7grandmel

[7grandmel]

weirdo

[7grandmel]

Im pregnant and its mine #illhavewhatimhaving

[7grandmel]

birthday doodls foar circunflexo

[7grandmel]

woodman makes an ep.png

[7grandmel]

There's a note on the ground...

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.

[7grandmel]

That's what I said - It's mine!

Rip of the week: 10/02/2025

Unfounded Ownership

Season Mine No Album Release (Read More) Unfounded Revenge / Smashing Song of Praise (PAL Version) - Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Ripped by SamanthaMK

You know what I haven't felt in the premiere of a new SiIvaGunner Season in a very long time? Complete and utter confusion.

Within recent memory, with both Season 7 and Season 8, I felt as if their premieres served as comforting, reassuring statements on what the year set out to deliver; the celebratory Year of Grand Dad for the former, and the comfort in an old friend becoming host with the latter, covered on Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab. Both seasons would later come to deliver some amazing surprises throughout, particularly by their finales, but lots of their runs felt comfortably reassuring, showing a team on track with a vision clear to both themselves and to us in the audience. Even in the years before, the premieres have served like a comforting bridge into the future; Season 2, 3 and 4 Episode 1 all formally introduced to us by Chaze the Chat himself to explain the path going forward. And yet as 2025 begins, as MAGFest came to an end and the team geared back up to begin uploading...suddenly, things got weird. Despite the last season's ending being all about piecing things together, about building bridges to move forward; 2025's season began with what I can only describe as a non-sequitur. With barely as much as a warning, we were thrust into Stingy's world, into Season Mine - not Nine - and it all, indeed, belongs to him.

It's hardly the first time that the channel's control has been usurped by an unexpected out-of-left-field arrival - I spent last week's post on Tribute to a MAD Agent discussing Inspector Gadget's terrifying Season 2 rule, best demonstrated on Become as Gadget - yet what differentiates Stingy's takeover is the context building up to it all. There's an undeniable sense of impulsive hap-hazardry that surrounds the early years of SiIvaGunner, with projects and events coming and going on a whim and the channel only taking it all seriously whenever it felt like it. The ARG that concluded Season 8, covered similarly haphazardly back on PRIMEneria, was all about addressing this carefree event-building, piecing together every possible stray bit of lore dropped throughout the early years to form a greater understanding of the whole. For instance, back during the first anniversary of The Reboot in Season 2, we were shown Fly High, No Lies ~Genocide Ending~: an out-of-nowhere alternate timeline highlighting how things could have turned out in the original Reboot storyline following if Chad's own behavior was more "accurate to how he is in the real world", even including the line "this was my true plan all along". The implications of this alternate-reality Chad Warden were left completely unexplored therafter, until the current SiIva team built onto it for this very same ARG to completely reframe the Reboot storyline, Chad's behavior, and even the original motives behind the channel's defacto villain of nine years, The Voice Inside Your Head. This was but one subject of many that the Susie ARG directly addressed; it framed the Season, then, as one of putting all the pieces together, putting all of one's ducks in a row, for the explosive finale of the storyline that lies just ahead.

And then, within that framing, with MAGFest hype having come and gone, with The Meeting and its messaging still fresh in everyone's minds...Stingy arrives. "After numerous long internal debates deciding on the next channel host", the SiIva team says on Discord, "we felt like there was really no better choice than Stingy!"; keep in mind, dear reader, that Stingy himself has NEVER appeared in SiIvaGunner lore beforehand, and that his song, the Mine song, had at this point appeared exactly FOUR times in the channel's entire history. I was in complete shock at 1AM on my phone; seeing Stingy's public announcement on the YouTube Community tab, the profile picture changing in an instant, tabbing over to the Discord server to see fellow fans in just as much disarray as myself. Unheard of for any prior takeover, Stingy was claiming ownership of far more than just the channel; SiIvaGunner's very own Discord account, the Twitter, the BlueSky, the Newgrounds...with every passing minute, the Discord community scrambled to see which online platforms had yet to be claimed by the assertive young prince, each discovery met with dread mere minutes after being shared. Bandcamp, Minecraft, Roblox, TikTok, the official highquality.rip website, all claimed to be his; all to the tune of the YouTube channel's new wave of Stingy-themed rips. Surely, this was just a momentary takeover...right?

