Shurelya

Shurelya is a chuuni who maintains a veil of respectability. She can sometimes display a "yandere" personality.

Shurelya is a young woman with green eyes and long silver hair. She wears the white and blue uniform of Pastelle Academy. Her hair is decorated with a silver snowflake pin. Her eyes have been observed to turn red when angry or using her latent powers.

She is occasionally seen in one of two other other outfits: a fur-lined winter magical girl outfit with a white hat; and a warrior outfit with a suit of armor depicted in the Shurelily poster.

Shurelya started out as a streamer on Own3D, a Twitch competitor which operated until 2013. Her YouTube channel was created on 21 December 2006, with her oldest pre-VTubing video dating to 29 May 2007. Her Twitter account was created in August 2008. Her most popular early work was the League of Legends: Zoning Tutorial, 27 November 2009, which since received over 2 million views. Her early livestreams focused on League of Legends.

As livestreaming became popular, the "meta" favored streamers who appeared on camera on stream, rather than as a disembodied voice. The commonly accepted wisdom at the time was that viewers made a better connection with the streamer if they had a visible person to connect to. This disadvantaged streamers like Shurelya, who chose not to use webcam. As a solution, she decided to appear as an anime character, using a static image capable of switching between different expressions.

The Shurelya character design was commissioned from Kriss Sison, who Shurelya previously commissioned to draw original art for her League of Legends itasha. Shurelya initially used a static avatar, something referred to nowadays as PNGTubing, but with hotkeys to display the character with different expressions. The use of anime art style and switching between pre-drawn expressions were well-established concepts in the field of visual novels. She also developed complex fantasy lore and setting elements for the character, inspired by her love of the Fate visual novel series and self-described "chuuni" nature.

On 27 October 2011, the web domain shurelily.com was registered. The Shurelily Twitch channel was registered on 8 December 2011.

While Shurelya was not the first VTuber—Ami Yamato debuted earlier in 2011, and the Super Sonico VTuber even earlier in 2010—she and LilyPichu were among the earliest known YouTubers and livestreamers to use professional anime-style 2D art and complex fictional setting detail to represent themselves on-screen as fictionalized original characters based on themselves. This approach would later become the meta in VTubing, particularly after it was adopted by hololive 1st generation in 2018.

• She was part of Shurelily project, with LilyPichu.

• Her class is Witch of Winter (冬の魔女, Fuyu no Majo).
• Her Reality Breaker is Eye of Onettia.
• She attends Pastelle Academy, where she is in the student council. She is also in the school kendo club.
• According to Shurelily Adventures episode 5, she is also an esper with the ability to use Boundary Shield, Great Melon Pan Shield, and Pastelle Requiem ~ Lily Storm.

• Her hobbies are video games and cooking.
• She likes dolphins, bunnies, and tea.
• Her favorite foods are roasted duck, fried fish, and prime rib.
• She secretly likes knives, trolling, anime, and killing people in video games.
• She was a big Dragalia Lost streamer until the game servers shut down.

• The inspiration of her name is the Reyvateil Shurelia from the JRPG Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia.
• The League of Legends items Shurelya's Reverie, Shurelya's Requiem, and Shurelya's Battlesong are named after her, not the other way around.
• Shurelya had a Live2D model produced, but it was rarely used.
• She is the inspiration of LilyPichu's original piano piece Shurelya's Song.
• She used to be a regular on the MMOs.com podcast.
• A Shurelya dakimakura was once produced.