The Real Reason Skyrim Granny Is Taking A Break

It's a sad day in Tamriel, indeed. A recent video from popular YouTuber Shirley Curry, a.k.a. "Skyrim Grandma," has explained that she will be taking a bit of a break from streaming. 

For those of you who haven't heard about the sweetest Dragonborn in history, Shirley Curry is genuinely one of the most adorable gaming personalities to pop up in recent memory. Skyrim Grandma first arrived on the scene in 2015. After getting into gaming through Civilization 2, her son introduced her to The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. On September 18, 2015, Curry uploaded her first gameplay video and a star was born. 

Last year, Gameumentary honored Curry on her 83rd birthday by releasing a short documentary about her called Shirley Curry: The Gaming Grandma. The documentary was something of a viral success and people were even more taken with Curry than ever before. After viewing the doc, one Reddit user wrote, "If people had half of her altruism and empathy any longer, society would be a better place. I didn't really know a lot about her before this documentary. She's a genuinely decent human being."

Following the documentary and a petition from fans, it was revealed that Curry would be immortalized in the next installment of the Elder Scrolls series. In a video posted by Bethesda Softworks, fans caught a glimpse of a digitized version of Curry that will be used as an NPC in The Elder Scrolls 6. We may not know a whole lot else about The Elder Scrolls 6 just yet beyond random rumors and conjecture, but the presence of Skyrim Grandma Shirley Curry is almost a selling point in and of itself.

Unfortunately, it appears that constant negativity from viewers (whether intentional or not) has led to Curry deciding that she needs to step away from streaming her favorite game for a little while. At the very least, it seems that she'll be retreating a bit from the public eye.

"My health isn't very good," Curry calmly and quietly explains to her viewers. "My blood pressure is going insane, my stress level is way too high, and, um, I'm going to have to take control of it."

Over the course of the video, Curry tells her viewers that the kind of feedback she has received from her viewers has led to quite a bit of stress for her. Apparently a lot of her viewers have been trying to encourage her to play different games, even though she has explained that she prefers Skyrim. She also expresses concern that she's wasting her time uploading videos and putting effort into streaming when nobody is actually appreciating it. It has all led to stressing her out and negatively impacting her enjoyment of the game.

As she says in the video, "I know I shouldn't let these things stress me out, but they do. From now on, I will respond to very, very few comments. I will be deleting a lot of comments."

One of the most notable things about the way that Curry plays Skyrim is that she's not all that interested in following the story or lore of the game. Instead, she tends to make up her own stories and find reasons to venture off into the wilderness and ruins of the map. In this way, she uses Skyrim as more of a role-playing game than even the original creators had intended. 

That's why it's especially a shame that commenters and negative attention from viewers has led to her lessening her uploads. She clearly just wants to enjoy herself without the added pressure of having to answer constant questions and field concerns from players that she isn't playing in the way they want her to play.

"I look at all the games. I'm a gamer," Curry says in the video. "If I wanted to play [those other games], I would be playing them."

Hopefully taking a bit of a step back will help Curry to renew her love for the game. After all, even the most prolific content creators have had to take a breather every now and then. Last year, PewDiePie announced that he would be taking time off from streaming and uploading videos for a little while. Though there were some worries that taking a break had caused him a bit of financial distress, he was back on Minecraft and having a blast in no time. 

According to Curry herself, she doesn't intend to stop playing Skyrim or uploading videos altogether. However, she does intend to significantly scale back her output for the time being. Fans of Skyrim Grandma will just have to be patient and king. Maybe it won't be too long before Curry is feeling refreshed and ready to take on some dragons once again.