Todays rips: 02/04/2024
Our Sweet Parsley and ...of 2023 and Christmas Spirit [FILE-07] (Beta Mix)
Season 7 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume Sapphire
Ripped by cookiefonster
Season 7 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume Sapphire
Rip credited to "Kai Cenaze the Evil Gyat"
Season 7 Part of: Haltmann's Archives
Ripped by Mitchell
Did everyone enjoy yesterday's April Fools bit? I hope you did, it was a ton of fun - and if you missed it, you can use Raft Ride ~ The Story So Far to get yourself up to speed. But now its time to move past my own silly April Fools joke and back to the SiIvaGunner channel's bit - for the one event I've wanted to cover on this day for months now. In terms of these events, its hard to top just how excellently executed and well-rounded Mario's death event in Season 5 with Your Best Nightmario was - but for me, the event held last year just narrowly takes the crown for me. April Fools of 2023, the Season 7 event held 367 days ago (leap year!), is one of the most heartfelt, silly, and outright fun events the channel has ever had. And yes, I couldn't narrow it down - I HAD to feature three rips from it. Hopefully, you'll understand why.
To start, I think it needs to be established just how BIG this event was. There have been far larger in scope events on SiIva before - the King for Another Day tournament basically lasted from September to Thank You, Everybody! across several months and over a thousand videos - but April Fools 2023 is different. All 248 rips uploaded were done so not across months, not across weeks - but ALL DURING April 1st itself, within a 24 hour timespan. Now granted, 21 of those were Trailer Stringers for Garten of Banban (don't worry about it) - but it still speaks to the sheer bredth of the event itself. It was downright agonizing to think of just three, two, let alone one rip to feature on the blog to cover this event, because unlike with Your Best Nightmario or Grand Dad Metropolis - there's not truly one set of rips that best encapsulate everything about it.
Which, then, brings us to the event's theme, the main hook, one that compared to the above mentioned April Fools events from prior years, is quite subtle. You may have noticed that each of the three featured rips share a quirk in common in their title - a (Beta Mix), or in the case of ...of 2023, (Beta Mix) (Beta Mix). What's that all about? Well, Season 7 as a whole can be best described as a loveletter and celebration to the *entire* SiIvaGunner channel - this is a large part of what RIP² was about as I covered in SING A SONG ABOUT HOPES AND DREAMS and Return to Collision Clouds. It wasn't just cheering for KFAD, wasn't just remembering The Reboot, wasn't just being nostalgic for Season 1 - every inch of SiIvaGunner's history, obscure or popular, was brought up, remixed, paid tribute to, and so much more throughout the whole year, and the year's April Fools event was the greatest testament to it. We all slowly realized what that (Beta Mix) suffix meant - that each of the many, many rips uploaded that day, were *direct tributes* to the rips uploaded in the channel's past, elaborations upon or spoofs or alternate takes on these classic - or obscure! - rips.
And that side of the coin is what I think Our Sweet Parsley in particular captures brilliantly. Sonic Adventure's My Sweet Passion saw two absolutely classic rips be made of it during Season 1: The first, Our Sweet Passion, is made in the channel's earliest months and is one of the most concise examples of a truly good bait and switch, playing the track's instrumentals but having its lyrics be read aloud, dramatically yet with a confused inflection, by ripper How2BeEpic, emphasizing the bizarre word choices and writing to comedic effect. In the season's final months, Harmony Friends of Coconut Gun fame mentioned back in CG Man HD Remastered Edition, gave us My Sweet Parsley, a rip that sentence-mixes these same bizarre lyrics in YouTube Poop-esque fashion whilst still playing the original instrumental behind it all. Our Sweet Parsley, then, sees cookiefonster pay tribute to both at the same time in a rip I'm sure many of us thought possible, yet had likely forgotten about by the time Season 7 was upon us seven whole years later: a perfect fusion of the two. That's right - the lyrics of the YouTube Poop-ified My Sweet Parsley are read out with the same dramatic, quite-unfitting voice as Our Sweet Passion, and its arguably even funnier: Since there's no sentence mixing done, we get to hear first-hand cookiefonster's descent into madness reading off how Amy "had to shave it". And to really bring the point home of how much of a loveletter this entire event was, the aforementioned descent into madness is immediately followed by a bait-and-switch performance of the DK Rap with changed lyrics, directly paying tribute to Harmony Friends' Coconut Gun Rap. And then there's a sly reference to Thunder, Rain, and Lightning just after that - ANOTHER Harmony Friends rip from Season 1!!