Despite the aforementioned sparse usage of the song prior on the channel, however, rips like Unfounded Ownership show just how fun of a source the Mine song really is. LazyTown has over the years gained quite a reputation in online circles for having genuinely really fun songs; the Pirate Song, Bake A Cake, and of course the SiIvaGunner-pioneered We Are Number One which I've covered everywhere from on we are number one but with outdated memes over it to We Are Number 4 (Golden). Robbie Rotten is hardly an unknown presence to us, and his constant output of rips since the beginning of Season 2 have shown just how capable the ripping team are at leveraging just one song in so many creative ways; its this matured, seasoned team that's now under Stingy's beck and call, and the touch for quality is already apparent this early on into his rule. Setting aside its sheer listenability in its own right for just a moment, Unfounded Ownership is filled with fantastic touches around just about every corner, with the thumbnail change being the most obvious one; replacing not just Lucas' front-and-center render with a prideful Stingy, but also various background screenshots from Brawl with images reaffirming Stingy's rule. Beyond that, though, you hear it around every part of the listening experience, such as the rising WANO trumpet fanfares and flairs from 0:28 to 0:40, the "MINE-MINE" stingers that appear loudly in the section following, and of course the "This instrumental riff is also mine" quote being so perfectly placed in the brief interlude inbetween the song's more hectic segments.

But to of course return to the main topic at hand; this rip shows just how much the channel's long-term rippers, rippers like SamanthaMK and the many more who have been helping the channel for half a decade's worth of time, have grown in experience and proficiency. We don't have official stems released for the Mine song the way we now do with WANO, and as prior mentioned it's not exactly one that's well explored online beyond low-effort MrMrMANGOHead-core parodies, and yet Unfounded Ownership sounds as if the team had been doing these rips for all of 2024 behind our backs. The pitch shifting is both hilarious and exceptionally done, working alongside the placement of specific vocals for harmony with Unfounded Revenge's melody; the repeating, compounding "Mine-mine-mine-mine-mine"'s at 0:14 followed by the high-pitched "it all belongs to meee~" show what I mean just about perfectly. It's in large part just what I find impressive about rips like no more nuzzles in my skin; merging two seemingly conflicting songs in degrees so far above a mere mashup that you begin to question how the ripper managed to sit through it all to begin with, the end product lying so, so far away.

Every relisten I find some new little part of Unfounded Ownership to love, and saying that makes me feel absolutely insane given that I still can't quite even comprehend the state that the channel itself is even in. I'm taken back to the beginning of Season 4 Episode 1, where Chaze the Chat introduced the season as being one explicitly aiming to be "more unpredictable and chaotic than ever before"; yet, paradoxically, making said announcement in the same means of season premieres as the prior two years had already done. Season 4 Episode 1 did indeed have some absurdist highlights - I'll never forget the likes of Chain of Memories 2 Day or Sex - Steve Harvey - and yet the Season ironically wound up becoming far more known for the most expected part of its run, the tournament sequel announced before the season even began; reflective, in a sense, of how Chaze the Chat's wish for chaos was announced in the most expected means possible. Funny enough, SamanthaMK even worked on last year's season premiere with Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab, a collab as comforting and reassuring as it was, in part, expected; With Season Mine, with Stingy's takeover, meanwhile, Chaze the Chat's promise for chaos is finally being followed through upon, the tables being flipped only after so much time had been spent carefully decorating it. It's with the first channel host to truly take over EVERYTHING, the first season to exclude a number from its name entirely, the first premiere in ages to make me feel genuinely uncertain about what's in the pipeline for the channel; all, of course, still paired with rips like Unfounded Ownership, that show the team's utmost confidence and proficiency running high behind it all.

[7grandmel]

Rip of the week: 10/02/2025

Unfounded Ownership

Season Mine No Album Release (Read More) Unfounded Revenge / Smashing Song of Praise (PAL Version) - Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Ripped by SamanthaMK

You know what I haven't felt in the premiere of a new SiIvaGunner Season in a very long time? Complete and utter confusion.

