Facts You May Not Know About SSSniperWolf
Gaming videos have been big on YouTube since the early days of the platform, and that's still very much the case today. In 2018, YouTube's global head of gaming and VR revealed that as many as 200 million people watched gaming-related videos every day. "Creators continue to flourish," Ryan Wyatt told VentureBeat, and gaming has become even more prevalent on YouTube in the few years since. There are now countless gaming channels operating on the platform, but precious few get so big that their name is known by everyone in the online gaming community.
British-American creator Alia Shelesh (better known by her moniker SSSniperWolf, a name inspired by one of the primary antagonists in Metal Gear Solid) is one of those gamers. She was born in Liverpool, England, but relocated to Arizona with her family at the age of 6. She joined YouTube in 2013 and slowly built a dedicated following with her Call of Duty: Black Ops II videos. It wasn't until 2017 — when she started to mix up her content — that she got huge. SSSniperWolf now does reaction videos as well as gaming, and they've introduced her to a whole new audience — the raven-haired YouTube star is closing in on 20 million subscribers at the time of this writing in 2020.
She has become one of the biggest names in online gaming, but she's still a mystery to many. Here are some facts that you may not know about SSSniperWolf.
SSSniperWolf started playing video games at a young age
SSSniperWolf reportedly has a little sister and two younger brothers. Like most households with four kids running around them, there were regular arguments when she was growing up. When she spoke to Vogue in 2020, she explained how the tense situation at home ultimately led her to where she is today. "When I was younger, my brother and I would get into a lot of fights," the YouTuber told the fashion mag. "So my dad bought us a PlayStation in the hopes that it would calm the waters. It worked — we'd play everything from Metal Gear to Digimon World."
Speaking to TubeFilter a few years earlier, SSSniperWolf revealed that her parents were "super strict" with her and her brothers. "We were not allowed to go over to our friends' houses, parties, school dances, or even on field trips," she said. With nothing else to do, she spent her time gaming, and before long, she was completely hooked. She and her brother would make a dash for the PlayStation as soon as they got home from school ("Because I was a year older, I would always be player one"), and they would usually play all weekend, too. She soon realized that watching other people play games could be just as entertaining. "I also loved watching Call of Duty videos on YouTube, and one day thought to myself, 'Hey, I can do that too.' So I started my own YouTube channel."
SSSniperWolf does 'Martha Stewart s***' on the side
SSSniperWolf has a second, lesser-known YouTube channel that has nothing to do with gaming. The videos she posts to Little Lia are largely DIY-based, including everything from arts and crafts to beauty tips (the most popular video on the Little Lia channel, with 11 million views, is entitled "Trying HAIR LIFE HACKS to see if they Work"). In a video she posted to her main channel, the YouTube star explained that she's been doing this kind of "Martha Stewart s***" for years. "I like to make stuff," she said. "I've always been into crafts, like making things around the house, making bracelets, decorating." The difference today is that people are actually willing to pay for the things that she makes.
Most big YouTubers have their own line of merch, and SSSniperWolf is no different. Members of the Wolfpack (the name she has for her fans) can buy t-shirts, hoodies, and even phone cases to show their support — yet another stream of income for the popular gamer. It's a great side hustle, but the truth is she's been at this clothing game since before she blew up and became internet famous. "I enjoy thrifting," she once admitted. "Which is going to thrift shops and hunting for cool stuff, because who knows what you can find? There's so much crazy stuff [and] cool stuff at thrift shops ... Sometimes I sell the stuff and make a profit, so it's really fun for me."
SSSniperWolf went 10 years without seeing a doctor
Not many people enjoy visiting the doctor, but SSSniperWolf had a very good reason for staying away for such a long time. In 2014, the YouTuber revealed that she'd had a bad experience with a doctor when she was a little girl, which had a lasting impact on her. The incident led to her not seeing any doctor for the best part of a decade. "I am extremely terrified of going to the doctor," she confessed. "I am terrified because a doctor made me take off my clothes for no reason in front of my mom when I was a kid, so I've not been to the doctor since then, and I don't ever think I can."
SSSniperWolf went into more detail about her ordeal in September 2016 when she fell sick for three days straight and had no choice but to go and see a doctor for advice. The YouTuber revealed that between the ages of nine and 14, she would visit a doctor regularly because thyroid problems led to her "losing a ton of weight." According to SSSniperWolf, the incident took place during one of these sessions. "One time I went to the doctor, he made me get naked, and then he touched me," she said in a candid video recorded right before her first appointment with a doctor in 10 years, adding that the whole experience had left her "scarred and triggered."
SSSniperWolf is a college dropout
SSSniperWolf graduated from high school a semester early and decided to start taking classes at a local community college so she could figure out what she wanted to do with her life. "I hated it," she said in a 2013 video, citing rude teachers, a lack of friends, and getting hit on by male classmates as some of her reasons for being unhappy. She eventually transferred to a university, where she began studying to become a pharmacist. Unhappy with her chemistry classes and the idea of life as a pharmacist, she switched her major to nursing. Even though she finished all of her prerequisites for nursing, she was still unhappy with school and decided to take a break — with her mother's blessing.
"My mom [...] is still my biggest supporter," SSSniperWolf said during her 2018 interview with TubeFilter. "I was in college when I started making YouTube videos, and I convinced my mom to let me take a year off and try it out. She let me, and it all worked out. At least no more homework." She confirmed that she completed her second year of college in a 2016 Q&A video, but she never graduated. The YouTuber has flirted with the idea of returning to college, but to study something completely different: In 2015, she told her Twitter followers that she was considering a degree in game design at Full Sail University, the Florida school that specializes in entertainment, media, arts, and technology.
