The Studio Ghibli-style Lofi Girl has been sitting by her window since 2018, listening to soft hip hop beats forever playing in the YouTube livestream she lives in. She’s become a studying staple, a teammate to sit beside while you pore over homework or your half-finished sitcom script, and spawned countless offshoots, including a Star Wars inspired one, and one featuring a medieval Italian friar, for those in need of lofi Catholic beats instead.
And, aside from a few respites due to accidental bans and copyright claims (making her longest ongoing livestream only nine months old) through rainy nights and grapefruit-coloured mornings, Lofi Girl has been taking fastidious notes for an exam that never comes. That changed around 1 p.m. ET, on April 10, when she suddenly and unexpectedly vanished.
“LOFI GIRL DISAPPEARED…” alerts one popular tweet.
“lofi hip hop study and chill to beats girl lore happening rn???” wonders another, documenting through screenshots the play-by-play of Lofi Girl’s hurried exit. On April 7, the Lofi Girl channel posted a video of the girl by her window, as usual, but staring out at a neighbour’s glowing blue room instead of at her notes.
lofi hip hop study and chill to beats girl lore happening rn??? pic.twitter.com/7xdGB9xOFe
— Marie Lum 林 (@PuccaNoodles) April 10, 2023
“What is happening with this blue window?” that video title says.
Lofi Girl’s livestream was renamed a red question mark, and it slowly zoomed in on the blue room behind the window, revealing another chilled-out, abandoned study set up. A second livestream appeared April 7 and seemed to reveal even more of the room, showing a bubbling aquarium frothing beneath the stream’s steady ambient fuzz, a calendar with today’s date circled, and a digital clock counting down to 1 PM ET (or 3 AM AEST). The title for that second stream is a simple white question mark.
— Lofi Girl (@lofigirl) April 10, 2023
So, what’s happening? Internet sleuths deduced that Lofi Girl lives in Lyon, France, just based on the buildings seen outside her window — is she going to her international off-the-books buccal fat removal appointment? Is she preparing for the tell-all Netflix documentary where she advocates to ban white American men from the search term “anime girls”? Are they going to execute Lofi Girl live on camera?
No, I think it’s just a marketing thing.
On Twitter, the Lofi Girl brand posted that the blue window revealed the domain name for a new website, lofiworld.com. All the website currently displays is a “launch” button that takes you directly to the second livestream, with the countdown. It seems to be a brand expansion, though people in the chat of Lofi Girl’s main livestream keep writing “LOFI GIRL DIED” and “RIP LOFI GIRL.” She won’t be dead to me unless this ends up involving the metaverse, somehow.
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