This week I spoke with Hirumaredx, a popular World of Warcraft Youtuber whose videos include top 10s, Micronews and the occasional video about the villains of Warcraft. So have a seat, get comfortable and let’s find out more about Hirumaredx.
Me: So tell us a bit about yourself, who is Hirumared?
Hirumared: Hirumared is just the dumb name I used for my Youtube channel. I really wish I had re-branded it back when I first started but now I’m kind of stuck with it. Whenever I made usernames online I’d just add a color to an anime character. And I just happened to use the combo of Hiruma and red a lot. Like for example the main character I play on in WoW is named Hirumagold. I don’t really do that anymore though. If you mean who is the person behind the name, well I’m Jacob. 25 years old, and I make Youtube videos for a living.
Me: What drove you to create videos about World of Warcraft?
Hirumared: Well I originally started out copying Pyrion Flax’s bad Dota2 guides, but I thought I’d do WoW versions of them. And then it just kind of took off from there. I also have another Youtube channel that doesn’t do half bad for itself which is about Yugioh called Theduellogs. And a few other smaller Youtube channels I upload on for fun. It’s just only my WoW Channel is popular. So really I just make videos about things I like, and my WoW ones got the most popular so I stuck with it.
Me: What keeps you motivated?
Hirumared: I like to say in videos that motivation is for hippies and starving artists. I make habits instead. If I go too long without making a video my body starts WANTING to make something so I don’t really need motivation. If anything I work too much and I’ve been working out how to take breaks and days off. Turns out working 24/7 is bad for your health. But in the traditional sense, I guess I could talk about what gave me motivation in the first place? That would be me getting fired from my minimum wage job and becoming my nephew’s babysitter. So I had a lot of free time on my hands, and I thought I’d try my hand at making videos since I had always been interested in it. I did make videos back in high school around the year 2008 and I had some fun with that. I was just way too busy to keep that up so I stopped after a while and didn’t start back up again until 2013 when I was fired from my job.
Me: Aside from making videos, do you still play WoW just for fun?
Hirumared: Yes I still play WoW for fun. Which as it turns out is not very common amongst other WoW Youtubers lol. I raid 2 days a week with my guild as a Disc Priest healer and so far we’ve cleared Heroic Antorus and are just doing achievements and stuff. I also fill in for another friends Mythic raiding guild if they need a back-up healer. So I kinda do casual mythic raiding because of that. Outside of raiding, I mainly just level alts, or do stuff for footage. I don’t really have as much free time as I use too so I try not to play too much WoW if I can help it. Making videos takes a really long time, and I kinda spend all my time doing that. Now getting footage for videos doesn’t really count as “playing WoW” since rarely am I doing something I actually want to do to get that footage. But for some videos I can spend an extra 20 hours a week in WoW just getting footage.
Me: What would you say your hopes for Battle for Azeroth are?
Hirumared: My biggest hopes for BfA is for Lore on Wrathion. I just want to know what he’s up to. Also I was kinda hoping they would release new classes in addition to the allied races but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Me: If you could personally experience any major WoW Lore event, what would it be?
Hirumared: WoW is a scary place, I don’t think I’d actually want to be there in person to witness a lore event. But If I could just live passively and observe an event it would be Admiral Taylor’s Garrison to see what happened and why Wrathion was there. It was a quest hub in WoD that seemed like it might lead to something but the story was just left open and nothing was explained.
Me: What’s your experience with Discord as a platform for community building? What do you think the Pros and Cons are of using programs like Discord to interact with your fans?
Hirumared: Discord seems like such a neat concept that I’m surprised it hadn’t been done before. I think it’s pretty great for building communities. Some of the pros of interacting with fans there is to get to know them better, in an easy setting that allows you to talk to a group of people at once and not in a pm. Plus you can just talk when you want to and don’t have to drop what you’re doing to respond. Also it makes you seem more likeable if you’re actually nice or don’t have a toxic community. The cons would be if you have a toxic community that could drive people away from you and your content, and the people who pm you weird random stuff. I have a small little Discord server of my own with only a handful of fans in it which started off as a Patreon reward. And with a small user base it’s easier to control toxicity, and I also try my best to not have it a place of hero worshiper. Some Youtuber discords can be too cult like in that any negativity or small criticism directed towards the Youtuber is met with a million people coming to their defense and harassing the person. I can happily say the fans in my discord make fun of me more than anything else, so I don’t have to worry about that happening anytime soon lol.
Me: If you weren’t streaming/ YouTubing, what would you be doing?