Within recent memory, with both Season 7 and Season 8, I felt as if their premieres served as comforting, reassuring statements on what the year set out to deliver; the celebratory Year of Grand Dad for the former, and the comfort in an old friend becoming host with the latter, covered on Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab. Both seasons would later come to deliver some amazing surprises throughout, particularly by their finales, but lots of their runs felt comfortably reassuring, showing a team on track with a vision clear to both themselves and to us in the audience. Even in the years before, the premieres have served like a comforting bridge into the future; Season 2, 3 and 4 Episode 1 all formally introduced to us by Chaze the Chat himself to explain the path going forward. And yet as 2025 begins, as MAGFest came to an end and the team geared back up to begin uploading...suddenly, things got weird. Despite the last season's ending being all about piecing things together, about building bridges to move forward; 2025's season began with what I can only describe as a non-sequitur. With barely as much as a warning, we were thrust into Stingy's world, into Season Mine - not Nine - and it all, indeed, belongs to him.

It's hardly the first time that the channel's control has been usurped by an unexpected out-of-left-field arrival - I spent last week's post on Tribute to a MAD Agent discussing Inspector Gadget's terrifying Season 2 rule, best demonstrated on Become as Gadget - yet what differentiates Stingy's takeover is the context building up to it all. There's an undeniable sense of impulsive hap-hazardry that surrounds the early years of SiIvaGunner, with projects and events coming and going on a whim and the channel only taking it all seriously whenever it felt like it. The ARG that concluded Season 8, covered similarly haphazardly back on PRIMEneria, was all about addressing this carefree event-building, piecing together every possible stray bit of lore dropped throughout the early years to form a greater understanding of the whole. For instance, back during the first anniversary of The Reboot in Season 2, we were shown Fly High, No Lies ~Genocide Ending~: an out-of-nowhere alternate timeline highlighting how things could have turned out in the original Reboot storyline following if Chad's own behavior was more "accurate to how he is in the real world", even including the line "this was my true plan all along". The implications of this alternate-reality Chad Warden were left completely unexplored therafter, until the current SiIva team built onto it for this very same ARG to completely reframe the Reboot storyline, Chad's behavior, and even the original motives behind the channel's defacto villain of nine years, The Voice Inside Your Head. This was but one subject of many that the Susie ARG directly addressed; it framed the Season, then, as one of putting all the pieces together, putting all of one's ducks in a row, for the explosive finale of the storyline that lies just ahead.

And then, within that framing, with MAGFest hype having come and gone, with The Meeting and its messaging still fresh in everyone's minds...Stingy arrives. "After numerous long internal debates deciding on the next channel host", the SiIva team says on Discord, "we felt like there was really no better choice than Stingy!"; keep in mind, dear reader, that Stingy himself has NEVER appeared in SiIvaGunner lore beforehand, and that his song, the Mine song, had at this point appeared exactly FOUR times in the channel's entire history. I was in complete shock at 1AM on my phone; seeing Stingy's public announcement on the YouTube Community tab, the profile picture changing in an instant, tabbing over to the Discord server to see fellow fans in just as much disarray as myself. Unheard of for any prior takeover, Stingy was claiming ownership of far more than just the channel; SiIvaGunner's very own Discord account, the Twitter, the BlueSky, the Newgrounds...with every passing minute, the Discord community scrambled to see which online platforms had yet to be claimed by the assertive young prince, each discovery met with dread mere minutes after being shared. Bandcamp, Minecraft, Roblox, TikTok, the official highquality.rip website, all claimed to be his; all to the tune of the YouTube channel's new wave of Stingy-themed rips. Surely, this was just a momentary takeover...right?

