he was compelled to come into the light. Joke-Explainer probably spent years wandering Grandiose, doing her own thing, living her life, interacting with people; checking in once a couple of years until we caught up with her for channel host. Haltmann had way more time than he would've to become committed to finding his daughter, and Susie had pretty much her entire existence as a Figment to watch from behind the scenes, until… well, you know.
And it's like, how do you condense that? If your 6 year old nephew turned 15 when you weren't looking, how do you compartmentalize the hundreds of off-screen stories in your brain? You don't, right? These type of things reward being around from the beginning, in a story that has broken its predefined end, and with characters that have had the chance to live autonomously. And that's probably bad for some of the newer viewers, but maybe that's better for some of the characters.
By the tail end of the project, I realized I was a lot like Susie. Not in the literal sense, duh, but in the metaphorical, as a watcher of the story with a lot of opinions, who suddenly got to have those opinions known on the grand stage.
Susie started to sound more and more like me as time went on - or maybe I started to sound more and more like Susie? I'm not sure - as the character got situated in her place. I hope that hasn't been too obvious as you've been reading this document, but it probably has.
Susie and I don't agree on everything. We probably disagree on most things, realistically. But here we had one shared goal - to walk forward with this thing we've been watching for so many years.
All we had to do was try and find the right words.
How do feel about "Mario Party 9 Voices" rip and that fact the original GiLvaSunner channel was deleted after this was uploaded?
GilvaSunner's deletion (and tribute event on SiIvaGunner) is an incredibly historic moment in the history of the SiIva channel and its community, and to be the creator of the last rip uploaded when Gilva was still alive is an honor...
Which makes it genuinely so funny that it was THIS!
SiIvaGunner's CCC side story, Cognitive Dissonance, has finally publically released!!
...And I was the LEAD WRITER for it!! My first time ever writing for the CCC! How exciting!
(I was also an art director too...!)
I've been so overjoyed seeing everyone's reactions to CogDis, I'm very very happy you all enjoyed it! I love and appreciate all of the hard work everyone in siiva put into making this side story the best it possibly could be!
This entire story is weirdly personal to me... it just ended up being that way because I tend to put personal aspects of myself into my work, to make it the best it possibly can be. Writing the psychological horror sections were quite difficult, as I had to tap into a very deep (sort of scary) part of my brain to make them. And that damn elevator scene!
Here's my favorite part of the entire script, if anyone's wondering.
I enjoy how meta it is, sort of dissecting the nature of siivagunner lore itself. Fun stuff to me!
Season 8
No Album Release (Read More)
Corneria (Brawl) (Alpha Mix) - Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Ripped by Yassir F.
I don't know if words could even begin to describe the emotional rollercoaster I have been on since December 19th, 2024.
It's such a funny thing, following this channel for so long. Throughout the early days in Season 1, the team would cobble together ideas for rips, events, and story in mere weeks' time, seemingly just to get reactions out of the fanbase. Beyond the inherent lunacy to The Reboot and I Saw a Brainwasher Today, this was also the year where one contributor just decided to tell a storyline about the Australian rental service Mr. Rental's titular mascot and his hatred for mashups back on Mr. Rental [B Side] ~ Out of Options; this was the year where legendary folk singer Bob Dylan became a reoccurring joke on the channel, just because PinkieOats was on a voice call and sung a cover in a captivatingly shoddy impression back on Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday - as performed by Bob Dylan; this was the year where the termination of the original GiIvaSunner channel was explained in-universe as being a scheme by Angry Joe, in a slapdash meme tribute to Baneposting in the one year that it was relevant on the channel. It was a mess we all adored following due to the clear passion for entertainment that lay underneath; and when Season 2 returned with an unbelievably explosive bang and showed just how much could be made with this chaos of a story being told, I was more excited than I can put into words. As said back on ULTRA S+G, Season 2 was when it felt as if EVERYONE was aboard the ride that the SiIvaGunner team was promising; shooting for the stars for quality and evolving the lore into something shockingly compelling despite its absurd origins.
It's hard, especially as someone who hardly ever lost their passion for the channel in the first place, to pinpoint exactly where things started to lose Season 2's momentum. Perhaps it was the two years spent covering Season 4, with all the focus spent on an event of unprecedented scale that all ultimately was an aside from the channel's typical mold; during the production of which many core team members wound up leaving to never return, including channel founder Chaze the Chat. Perhaps it was Season 3's more low-key format and direction, one that Chaze the Chat himself appeared adamant to steer away from when Season 4 Episode 1 first began; or perhaps it was all inherent to Season 2's overambitious nature, with the Christmas Comeback Crisis episodes growing ever more vast in scope, eventually resulting in a 6-year long gap between Episode 10 to 11. Perhaps it was later, perhaps it was sooner; nevertheless, its undeniable that the wait occurred, and the driving narrative that had enamored us all throughout Season 2 was left on ice, forever frozen in time on December 2016.
