Who Needs an Ocarina When You Can Relax with Zelda ASMR

There's no novelty left in the idea that games can be an escape from the stresses of life. At this point it's understood as fact, and even though not all of us take to games for that precise reason it remains a significant reality of the hobby. ASMR might seem like a completely different beast, but it's not—in fact, it can help meet many of the same emotional needs as gaming. People (at least those who don't find it "creepy" or unnerving) come to it for a plethora of reasons, but chief among them is the relief it can provide from anxieties that range from the nagging and mundane to the almost overwhelming. Like games, for many ASMR makes the world feel a little smaller and a lot more manageable.

In that sense, a channel like Hylian ASMR was inevitable. Marrying her soothing audio content with the animated presences of Princess Zelda, Midna, Ruto and other Hyrule natives, her channel offers viewers a window into her own passions as much as it offers them a way to unwind.

There's certainly a stereotypical image of the ASMR YouTube personality as a pretty young woman sifting through a makeup collection, tapping her nails on the table or leaning this way and that as she whispers susurrously into her microphone. But the reality of ASMR is that these days you're almost as likely to get a soft-spoken nail polish haul as you are a quiet and careful itemization of every single one of her carefully sleeved and jealously guarded Pokemon cards, or a tour of their virtual farm in Stardew Valley. ASMR and gaming have long been intertwined, but these days that connection is easier to see than ever.

All images courtesy of Hylian ASMR

Even so, the Tennessee-based YouTuber Hylian ASMR is an anomaly within the ASMR community. While most ASMR personalities on Youtube pair their audio with either a video or occasionally a still image, Hylian ASMR's audio is backed by clips she animates herself using fan-made models of characters predominantly from her favorite series, The Legend of Zelda.

The circumstances which brought her into ASMR as a whole aren't uncommon. Upon finishing school, she had taken on multiple jobs and soon found herself overwhelmed by anxiety. "I eventually ended up quitting both jobs," she admitted, "The anxiety was simply too much for me to handle." About two years ago she stumbled across the ever-growing vein of ASMR content hosted on YouTube, including ASMR Let's Plays. Its effects on her were significant, and she found that it helped her to "relax and concentrate on the positive aspects of life instead of being down most of the time."

Making her own ASMR content to help others in the same way was a natural step to take, as was tying it to something else she found comfort in. Though she initially started by producing typical ASMR videos she soon changed courses and created a new channel, Hylian ASMR, with a more specialized focus. She chose to use the name of the elf-like race in The Legend of Zelda games (and to make the game series a thematic focus for the channel) because it had had been a longtime favorite of hers.

"I could think of no other game that helped me relax more" Hylian ASMR explained. "I always loved gaming in my childhood. It was like escaping away from all of the anxiety and stress that always seemed to weigh me down. I grew up playing the Zelda series, and whenever things got hard, I knew that I always had the land of Hyrule waiting for me when I got home."

Hylian ASMR's animations are done through the use of Miku Miku Dance, a popular piece of free 3D animating software that's comparable to Valve's Source Filmmaker. The program was originally born from the Vocaloid community as a way for novices to animate music videos for virtual idols like Hatsune Miku (hence the name) but it's far from being limited to use with Vocaloids. Users of Miku Miku Dance (MMD for short) share character models based on anime, games, movies and so on that anyone with the inclination can load into the program and start animating.

Although she'd seen MMD before, Hylian ASMR found it a little intimidating and didn't start learning to use it in earnest until the idea for her channel took root. "It took quite a while to get used to how the program worked," she told me. However, MMD is a relatively straightforward program compared to a lot of animating software available, so her perseverance in learning paid off.

Of course 3D animation takes a lot more time that recording your ASMR videos the old fashioned way. When she initially started making ASMR videos with a camera and a microphone recording would take somewhere from a half-hour to an hour, and after some light editing she would upload the video to her channel. "However," she explained, "with animated ASMR it is very different." Although recording audio is comparatively quick, "it takes an incredible amount of time to animate the character to each audio clip. Usually I spend around 4 to 5 hours at a time trying to perfect the animation." Considering that the length of Hylian ASMR's videos averages around 15 minutes each, that's not an insignificant amount of time.

This time commitment likely didn't come to her as a shock; Miku Miku Dance isn't Hylian ASMR's first brush with animating. "I've always been into animation," she shared. "I started at the early age of 11 years old. I use to draw out every frame with pencil and animate them after scanning them onto my PC. When I entered high school stress and anxiety made staying consistent with my animating much harder to control. Eventually I had to focus entirely on school." It was her YouTube channel that gave her the opportunity to rekindle her interest in animation, and provided the impetus to learn how to employ the kind of 3D animating software that had eluded her when she was younger.

The response to her experiment has been largely positive. "It seems like many people prefer the sense of immersion that ASMR can deliver through a video game character that they are familiar with," she explained. Although she started her channel out with only  The Legend of Zelda in mind, soon requests came in to feature characters from other series', and Hylian ASMR began to expand her channel's offerings slightly. "Usually I work with characters that I'm familiar with, so I add what would best work for them into my video," she told me. "For example, I know that the character Jinx [from  League of Legends] loves explosions, so I added soft firework sounds into the background of her ear cupping video."

But it's not all mellowness and ear-cupping for this member of the ASMR community. Nintendo has a notably itchy trigger finger when it comes to pursuing copyright infringement, and Hylian ASMR is well aware of the thin line her videos tread. Nintendo routinely places ads and claim revenue on videos people post that show or comment on their games, and most recently had a free fan-made Metroid game taken down as well as a bevy of 18+ fanart featuring Nintendo characters wiped from Tumblr.

"Nintendo's recent copyright actions do concern me a great deal. If they were to copyright strike my videos that could end very badly on the behalf of my channel," she told me when we discussed the possibility that this article might bring her unwelcome attention. "The way I see it, they will probably find my channel sooner or later," she added.

Although Nintendo is well within their rights to protect their IP, they seem to be one of the last companies to take the importance of nurturing their online fan communities to heart, particularly on YouTube. Their harsh approach to managing these issues contributes to an uneasy climate for those like Hylian ASMR who express themselves through the fandoms they hold dear.

So what does a Hyrule-loving amateur animator play between projects? Like many others in the ASMR community, Skyrim and No Man's Sky have both caught her attention. "I'm very interested in adding Skyrim to the channel," she explained, "Because I feel that it has stress reducing properties very similar the the LoZ series. "