Rip of the week: 23/12/2024
PRIMEneria
Season 8 Featured on: Thickmas
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.
Rock the fuck on, SiIva team.