Yet it felt, in a way, inevitable that things would grow in this way. The SiIvaGunner team was growing, its members maturing, its worst influences leaving; and most important of all, their creative juices were flowing like mad. To be confined to one 12-episode run of a fake visual novel couldn't contain the ambitions this team have; even before the CCC began, the aforementioned Mr. Rental and projects of its ilk show just how hard it is to keep SiIvaGunner's contributors from doing what they want. Gradually, it felt as if both the team and us in the audience came to accept that inevitable constant – that the only predictable thing about SiIvaGunner is its unpredictability – and so the side projects grew to the scale of main projects. We'd see experimental projects still hinting at the main story such as The Lost Rip and The Life and Times of Wade L.D.; not long therafter, we'd get everything from the King for Another Day Tournament and NIGHTMARESCAPE ~ Unrestrained Hypercam 2 ~, to The Disappearance of Super Mario and Your Best Nightmario, to entire festivals containing their own events, art direction, and self-contained storylines. SiIvaGunner was no longer just on one lane, but doing so many different concepts and events and journeys with such excellent finesse; even though many had given up on the return of the Christmas Comeback Crisis itself returning, it was impossible not to be impressed and enamored by the effort put into everything that was, effectively, taking its place.
I've made it no secret that Season 5, despite having events I greatly enjoyed such as the aforementioned Mario incident and everything discussed on Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier, was the time at which my interest in the channel (particularly from a narrative perspective) felt more muted than before. Especially without the behind-the-scenes knowledge I know now of the team's troubled state, it to me was the year when I began to feel as if the channel was forever going to drift along in this excess of creative endeavors. Past an incomplete Christmas Comeback Crisis now filled with sideshoot stories, we still had Mr. Rental left unresolved, now had an AI running the channel that we knew next to nothing about, had a gigantic cast of 32 characters left from the King for Another Day Tournament that each seemed to be prodding at some sort of developments of their own, had Nutshackwoodman34's unexplainable cacophany still up in the air, had everything relating to Astronaut in the Ocean and Yankin', and a multitude of audio dramas with a canonicity that, at the time, felt largely up in the air. I'm well aware of how bizarre this all sounds and I want to clarify that I've long since accepted and adore just how much SiIvaGunner team have been able to do; but back then, I couldn't help but feeling as if things had steered out of control for the lore. In essence, I had to accept that SiIvaGunner was now primarily focusing on its rips, events, and quality; long-time followers of the channel's lore were becoming vastly outnumbered by a growing audience of KFAD kids, Friday Night Funkin' fans joining through excellent rips like Satinpanties Symphony, and those simply here to enjoy what the channel could offer.
This, then, brings us to Season 6 and Season 7. Despite not technically continuing those stories that I was longing after, throughout almost every corner of Season 6 I got the sense that the team was eager to make some genuine change to their status quo; as expressed back on Bramble Blast Collab and I've won, but at what costI've won, but at what cost, there's a solemn feel that underscores the season, the realization that one can't stay hung up to the past forever, which all culminated in its beautiful season finale. It felt as if the SiIvaGunner team had themselves realized just how large their world had gotten and were beginning to grab their many bulls by the horns; and, once grabbed, Season 7 felt like a year-long celebration of each and every facet of the channel's long life. With a series of tribute beautiful enough, as said on The Paragoomba and the Wiggler one whole year ago, to bring me to tears, paired alongside the unbelievable return of the core series Christmas Comeback Crisis with an eleventh episode freed from development hell; I felt as if I was finally, completely on track with everything SiIvaGunner could throw at me. The past was the past, its many endeavors had been celebrated; and now, everyone was caught up and ready to finish that story started so many years ago.
I never quite knew what to expect from Season 8, aside from an understandable sense that the team needed plenty of rest and time after having just finished up the biggest story-related release in the channel's entire history. And so, after just a few events of time to get to know our lovable new channel host Joke-Explainer 7000, I labeled this the "silly season"; a year for a new character to bring back some lower-key whimsy to the channel after the prior two seasons had so expertly reminded us of how much the team genuinely do care about the world they've (almost inadvertently) built. I had no qualms; Joke-Explainer 7000 was hilarious to follow through rips and events such as Super Ludacris JB World, the rips have been higher quality than ever through efforts like Wake Up! It's Friday! and no more nuzzles in my skin, and we were all on the same page in knowing exactly what would come next, eventually. The conclusion to it all.
Yet once again, history repeats itself; the only predictable thing about SiIvaGunner is its unpredictability.