Despite the aforementioned sparse usage of the song prior on the channel, however, rips like Unfounded Ownership show just how fun of a source the Mine song really is. LazyTown has over the years gained quite a reputation in online circles for having genuinely really fun songs; the Pirate Song, Bake A Cake, and of course the SiIvaGunner-pioneered We Are Number One which I've covered everywhere from on we are number one but with outdated memes over it to We Are Number 4 (Golden). Robbie Rotten is hardly an unknown presence to us, and his constant output of rips since the beginning of Season 2 have shown just how capable the ripping team are at leveraging just one song in so many creative ways; its this matured, seasoned team that's now under Stingy's beck and call, and the touch for quality is already apparent this early on into his rule. Setting aside its sheer listenability in its own right for just a moment, Unfounded Ownership is filled with fantastic touches around just about every corner, with the thumbnail change being the most obvious one; replacing not just Lucas' front-and-center render with a prideful Stingy, but also various background screenshots from Brawl with images reaffirming Stingy's rule. Beyond that, though, you hear it around every part of the listening experience, such as the rising WANO trumpet fanfares and flairs from 0:28 to 0:40, the "MINE-MINE" stingers that appear loudly in the section following, and of course the "This instrumental riff is also mine" quote being so perfectly placed in the brief interlude inbetween the song's more hectic segments.

But to of course return to the main topic at hand; this rip shows just how much the channel's long-term rippers, rippers like SamanthaMK and the many more who have been helping the channel for half a decade's worth of time, have grown in experience and proficiency. We don't have official stems released for the Mine song the way we now do with WANO, and as prior mentioned it's not exactly one that's well explored online beyond low-effort MrMrMANGOHead-core parodies, and yet Unfounded Ownership sounds as if the team had been doing these rips for all of 2024 behind our backs. The pitch shifting is both hilarious and exceptionally done, working alongside the placement of specific vocals for harmony with Unfounded Revenge's melody; the repeating, compounding "Mine-mine-mine-mine-mine"'s at 0:14 followed by the high-pitched "it all belongs to meee~" show what I mean just about perfectly. It's in large part just what I find impressive about rips like no more nuzzles in my skin; merging two seemingly conflicting songs in degrees so far above a mere mashup that you begin to question how the ripper managed to sit through it all to begin with, the end product lying so, so far away.

Every relisten I find some new little part of Unfounded Ownership to love, and saying that makes me feel absolutely insane given that I still can't quite even comprehend the state that the channel itself is even in. I'm taken back to the beginning of Season 4 Episode 1, where Chaze the Chat introduced the season as being one explicitly aiming to be "more unpredictable and chaotic than ever before"; yet, paradoxically, making said announcement in the same means of season premieres as the prior two years had already done. Season 4 Episode 1 did indeed have some absurdist highlights - I'll never forget the likes of Chain of Memories 2 Day or Sex - Steve Harvey - and yet the Season ironically wound up becoming far more known for the most expected part of its run, the tournament sequel announced before the season even began; reflective, in a sense, of how Chaze the Chat's wish for chaos was announced in the most expected means possible. Funny enough, SamanthaMK even worked on last year's season premiere with Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab, a collab as comforting and reassuring as it was, in part, expected; With Season Mine, with Stingy's takeover, meanwhile, Chaze the Chat's promise for chaos is finally being followed through upon, the tables being flipped only after so much time had been spent carefully decorating it. It's with the first channel host to truly take over EVERYTHING, the first season to exclude a number from its name entirely, the first premiere in ages to make me feel genuinely uncertain about what's in the pipeline for the channel; all, of course, still paired with rips like Unfounded Ownership, that show the team's utmost confidence and proficiency running high behind it all.

[7grandmel]

made something fucked up

[7grandmel]

