I don't know how I've never heard of Shirley Curry before. Shirley is an 82-year-old (at least when she wrote her YouTube About page) grandmother that loves playing and broadcasting Skyrim. She's been playing it longer, but she started uploading her gameplay sessions a couple years ago.
In an era of larger-than-life, louder-than-you YouTuber personalities, it's wonderful (wonderful!) to simply hear a sweet old lady playing a video game she loves. Shirley doesn't yell—unless she's startled momentarily from something ambushing her. She doesn't spit racist diatribes—always a very real danger nowadays. And she even enjoys a little bit of role-playing, filling in bits of dialogue with her traveling companion (Kharjo the Khajiit), or wondering why the guards and citizens of Skyrim don't really seem to care one way or the other that she's the Dragonborn.
I love Dunkey's work. I love Obsidian Ant's work. And no disrespect to those folks, but Shirley Curry is now my favorite YouTuber. It helps that I'm having something of a Skyrim renaissance myself, so it makes watching other people enjoying Skyrim all the more enjoyable for me. But in an entire website that's a minefield of racism, ageism, ableism, misogyny, and bigotry of all kinds, it's so, so nice to find a YouTuber completely removed from all of that. She even starts off her videos by greeting everyone as her grandkids.
Here's Shirley's continuing adventure as "Ganci," a level 30 Redguard (as far as I can tell), wearing an almost complete set of elven armor, riding a nightmare (?), and packing a few mods into her playthrough. Here's her latest adventure, in media res. I enjoyed a playful chuckle as a Vigilant of Stendarr attacks her. Shirley impales her attacker and sorrowfully says, "Oh my God. I'm sorry, Vigilant. I didn't have any problem with you. I don't know why you attacked me."
