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Silksong has rapidly outpaced Elden Ring in terms of the amount of copium—a fun little portmanteau of ‘cope’ and ‘opium’—its fanbase has had to generate to keep its heart pumping after six whole years. A recent developer tweet saw the hive buzzing, but alas, the fanbase has been let down once again.
While plumbing the depths of this conspiracy theory, however, I stumbled across a YouTube channel called “Daily Silksong News” and stared, a little staggered, at its (then) latest video, day 1,462. Surely not, I remember thinking, before having myself a little scroll and realising—with a sinking sort of dread—that the poor sod running it had, indeed, been keeping users informed for almost 1,500 consecutive days.
Araraura (Ara) has been in charge of the channel since January 16, 2021—around 702 days since the game’s first reveal back in 2019. Most of the videos are a mere 30 seconds long, however, like a sitcom with special episodes, there are some longer gems scattered throughout it.
To put in context the sheer Sisyphean scope of Ara’s task, even if every video was simply a 30 second informational update, the channel would still take a whopping 12 hours to watch end-to-end. With the longer updates included, that estimation skyrockets.
I reached out to speak with him about how he was, to put it simply, doing while underpinned by the weight of this responsibility. Turns out, he didn’t quite know what he was getting himself into: “I didn’t think I would be there for day 500,” Ara confesses. “My expectations for Silksong’s release were being further pushed over and over. Every new year I thought: ‘This is the year’. It wasn’t.”
To break up the monotony, Ara has constructed some ‘special episodes’—when I asked for recommendations, he had several gems to show off amongst the pile of defeated-sounding updates. Videos like day 1,188, with a fakeout dream sequence, or day 1,172, where he laboriously recounted the 702 days he’d missed before starting the channel.
There’s also day 1,095, which is just a full recreation of TF2’s Meet the Spy, and the harrowing day 366,348, which presents a post-apocalyptic future in which Team Cherry has been tied to computers and “left to toil on their endless project” on a dead Earth. Other recommendations include days 666, 1,124, 828, 1,221, 696, and 352, which I’ll leave you to browse at your own leisure.
When I point out the sheer scope of his channel, Ara comments that watching them all back-to-back “could’ve been a fun bingeing night, if it weren’t for some of the videos being multiple hours long.”
Still, it’s not all been bad: “It’s good to know I have so many people supporting me and the channel, and I’ve met a lot of great folks I call my friends thanks to that.” In fact, the whole exercise—maddening as it might be—has left him in a decent spot overall, covering the daily news of one of his favourite games:
“I don’t think I would’ve been able to keep doing this if the game I was covering wasn’t Silksong. Hollow Knight is my favorite game after all. Also, the fact that it takes only a few minutes to produce a regular video, having so many people supporting the channel and being able to make decent revenue definitely helps.”
Ara also happens to be a repository of Silksong fandom lore, such as “the Great Silksweep of 2023, -Y pattern recognition, EDGE Magazine teaser, the ‘Ara is Missing’ arc.” My favourite of these by far (I mean, besides from the fact our friends over at EDGE are now cemented in Silksong’s canon) is the “-Y pattern recognition” thing, which is about as ridiculous as Ara makes it out to be.
“[That] comes from a series of memes where people drew Hornet holding a cigar, with the [text] ‘bait used to be believable’ in progressively lower and lower quality until it became only ‘-Y’. Some people suggested -I but it didn’t end up sticking.”
Luckily, Ara has not been left to bear this madness alone—specifically shouting out “Dai Locke, Kishan, Tinta, Pupe, Suscat, Axo and the rest of the 17 souls,” which sounds like some Elden Ring-tier worldbuilding out of context, as he adds: “Y’all are the real ones.” Daily Silksong news is now on day 1,465, in case you want to hear a rather deflated Ara rattle off that there is, in fact, no new Silksong news after last week’s debunking. Godspeed, Ara, and may your long labours be over soon.
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Kurt Indovina
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