Rip of the week: 03/02/2025

Tribute to a MAD Agent

Season 3 Featured on: Inspector Gunner 2 With Critic

Ripped by Dirty Spaceman

One of the first ever rips I wanted to highlight when I first started this blog was Season 2's 【＝３】e-MUNO Disco (vs. 音MAD AGENT). I would argue even today that it's more or less an essential listen for those looking to learn what makes SiIvaGunner such a special channel, and was likewise was one of the first rips to truly make me fascinated by the art of high quality ripping way back in the day. That affection I felt - and still feel - for it was, quality aside, in large part due to its release timing; back on ULTRA S+G, I made an effort to detail how Season 2 in particular was such a hugely exciting time to be a SiIvaGunner fan. There was a real sense of community and investment in all that the channel was doing, following the excitement of its return past the planned ending, the insane amount of effort going into keeping the story and lore going with the Christmas Comeback Crisis, and how so many events like Smooth day covered on Haltmanna feat. Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 were designed to be so intrinsically tied to the channel's lore. It was inevitable that that momentum couldn't be continued forever, and Season 3 became a more lower-key, transitional period in the channel's life as the team figured out just where to pull SiIvaGunner going forward - yet from that reflective period spawned one of the most memorable events in the channel's life, all distilled perfectly with Tribute to a MAD Agent; April Fools 2018, the Nostalgia Critic Takeover.

Barring just the first King for a Day Tournament that I've still only covered briefly back on FINAL DESTINATION, I feel like the Nostalgia Critic takeover is more or less THE event to remember from Season 3. Its core premise is one I've already covered in some detail on CG Man HD Remastered Edition; with Doug Walker in charge of the channel now over two years past its initial Season 1 run, the event sought to evoke nostalgia from those of who had been following since the channel's absolute earliest days. Setting aside all lore, all progress, all the sights toward the future, the Nostalgic Critic takeover became like a prelude for what something like Season 7 would later relish in with rips like Our Sweet Parsley, to pay tribute to what had come before. The takeover achieved this nostalgic effect through a multitude of means; this was the period where lots of the original GiIvaSunner rips of January-March 2016 were first reuploaded, where old amateurish rips were lovingly remastered along the lines of Fragile Snowman (Remastered) or what we'd see way later on Violet Snow Memories. This introspective feel had prior in the season only been felt through the expected increase in quality in rip output, but now for the first time in months it felt as if so many parts of the community were on the same page, reflecting on the same rips, remembering just how many stupid bits Season 1 had, and overall just taking a step back to recognize just how far everything had come in just two short years.

It's that sense of fleeting community - that conversation between you, your fellow viewers and the team maintaining kayfabe behind a YouTube account - that sat at the core of my engagement with the SiIvaGunner channel. The core that was beating so strongly throughout those first two seasons of the channel, the core I've tried writing about for rips like go home youre drunk man, and the core that I could feel once again here in Season 3 through Doug Walker's forceful interference. Yet...that is only half the story, only half of the takeover's nature. Once it all began on April 1st 2018, Critic was unknowingly joined in his attempt to rule the channel by Inspector Gadget; to some, but a cartoon character from a bygone age, but to SiIvaGunner fans who followed Season 2, a demon thought to have been vanquished long ago. His inexplicable rise to power in Season 2 was one of the absolute highlights of that run, a sense of panic and unease spreading through the community as for what this meant for the status quo of SiIvaGunner (one we're undergoing Right Now at the start of Season 9, funny enough), all of which I covered all too briefly back on my writing on Become as Gadget. And so, the takeover was twofold; We had the Critic giving us throwbacks to the budding months of Season 1, Inspector Gadget giving us that constant sense of unease felt during his Season 2 run, and the two combined served as a further extension of the "Minecraft with Gadget" bit that had originally provoked the latter's prominence as a channel meme to begin with; a critic and a figment of his imagination, butting heads in a way that felt oh so typical of the old age of YouTube.

With all that preamble out of the way, it's hopefully made somewhat clear just how effective the Nostalgia Critic With Gadget (or whatever its proper name ought to be) takeover truly was in reminding us of how much love we still hold for SiIvaGunner; and, in turn, how much love SiIvaGunner's team holds for itself, holistically. Enter, then, Dirty Spaceman's Tribute to a MAD Agent, wrapping up everything I've thus far covered into one simple package. Without all the aforementioned context provided, the combination of its rip title and the rip's contents may make very little sense - why would a Pokémon Ruby rip of YO-KAI DISCO from Mamorukun Curse! be a "Tribute to a MAD Agent"? - but with the context available, a viewer can suddenly triangulate just what the rip is made in tribute TO; the aforementioned 【＝３】e-MUNO Disco (vs. 音MAD AGENT), the channel's at-that-time most prominent rip using YO-KAI DISCO. The connection was easy to make passively at the time both due to the song's lack of coverage on the channel otherwise, but also because both the rip and its tribute here employ the same slight speed-up to the source song, something that, as I would later find out, many famous YTPMVs/MADs of the song such as wazgul's SEN-TRY Disco. This would further be done on future YO-KAI DISCO rips like D-VA DISCO from Season 4 Episode 1, but back in Season 3 it was a connection that felt almost exclusive to these two rips; a tribute, then, hence its namesake.

