Rip of the week: 30/12/2024
Uncanny Approaching
Season 6 No Album Release (Read More) Enemy Approaching (Extended Version) - Undertale
Ripped by Blookerstein, Myeauxyoozi Visuals by Moralem, Galacksy, A-Man, Sarvéproductions
Requested by @realchickenmanny and crickqt! (Ask Box, Discord)
And so, we've reached the end of the year. Christmas, holidays, Season 8 of SiIvaGunner; all come to an end with the celebratory bang of fire in the sky. And for this blog, too, I knew had to end the year in something big; in a rip of cosmic, cataclysmic power. After finishing up the previous post covering PRIMEneria, I solemnly returned to my expansive archives with arms folded behind my back, my gaze passing across dozens upon dozens of possible rips left in the blog's drafts; each possible contenders for a future post. Requests, gimmicks, anniversaries, lore, good rips, bad rips, a collection of treasures gathered across one-and-a-half years of running this blog for the purpose of review...and yet deep down, I always knew what had to be done. Since the blog's very beginning I was aware of its existence, a rip with energy so potent that I never once dared to approach it, yet I knew that it could not be ignored forever. The rip is, indeed, perhaps the most vile creation the SiIvaGunner team has yet made, a weapon of torture unleashed upon us at the apex of Undertale's 7th anniversary celebrations. Indeed, it is the magnum opus of SiIvaGunner's 6th Season; Uncanny Approaching.
Take a moment to picture yourself, sat at the computer in the far away time of September 2022. You're a big fan of the SiIvaGunner YouTube channel, which had uploaded high quality rips for six years and have been an absolute delight to follow throughout. A large part of that investment has been the channel's close ties to one of your favorite games: Undertale! From the very beginning, you've noted that it's as if the channel and game have had a sort of brotherly relationship, with lots of rips like Locked in the Underground, Field of Love and Cringe, Aphex and more showing a fantastic understanding and reverence for the game and its soundscape. Earlier in the very same year, for the big Minecraft anniversary event you also followed quite attentively, there was a particularly resonant piece – Fell From a High Place (Reprise) – which made it ever so evident how much Undertale means to so many people all around the world. And now, it was September 15th, the celebration of the game's release in full swing; midway through the day, you notice the upload of and watch the impeccably made Jesus of the Underground, floored by the ripper's devotion to such a large project and amazed at the end results. This is a truly fantastic anniversary indeed! What could possibly go wrong?
Yet at the back of your mind, you recall rips that appeared as if to hint at the brewing of a greater evil to come. SiIvaGunner, like Undertale itself, has always had a dash of insanity to it, a pinch of the insufferable for the sake of comedy. None had captured that vibe better, perhaps, than Mad Mew Mew Becoming Uncanny, merging Undertale with a multitude of sources - chief among them, as featured in its title, the king of brainrot. Whilst commonplace enough today to become 2024's word of the year, I think it's reasonable to say that 2021-2022 or so were when this kind of content truly began to rise in notoriety. It can be hard to put a proper definition on the term; it's the kind of widely attention-grabbing slop that infests TikTok and YouTube shorts, which has gone through so many degrees of ironic and unironic evaluation to where nobody really seems to know what to think of it anymore. The face of brainrot changes by the month – CostCo Guys, Skibidi Toilet (hey there, Hidden Headtoilets (skibidi toree 2)!), Gegagedigedagedago –but to me, its icon shall forever be the legendary Uncanny Mr. Incredible; a series of edited images depicting Mr. Incredible from The Incredibles in increasing stages of grief. These images and the video edits made for them are truly some of the sloppiest slop you can find online, like an evil and fucked up extension of the age-old meme format of "Thing -> Bad, Thing -> Good", yet designed to where it could theoretically...go on forever.
This brewing, bubbling evil, already being toyed around with by the SiIva team in rips like Level 8 - Eversion HD, would only grow and grow throughout the year; the true power of Uncanniness yet to be wholly harnessed, it's potential for creating endlessly engaging slop yet to be fully understood. Until at last, the fated day came; Undertale's anniversary stood in the crosshairs of the canny, and the day would be remembered not for its festivities, but for its pain. For Uncanny Approaching.
Even without playing the embedded video above, you've likely already put the pieces together of vaguely what sort of rip we're discussing here. A step above merely having images of Mr. Incredible react to captions with befitting music, Uncanny Approaching – as was foreshadowed in the aforementioned Level 8 - Eversion HD – features a selection of freshly-made images of Frisk, Undertale's protagonist, matching every stage of Mr. Incredible's canniness; and additionally, more than just a simple spiral downward, we're also treated to images of Frisk *gaining* canniness across escalating stages of celebration. The original Mr. Incredible Uncanny posting comes with a set standard of music tracks to pair with every image featured; similarly to the legendary Story of Undertale, each of those tracks are here rearranged in the sonic style of different parts of Undertale's vast soundtrack.
