LoFi Girl

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Part of a series on Lo-fi Hip Hop Study Mix. [View Related Entries]

About

LoFi Girl, also known as Study Girl, is an animated character created by Juan Pablo Machado for the YouTube channel Chilled Cow and their YouTube stream Lofi hip hop mix- Beats to Relax/Study to. The short animation shows a girl wearing headphones studying at her desk next to her cat and a window. The animation came to be known as a character that doesn't stop studying.

Origin

On March 2nd, 2018, artist Juan Pablo Machado^[1] introduced the animation in a blog post titled "Making of a 2d animation for Chilledcow LoFi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to" (shown below).

On March 19th, ChilledCow uploaded the animation to the stream "Lofi hip hop mix – Beats to Relax/Study to" (shown below). The video gained over 27.8 million views in two years.

Precursor

On July 15th, 1995, the Studio Ghibli anime film Whisper of the Heart was released in theaters. In the film, there is a shot of a young girl character studying that appears to be the basis for LoFi Girl (shown below).

Spread

On March 14th, 2018, Twitter user @Jet0o^[2] posted an animation of parents sitting across the table from a girl who looks similar to LoFi Girl and captioned it "My daughter. We need to talk. It's good that you're diligent in your studies but you have an unhealthy addiction to lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to" (shown below, left). The tweet garnered over 90,200 likes and 36,800 retweets in two years. On August 22nd, 2019, Redditor SpicySusBois posted the LoFi Girl image to r/dankmemes^[3] congratulating her for studying for over a year straight (shown below, right). The post accumulated over 79,900 points (94% upvoted) in six months.

On October 8th, 2019, the satirical news site Hard Times^[4] published an article titled "LoFi Hip Hop Radio Girl Still Fails Test After Four Years of Studying." ChilledCow began posting weekly LoFi Girl fanart. On November 7th, 2019, ChilledCow posted "This week's fan art of the Study Girl is from @Timo_wei95" to Facebook^[5] (shown below, left). On February 22, 2020, YouTube deleted the stream.^[7] The video was reinstated that day and a new stream was started. Twitter user @Pixlriffs^[6] tweeted, "Happy to see @ChilledCow's lofi hip hop radio stream got reinstated, but I think by taking the account down – however briefly – YouTube may have inadvertently created the longest video on the platform. That is a 13,165 hour, 23 minute, 44 second long stream" (shown below, right). The tweet garnered over 16,300 likes and 4,700 retweets in three days.

European LoFi Girl

In September 2020, users of the subreddit r/europe began making redraws of the LoFi Girl based on their country. This was inspired by August 31st posts by user u/Marccolo with a Romanian version of LoFi Girl (shown below). First posted to r/Romania,^[8] it was subsequently posted to r/europe where it amassed over 33,000 upvotes.^[9]

From there, other r/europe users began posting their nation's version of LoFi Girl. This culminated in a competition on the subreddit which u/Marccolo ultimately won.^[10] Additionally, several mega-threads with different LoFi girls were created^[11]^[12] and the subreddit r/LofiGirl was used for the competition.^[13] The phenomenon was covered by boredpanda on September 7th.^[14]

End of the live stream

On July 11th, 2022, after two consecutive years on stream on YouTube^[15], the video was taken down by the platform due to a bogus copyright claim. The stream accumulates 668 million views and more than 20,000 hours of music when it was momentarily deactivated.

After users noticed the end of the stream, they started to post several memes on social media saying “goodbye” to the LoFi Girl, saying “she’s finally ready to take that exam”. The post by @zelune, received 54,000 likes in five days.

Synthwave Boy

On April 11th, 2023, the LoFi Girl channel introduced a second stream featuring a new, presumably male character typing on a computer with coffee and a dog cozied up next to him. The second stream focuses on synth wave music to "chill/game" to, leading the community to dub him "Synthwave Boy." The introduction of the second stream came after a brief ARG where the LoFi Girl went missing from her stream, presumably to investigate a blue window she could see from her own. This turned out to be the room of "Synthwave Boy."