And indeed, beyond being a tribute, Tribute to a MAD Agent is a damn good rip in its own right. Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald has an absolutely iconic soundscape, typically lead by loud brass, yet on Route 111 is led by an iconic bouncy synth with the big-band sound instead delegated to the song's backing and percussion. This lead synth is a lot chirpier than the one in the original YO-KAI DISCO yet still captures that same bouncy energy, aided tremendously by the little details surrounding it in this arrangement. No part of Route 111's original melody persists here; akin to rips like Float Islands (Kirby 64 Arrangement), this rip seeks to wholly arrange its song using only instruments from its source game and finds tons of wiggle room for small details throughout that process, such as the subtle call-and-responses in the melody as heard in parts like 0:34, the lead synth met with the sound of a distinctly different synth replying to its inquiry in kind.

Moreover, though, I can't shake the feeling that the choice of Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire as the game to do this tribute to was a deliberate one. Dirty Spaceman didn't begin ripping until early into Season 2's life, and doesn't have the *most* extensive list of contributions, yet is also a ripper who nevertheless strikes me as very aware of the channel's entire legacy. The one prior rip of his I've covered on here, Maskettaman - Dr. Pavel's Fly​-​So​-​Good, was yet another sort of tribute; a love letter to Baneposting, a meme previously quite prominent during the channel's first year, yet faded from use due to its unconventional nature as a source. He knows internet history, and he knows SiIvaGunner history; thus, the choice of game for Tribute to a MAD Agent, to use the game used for the very first SiIvaGunner rip ever made and released, feels like all too deliberate of a choice. Like mentioned back on Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab, few games have as close of a tie to the earliest of SiIvaGunner's days as Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire, and few moments in the channel's life were as focused on remembering said early days as the very event Tribute to a MAD Agent was made for; in that way, the rip is able to at once reference Season 1 and Season 2 in a way that's surprisingly understated yet immediately understandable for those watching.

I'll be honest and say that I spent a lot of the lead-up to writing this post simply looking for parts of Season 3 that I'd remember enough to write about - mind, with Tribute to a MAD Agent this is now the fourth-or-so time that I cover this very event. Yet I mean not to suggest that it was the one good part of an underwhelming year; rather, that the Critic and Gunner were able to more clearly amplify the essence that the season as a whole was sort of going for, amplifying an understated pursuit to continue reminding us all of why we all got so invested in this stupid channel in the first place. Season 3 was a period of things bubbling, with rips and rippers continuing to grow, yet never truly exploding in ways that felt out of step with what the channel ought to be. Starting off small, hitting a sudden, hastily-planned, channel-changing event partway through the year, with sprinkles conveying the meaning of the greater whole dished out in the midst of a sea of self-expression...in that way, Season 3 is like a microcosm of SiIvaGunner's entire existence, a summary of its life only two years after it began. Tribute to a MAD Agent is not the most glamorous, standout work of the year, not the most impressive effort that had been made at that point; yet it, like so many rips of its prior Seasons I've covered before, serves as a small sample, a taste test, of one of the many flavors that make this channel so worth having followed in the long term; for the jokes, for the bangers, and for the memories.

[7grandmel]

...I see a hand.

[7grandmel]

found this old piece in my files - still quite like it, so I thought I'd share! i made this one for the silvagunner 7th anniversary video [you can see the drawing at 14:43]

[7grandmel]

Across its 9 years of operation, the SiIvaGunner channel has to date released 130 albums on Bandcamp, mostly made up of collections of prior released rips from the YouTube channel.