All of this in unison sets the stage for a genuinely high-quality adaptation of the braindead Uncanniness-posting; accolades already thrown toward the previously mentioned early appearances of Mr. Incredible Going Uncanny on the channel like Level 8 - Eversion HD. It is, indeed, perfectly befitting for the SiIvaGunner channel to take a concept so run into the ground by low-effort posters and to reenvision it into something truly grand...yet Uncanny Approaching goes many steps further beyond that simple milestone. Indeed, more than just music and images, more than just featuring every image for a one-and-done bit, Uncanny Approaching goes the full mile and features captions and Situations for our canny friend to react to; "you hop on your PC" -> "you see you friend connected on discord" -> "he sent you a message" -> "you decide to check it" -> "he invites you to a party after school tomorrow" -> "he says EVERYONE is invited!" and so on, and so forth. As you'll notice just from these brief excerpts, this "story" is written in a way that feels almost deliberately slow and painful, each snippet given a full Canny reaction, sometimes multiple identical ones in a row – althewhile also containing multiple grammatical errors and a general sense of slapdash-ness, perfectly capturing the feel of Canny-posting on TikTok and YouTube shorts; like super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont, its authenticity to the source material is to be commended despite the pain that it brings.
Pain is not an area unexplored by SiIvaGunner – one of my all-time favorite rips, Sex - Steve Harvey, occurred on a day pretty much entirely dedicated to it – yet the lengths that Uncanny Approaching goes toward inflicting it feels like a new level altogether. I've already set the stage for the lead-up to the rip, the absolute rug-pull of a surprise it provided after the beautiful Jesus of the Underground - yet I've been careful to omit one core detail. You're capable of seeing the runtime yourself right now just by clicking on the video embed, a gargantuan 37 minutes and 51 seconds; but back on its release, this video released as a YouTube Premiere, to be witnessed live in its entirety by an audience unaware of just how long they would have to endure it for. As someone who was there to see it all unfold, it was like seeing a prophecy come to life – the "Endless Slop" theory proposed in my mind during the months leading up to the rip was playing out in front of me, like a SiIvaGunner-branded precursor to that one AI Generated "Endless" Seinfeld parody. Only, of course, this was still a SiIvaGunner project, still ever so carefully teetering the line between slop and quality; the artwork still excellent, the rearrangements of all the Canny themes as fantastic as the same concept was back on Story of Undertale, and the story having some genuinely fun ties to the actual...well, story of Undertale.
And in a way, having all of those genuinely excellent qualities tied to a viewing experience as deliberately mind-numbing as this made the experience torturous in an even more special way. Later in the same day, we would get to see the images and music arrangements released in isolation from Uncanny Approaching through Enemy Approaching (Extended Version) (Short Version); yet before that released, if you wanted to hear just your favorite part of the Uncanny-posting's Undertale re-imagining, or explore the different pieces of art made for the project, you had to hunker down and sit through the premiere like everybody else. It's the perfect storm of slop and cinema; a blend of appeal and brainrot that draws you in with something compelling and keeps you stuck through a brainwashing regime of canniness. I've sat through the entire thing twice and I still don't believe I could tell you upfront what exactly happens in the story due to me outright zoning out of focus repeatedly both times; other than excellent quotes like "he look at you with evil intents, he about to grab you and turn you into a glitch man like jerry", "you get theb ox and run out of their as quick as you can", and "mom die", it's all become a noise of Undertale iconography and canniness.
Nevertheless, Uncanny Approaching is a true testament to the will of the SiIvaGunner team; to commit to an idea as genuinely insane as this is on paper and continue through with it despite – or perhaps even BECAUSE – of how much the audience will suffer through it. I can only imagine how long it must have taken, past drawing the artwork and arranging the music, for the video to have been put together; for each section to have been penned and composed so specifically as to maximize the torture involved. Indeed, I understand it to where it was Myeauxyoozi in particular who was responsible for this script, working with Blookerstein's arrangement talent demonstrated on The expanse of meme in past was split, A fiendish trap has now been set; Behind a tree the villains sit, Terror of sport, the Robbie's Net. alongside the art talent of four of the SiIva team's best artists; and given Myeauxyoozi's previous contributions to the channel such as Among Drip Drop Galaxy, Shaky Mountain and being the channel's biggest provider of rips using Harlem Shake, there is no doubt in my mind that he is – said with affection – mentally unwell enough to have been the best possible writer for the job.
Commendable in both its authentic arrangements (I especially love the Heart of Fire segment) and the surgical precision with which its attack on the senses was delivered, Uncanny Approaching was a once-in-a-lifetime event for those there to witness it all unfold. It's the kind of experience that's easy to forget amidst the insanity of SiIvaGunner's long history of uploads and events (mind, this was the same year as the insane Harlem Shakeover mentioned on Totally Shaaking Out Right Now), yet one that those who were there to see it will surely never forget. Indeed, I was there to suffer alongside everybody else, and it was the kind of pain I can only dream of experiencing through the channel again in the years to come.