On the train to my family home for a Christmas weekend, I check my phone to see a server-wide ping within the SiIvaGunner discord; was this related to that Direct that I'd told myself to watch after the fact? I shrugged and checked it out althesame, only to be met with an ominous link and a wish of good luck; https://hwcinternaldb.highquality.rip/. A portal into an in-universe file directory divided into five intriguingly named folders, collections of confounding yet alluring files. I return to the Discord server to confirm my suspicions; sure enough, for the first time in 7 years, the SiIvaGunner community is tasked with solving an ARG; a quest across websites, image files, encrypted text, file formats and high quality rips to uncover a truth buried deep within the channel. Yet to say it was only one truth would be misleading; with five folders came five separate branches, five separate community subsets, and five different endpoints.
Inexperienced as I am in ARGs to begin with, I was sadly also too occupied with the holidays to partake in these great mysteries being solved. Yet at every moment I had to myself, I would refresh myself on everything being discovered across all three branches, gradually growing more and more amazed at what I'd called the "silly" season was delivering. More than just providing further teases toward the finale to the Christmas Comeback Crisis, each path was addressing its own loose end from those intermediate years that I'd been so divided on. The FOOLS path explored the aforementioned The Lost Rip duo of NutshackWoodman34 and his best bro and actual brother Jerome, connecting their absurdist videos and reality-bending powers to the Fool's Spirit teased back in Season 7's April Fools event covered back on Christmas Spirit [FILE-07] (Beta Mix); The AIRTH path, meanwhile, uncovers buried logs, thoughts and feelings of the SiIvaGunner AI across all five years of its time spent as host of the channel. Most surprising of all to me, the BLACK path covered something I never thought I would see revisited; Season 2's alternative "Genocide ending" to the first-ever SiIvaGunner storyline, The Reboot, wherein Chad Warden instead chooses to take immediate control of SiIvaGunner for himself rather than sacrificing himself for the greater good. The release of Nice, Slick, Blackness was one of my most treasured memories in all my time following the channel, and seeing its events ACTUALLY explored so many years after the fact – alongside loose ends that I had long since given up on knowing the resolutions to – felt genuinely unbelievable.
I understand that, to even a lot of the channel's biggest fans, being as invested in its lore as I am may come across as a little ridiculous. But to say that this ARG was an absolute dream come true for me was an understatement; as if Seasons 6 and 7 weren't enough affirmation in themselves, as if the SiIvaGunner team hadn't already matched and exceeded all of my expectations with the treatment they gave CCC Episode 11 last year, the ARG and its revelations exceeded every expectation and idea I could have ever had for tying these eight seasons of the channel together. A Visual Novel, an Undertale fangame, an all-new KFAD Mojo! site, a Mr. Rental Choose-Your-Own Adventure game, the best-yet episode of NutshackWoodman34's escapades, and one more as-of-yet unrevealed reward to close the entire season with, a grab-bag of reveals unlike I could have ever thought of...
...all happening while the SiivaGunner YouTube channel itself – along with all the people blissfully unaware of the ARG happening – was uploading rips almost exclusively using hit YouTuber KSI's awful hit song Thick of It. Yeah, remember? PRIMEneria is what this blog post is meant to be about! Cast like a veil over all that's transpired since December 19th, the YouTube-only audience continued to blissfully truck along with one of the most obnoxious-yet-funny rip trends we've had in recent times.
The juxtaposition between the insane lore and fanservice being delivered behind the scenes versus the YouTube channel providing what may be the funniest possible stretch for Winter-themed song to base their event from is genuinely still making me giggle even days after the event's all wrapped up, and the best part is of course that the rips themselves were genuinely really good. Given my track record of covering Jake and Logan Paul rips like Logan Paul's Shop and It's Everyday Lake and last week's post on If Air Man came to life, that would be creepy, it should perhaps come as no surprise that awful YouTuber music is a pet favorite rip source of mine; yet the sheer quotability and horrendous flow of Thick of It makes rips like PRIMEneria special even by those standards. The change in pitch (key?) to the song itself sets it off on such a strong foot immediately, and though the initial 20-seconds or so of the rip are already a really funny mashup, it's what happens therafter that really makes shit funny. Toward the end of the first loop, and for the entire rest of the rip, KSI's vocals are pitch-shifted for specific segments to follow Corneria's punchy hi-octane melody in a way similar to something like no more nuzzles in my skin; and it's arguably even more funny given the song used.
The fucking gall of the SiIvaGunner team, man. The sheer audacity to make my every possible dream for the channel's future and legacy come true practically over the course of a week and to pair it with rips of KSI's Thick of It happening at the same time. Perhaps I wasn't so wrong after all; Season 8 may well still be the silly season, and PRIMEneria is the clearest, funniest showcase of that there could possibly be, capping off the year in unabashed style.