Of these albums, however, exactly two are credited to a different album artist than SiIvaGunner himself:

SUPER GANGSTA BROS. MIXTAPE (PROD. HALTMANN WORK$$$), released in 2021 and credited to "SIIVAGUNNER CRANK SQUAD" in reference to the original "Crank Squad" group responsible for the Crank That Super Mario parody. Almost every ripper on the album is also credited under an edited pseudonym.

OGG AND GADGET'S FUCKING COOL COVER ALBUM, released in 2025 and credited to "Ogg and Gadget", who are also credited for every single track featured on the album.

[7grandmel]

final fantasy vii? is that the one i played?

[7grandmel]

made these lil drawings to use for some custom acrylic charms im buying...

[7grandmel]

this actually happened my dad has access to the siivagunner backroom

[7grandmel]

[7grandmel]

Rip of the week: 27/01/2025

Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix)

Season 5 No Album Release (Read More) Concrete Jungle (Concrete Man Stage) (Alpha Mix) - Mega Man 9

Ripper Unknown

Requested by fezaki! (Discord)

The big appeal of Season 5 of SiIvaGunner for me, four years after the fact, is that it contains so many gems that I'm yet to discover, due to my detachment from the channel during 2021. I've been the song and dance a number of times; despite a handful of cool happenings like the Masked Wolf / Yankin' rivalry covered on Epic Rap Battles of History: Funny vs. Funnier, and the neat audio drama stories like what I discussed on Knowledge of the Depths, this was the year where the channel felt rather aimless in overall direction going forward. Without a huge investment in the ongoing story, I myself felt less engaged to want to investigate every uploaded rip as closely as I otherwise would have wanted to; yet despite lacking in overall direction, the production quality of rips had begun reaching previously unseen highs. Though the King for Another Day Tournament had ended two years prior, it felt to me as if the quality that said event promised had begun seeping into the channel's everyday uploads, as if the team had understood that layered, ambitious arrangements and mashups were just as appealing outside of events as they were as part of them. As a result of all this, Season 5 saw TONS of rips just like Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix); tragically underrated, largely divorced from the channel's goings-ons, yet OH so deliciously quality.

Sometimes, the great appeal of a rip is understood right from just hearing the concept. Joke lists on wikis can't always communicate immediately the effectiveness of a YTPMV, mashup or arrangement, be it the inherent comedic sound to Slope Dude's mix of sources, the sheer audacity and polish of no more nuzzles in my skin, or the context that surrounds a meme as dense in history as Bottom G and Lagplane. Yet with Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix), after seeing it amidst my requests and searching for it on the wiki, it clicked IMMEDIATELY just why this rip was worth discussing. Soulja Boy is a character who's been around in ripping circles since the channel's earliest days, an icon prominent in the SoundClown shitposting scene that SiIvaGunner grew out of; and a single glance at Dr. Soulja should be enough to immediately tell you why. From the listener's perspective, its an immediately charming and funny source, be it from the iconic steel drums and finger-snapping percussion or how its paired with the dorky, almost pathetic attempt at coolness that Soulja Boy's performance in Crank That evokes. From the perspective of the ripper, Crank That is in the same category as songs like Space Jam discussed on Hoopache and the yet-to-be-covered Chip tha Ripper freestyle; As comedic rap music with 4/4 time signatures andimmediately recognizable, funny-sounding beats, they're almost comically easy to just drag-and-drop on top of existing 4/4 video game music with little to no tweaking. It was their ease of production, and how it led to an absolute overabundance of low-effort rips throughout Season 1, that resulted in the entire Mr. Rental storyline covered on Mr. Rental [B Side] ~ Out of Options; its this entry-level skill floor that makes rips like The Jamminest of All stand out immediately in quality; and, indeed, it's the knowledge that all Soulja Boy is good for is his funny sound on Crank That that makes Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix) such an immediate stand-out.