You see what I mean, right? This was just one of the 240+ rips uploaded this day, but a ton of them had this same sort of love and care poured into them, no matter how shitpost-y they may seem from the outside. For me, the entire day was like being continuously rewarded for having kept up with SiIvaGunner so closely since its inception - yet more than the average use of the term "fanservice" implies, it all felt like it was done with the most genuine and wholesome, mutual respect between rippers behind-the-scenes. And, well, I say rippers - but part of the fun with the event was that it extended far past just rips! ...of 2023 is a (Beta Mix) version of a fucking *VLOG* of all things, the Vlog that channel founder Chaze the Chat recorded to announce the end of SiIvaGunner Season 2 and the beginning of SiIvaGunner Season 3. In other words, the equivalent of an update video, not anything actually core to the channel - yet still a video that die-hard fans like myself have long kept in mind since it was made.
I have no clue who "Kai Cenaze the Evil Gyat" is, but I want to thank them sincerely for creating the funniest rip I've ever seen out of one of SiIvaGunner's few completely-straightfaced videos, one that I mostly remembered for its very funny thumbnail. In some ways, it's the most classic of YouTube Poop, with sentence mixing and edits done purely for the silliness of "he's not saying what he's supposed to!!". But there's little nods to the fanbase's running jokes in the background - The Christmas Comeback Crisis development hell, the Rave.DJ sticker in the bottom right of the whole video, and so on - all the while, prominently, the entire video is coated in modern-day-YouTube content mill slop from top to bottom. A reaction video cam of Chaze the Chat, based on the Season 1 ending announcement The nutshack theme but the first nutshack is replaced with me ending the channel but edited to basically do nothing but say "uhm", constant reminders to like and subscribe, sensory-video sound effects - its genuinely absurd in a hysterical way to see such a tranquil, normal "olden days" YouTube video be slathered top to bottom in this kind of stuff - and it shows just how far this event went to fuck around with our past knowledge of the channel's history.
But, you know me - I'm a lorehead - and alongside all these videos, we also got the very special morsel of Christmas Spirit [FILE-07] (Beta Mix). I've long since accepted that a lot of things that happen on SiIvaGunner, especially nowadays, don't really have any direct ties to greater channel lore - that's completely fine, and its allowed the team to flex their creativity and individual skills in ways they couldn't whilst being ran under Chaze the Chat's administration in the first four seasons. Yet for this silly, downright pure-fun holiday event, Mitchell goes back to (Beta Mix) up one of the old Haltmann's Archives videos, the videos made during Season 2 and Season 3 specifically to condense and help convey old and new lore to the audience. It is, admittedly, not very serious, likely not even meant to be taken *seriously* - but it depicts a sort of glitch in the system, with the log changing from a researcher team's findings regarding "Christmas Spirit", to suddenly focus on a new, unknown substance called Fools' Spirit, a substance that appeared out of nowhere yet able to "warp and corrupt the space around itself". The testing is described as fruitless, yet as the log ends, we're shown a peek into the elusive testing grounds previously only described verbally - now covered in mist as pink as the Fools' Spirit, and evidently causing glitches to the actively-running SiIvaGunner experiments.
The rip is far simpler and straightforward than the abovementioned two - its less rip and more textbox - but I think its the initiative and attention to detail that really speaks to me here. The original Christmas Spirit [FILE-07] was well over five years old by the time this event rolled around, covering lore that hadn't been touched upon since the last main Christmas Comeback Crisis episode from just about as long ago - lore that, compared to stuff like Figments as covered in Bowser's Finale, is far less relevant to the channel's status quo. To find a way to bring back that old lore, repurpose it for the intents of this new event, and all the while having it tie together with the current state of the lore as well!!! You can see at the end, the laptop screen describes "Illucidity Active", describing the dream environment in which SiIvaGunner exists within during the entirety of Season 7 in particular. This Fools' Spirit then infests the laptop, and by extension SiIvaGunner's own dreams - giving us the entire April Fools events' gimmick to begin with! And hell, depending on how you read into things, it could even be viewed as - unintentional or not - foreshadowing for some of the great reveals made during the Season 7 finale, One Last Chance [Episode 11] of the Christmas Comeback Crisis.
Do you see why this event was like heaven on earth for me, the notorious overthinker of SiIvaGunner lore? This channel is my autism fuel, it is my Pokédex - and the entirety of April Fools 2023 was like being personally thanked for 24 hours straight for my commitment and love for the channel. No, you silly doofuses - thank YOU for running the channel to begin with, for keeping it so incredibly fresh for eight years and running!! I could do this sort of breakdown for far more than three rips from this event - if you gave me infinite time, I would GLADLY repeat Raft Ride ~ The Story So Far but for April Fools 2023 -, but I think its best I leave you all to explore the event on your own. It needs to be emphasized just how magical Season 7 was for me - it was the thing that made me start this damn blog to begin with!! - and it fills my heart with such joy to see that so much of the SiIvaGunner team loves this channel in its entirety. Be it the love for rips, like with Our Sweet Parsley, love for lore like with Christmas Spirit [FILE-07] (Beta Mix), or love for quite literally everything inbetween like with ...of 2023 - I'm forever assured that SiIvaGunner will stay in good hands in the years to come. Godspeed, you beautiful bastards. April Fools.