Hirumared: If I wasn’t a Youtuber, I’d probably have just found another random job. I worked at a water-park for 5 years and only made minimum wage and I was fine with that. As long as I can make enough to support myself and my hobbies I’m good to go. And luckily my hobbies are all cheap so I don’t need very much. I was also in college going for a degree in psychology before I dropped out to focus on Youtube. I never really had any plans to go into the field once I got the degree, I was only going because I liked the subject and it seemed like a good idea to have a degree of any kind rather than not. Honestly with how many credits I have I could probably just go back to school for 1 semester and get a degree in something. I was in college for about 3 years or so, I just really don’t want to. Classes are the worst, and I only have the very hard stuff left to do. Some advice, if you have to take a 2nd language don’t take Japanese. Japanese is one of the hardest languages to learn and nothing like English so you have to learn a new way of speaking and writing completely. It was so bad, I honestly probably dropped out just so I wouldn’t have to take another Japanese class. For my degree I needed 2 consecutive years of a foreign language, or 4 semesters. And I was on semester 3 of the 4 before I quit. I didn’t pass the 3rd semester Jap201 class either, so I’d have to retake that or start over with a new language and I don’t want to do either of those things. So if anything I’m glad I don’t have too!
Me: Do you have any projects coming up that you want to talk about?
Hirumared: I don’t really have any big projects coming up. If I want to do something I usually just do it then and there, and I actually just finished up a big project back in December. If anything I’m trying to take things easy for a bit because my body gave out on me from burnout after making 12 videos for 12 days. To put that into perspective, I usually make about 4 highly edited videos a month, with 1 being released once a week. So doing 12 of them everyday for 12 days was a tiny bit more than I’m use too. Even planning for the 12 videos for a month and a half before hand was only barely enough time to get them all done. Now that I think about it I worked for a month and a half straight, editing every day all day. No wonder my body gave out on me. I’m never doing that again. But back to the topic, I just have normal videos planned coming up. I have my artist currently working on my next villains corner video which she’s almost done with. And I have a different editor working on the video for the History of Molten Armor which is video 2 out of a 3 video series. He should have that one done any day now. And I’m personally working on a Top 10 video which I still need to get footage for. So that video is about a week off from being done with my new reduced work schedule, plus making Yugioh videos for my 2nd channel.
Me: Fun fact time! What are some fun facts about yourself?
Hirumared: Fun facts with Hiru. Despite having a job making videos about a video game on the internet, my real talents lie in sports. I’m athletically talented and I generally do really well in any sport I try. In my freshman year I was the best player on the football team, and when I moved up to the big boys in normal high school stuff, I was made a starter despite my short height. Our team even made it all the way to state in my senior year. Which is like making it to the finals, and being one of the best teams in the state. I however do nothing sports related nowadays. Too many injuries from high school, plus even if I wasn’t injured I was too short to play at a higher level than high school. So it’s kind of a useless talent that only comes in handy when I play ping pong occasionally or something like that. I’d have much rather preferred to be talented in some form of art or creative field.
Fun fact #2 – I went to school for psychology, so I used what I learned to force myself to have good habits and work myself to death. In case you didn’t know, habits are like the body’s cheat codes. If there’s an aspect of your life you want to improve on, try your best to turn it into a habit. Like for example, I always wash my dishes after I’m done with my food. It was annoying at first to turn it into a habit, but now I’ll catch myself trying to wash plastic plates by mistake while at a party because it’s so ingrained in me to do so after eating. I also have a habit to walk my dogs at 5. I use to have a habit to go for a run after breakfast before I had my chest problems, and now I have a bad habit of working on videos whenever I have free time. It used to be a good thing but I now need to force myself to relax a bit.
Fun fact #3 – I have like 10 different Youtube channels. of the 10, 4 have over 1,000 subscribers. There’s my main channel with WoW videos that has about 125k subs. My Yugioh channel which has about 25k subs, and is my 2nd largest and 2nd most successful. There’s my spin-off WoW channel all about pet battles with about 5k subs. And a general top 10s channel with about 2k subs or something. Of the channels I have I only really regularly upload on 3 of them. And the Yugioh channel is actually considered one of the medium sized channels over on the YGO side of Youtube. Although I spend most of my time working on the WoW channel since it’s the one that pays the rent. So when I’m not making WoW videos, I’m making videos about something else.
Thank you so much for doing this interview Hirumaredx, it’s been a great time. If you wanna see some quality content, you can find his Youtube channel and Channel posted below!
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCap5sQEW2w7aoM2ehCdNVNQ
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hirumared
Speaking of Youtube, We just launched our own channel, Take a Look: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClc8BQQ7fhsAJYto3Y1o35w
The Nerds Templar 