Indeed, as you may well hear from just a few seconds of listening; Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix) is far from your everyday Soulja Boy rip, reinventing the scene even after Season 4 Episode 2 had already done so a year prior through the Crank That revitalization covered on Koopa Street. It is, paradoxical as it may sound, a Soulja Boy rip *without* Crank That in focus; still filled with Soulja Boy's immediately identifiable, half-hearted attempts at self-confidence, but notably lacking in those immediately identifiable steel drums. They're still there, to be clear - they make an absolutely triumphant appearance midway through the song playing whats best described as a backing-instrumental solo at 0:44 - but a majority of the rip is instead spent covering the separate Soulja Boy hit Bird Walk. Comparatively, it's notably quite a louder song than Crank That; the vocals layered and reverberating make Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix) sound almost oppressively excited, like you're listening to a group of cheering Soulja Boys in the stands, their cheering given amazing melodic direction through Concrete Jungle's fast-paced melody. Deeper in the mix, you can indeed hear that Bird Walk's lead vocals are pitched to follow along said melody in a way similar to rips like I will Never be a Redneck, yet its fittingly buried underneath the loudness of Bird Walk's vocals mashed up with the melody, the chiptune lead still also playing entirely unaltered right alongside it.

As someone completely unengaged in the larger Soulja Boy discography, the rip is a genuinely super fun listen in large part due to how familiar-yet-unfamiliar it sounds throughout. You hear bits and pieces of Crank That, you can identify Soulja Boy's unmistakeable swagger, and yet it never *quite* sounds like something you've heard before; which, honestly, makes it pretty funny that the rip is using music from Mega Man 9 in particular. The game Aiming to more or less be a spiritual throwback to Mega Man 2 in every way but name, the Concrete Jungle theme can pretty easily be compared directly to Wood Man's Stage theme in structure and the level it's used within; a comparison only made funnier given Wood Man's own high importance on SiIvaGunner itself as written about back on Nice, Slick, Blackness. In that sense, intentional as it may or may not have been, Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix) is almost like a bizarre, alternate-reality version of the kind of rip you'd expect to hear during Season 1 or Season 2; Soulja Boy and Wood Man, but it's not quite Soulja Boy, and it's not quite Wood Man, and yet its an absolute indisputable banger despite those restrictions. The, pardon the choice of words, uncanny feel of the rip is only emphasized by how, per the Wiki, two of the songs of which pieces of are used in the mix remain completely unidentified; nevertheless, they add to the cacophony in a way that still feels composed just enough to stay on track. Variety and escalation, like I've discussed on rips like Be Cool, Be Wild and Be My Girl, is the secret spice to making a SiIvaGunner rip truly memorable, and these little sprinkles keep the rip's energy topped up throughout its 3-minute runtime.

It's a damn shame that the rip's author remains completely unidentified, as there is tons of small little details in execution that I feel the need to commend. There's so much fun had throughout the rip, combining Bird Walk with whatever additional sources join the mix in ways both subtle and blatant, the aforementioned occasional but understated appearances of Crank That's steel drums, or, as also mentioned briefly before, how the rip still insists on having a quiet vocal lead pitch-shifted to Concrete Jungle's melody despite ultimately being secondary to the mashup playing above it. In particular, though, there's a moment right around 01:11, just a few seconds after the first unidentified source is added to the mix, where the progression of the song - its percussion, backing, melody, etc. - is halted for a split second, just to recapture a vocal quirk of the newly-added source. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, the kind of subtle tweak for flavor I otherwise associate with rips by recognized rippers like Eazystep or Sweatpants Select; and yet here it is within Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix), an album-less, less-than-20K-views, 4-years old uncredited rip that I only found out about from a chance encounter on my submission spreadsheet. And it's a rip that's not just well made, but one that takes perhaps the most played out concept in all of SoundClown history - 4/4ths rap mashups - and twists and subverts your every expectation on them in ways you never thought SiIvaGunner could do five whole years into its run. That right there is, once again, the absolute magic of Season 5 SiIvaGunner for me in action; that classics on the level of Concrete Crank (Soulja Mix), rips waiting to showcase the ground they've secretly broken in being conceptually genius and filled with quality in execution, could just be waiting around every corner.