She has an on-and-off relationship with a fellow YouTuber
Amid her rise to fame, SSSniperWolf got a message from YouTube user Evan Sausage that made her laugh. The two quickly developed an online rapport and began communicating all day long over text and Skype, according to a November 2015 video confessional. Eventually, they met and actually bought a house together, even though she admitted that their relationship began with some rough patches and growing pains. At the time this video confessional was published, SSSniperWolf believed that the two would most likely get married one day.
Flash forward to May 2016. In a video titled "We Broke Up," SSSniperWolf revealed that she and Sausage had split and that he had moved out of their house. "There's been some drama," she said, adding that Sausage had fled to Las Vegas and wasn't contacting her. They were back together by June 2016, as she explained in a video called (you guessed it), "We Got Back Together." The rekindled love affair didn't last long, however; by September that year, SSSniperWolf posted another candid video explaining that they were broken up but still living together as friends on good terms.
By 2019, SSSniperWolf was referring to Sausage as her boyfriend again. Not only that, but he also began appearing in her videos with increasing regularity, rating her outfits, and getting pranked. The lovefest continued over on Instagram, where SSSniperWolf shared a snap of Sausage pecking her on the cheek during her birthday celebrations.
The reason SSSniperWolf will never star in an adult movie
In 2016, SSSniperWolf contacted adult entertainment website Pornhub on Twitter, asking them to follow her so she could send them a DM. Then, things went a little crazy. "People were like, 'Oh my God, a porno's finally happening!'" SSSniperWolf said in an explanation video. "No. It'll never happen... People do porn for two reasons. One, for money, obviously; 99 percent of people do it for money, because it's easy money. Two, because they like it. I don't think I would enjoy that, like, being naked for everyone to see and doing personal things like that." So what did she want to talk with Pornhub about, exactly?
It turns out that some people already believe that SSSniperWolf has done adult entertainment, thanks to a cam girl that looks a lot like her. "The first time I saw her pics and videos I was like, 'Oh my God, this girl kinda does look like me.' It's scary." SSSniperWolf wanted to open a dialogue with Pornhub so she could get them to remove the videos of her doppelganger, which were being reuploaded to the site with the YouTuber's name in the title. She conceded that the cam girl wasn't the one uploading these videos, but blamed her for "playing it off" and making money from being a covert "SSSniperWolf impersonator." Adding insult to injury, the cam girl had SSSniperWolf's explanation video temporarily banned from YouTube, the gamer claimed in a tweet.
SSSniperWolf has been arrested on at least one occasion
In August 2016, SSSniperWolf tweeted a mugshot to her followers and revealed that she had been booked after an argument at home got way out of hand. "So neighbors called cops [because] they heard screaming and I got arrested for disorderly conduct," she wrote, adding: "lol at my mugshot [though]." A few weeks later, she took to YouTube to confirm that she and Sausage had both been arrested, allegedly after SSSniperWolf threw a screaming fit because Sausage had changed his phone background to a photo of "some random girl." SSSniperWolf downplayed the cause of the arrest, referring to it as the "dumbest thing ever."
Following her 2016 arrest, stories about a previous brush with the law resurfaced. Rumors that SSSniperWolf had been arrested for armed robbery three years earlier started to spread online, with YouTube gossip hound KeemStar sharing apparent receipts on Twitter. TheGamersFromMars later claimed that the charge was actually assault and stemmed from a misunderstanding involving an undercover officer. According to his video, the cop mistakenly believed that SSSniperWolf had been shoplifting and grabbed her purse, so she fought him off. She allegedly received one-year probation for the incident. "I've talked about it a lot in past videos, but since it happened years ago, that's why I don't bring it up anymore," the gamer said when asked about the earlier arrest in a 2016 Q&A video. "I'm not hiding anything. There's just no reason to talk about it."
Her first ever cosplay was a Dragon Ball Z character
Fans of SSSniperWolf know that she's massively into cosplay, but what you might not know is that she used to be a "huge manga nerd" growing up. "I used to collect manga — you know, graphic novels, Japanese comics," she said in a 2014 tell-all video. "I used to be obsessed with Saiyuki, One Piece, Naruto, Inuyasha. Those are some of my favorites." She was also into anime from a young age, and like most Americans, she had been exposed to the cultural phenomenon that was Dragon Ball Z. "My first cosplay was a Halloween costume that my mother helped me make; it was Bulma from Dragon Ball Z," she told Vogue in 2020. "No one recognized me when I went trick or treating."
The crafty gamer and her mom created the outfit themselves, and her mom was on hand to help the following year when SSSniperWolf wanted to go trick or treating as Botan from Yu Yu Hakusho, another favorite anime of hers. She still makes her own cosplay outfits to this day. "I usually go to a craft store or order similar clothing online, and then put it all together myself," she said. "Like myself, I think a lot of people like the idea of being able to transform into someone else for a day." SSSniperWolf admitted that she doesn't have much time for cosplay nowadays when she spoke with TubeFilter, but she still loves it.
She was a playable character in DragonSoul
It's not every day that a gamer gets to play as themselves in a video game, but that dream came true for SSSniperWolf in 2016. Well, kind of. The creators of mobile RPG game DragonSoul decided to create a playable hero named Spirit Wolf, based on none other than SSSniperWolf herself. "Look at her, she's so cute!" she said in a video. "Is that not me? That is me! No, really, it's me." The YouTuber took her subscribers with her when she traveled to Wisconsin for a character shoot, giving them a behind-the-scenes look at the process. She walked around the woods taking snaps and later posed in front of green screens as the photographers did their work.
"It was really exciting, because this was the first cosplay I got to shoot professionally," she said in her Spirit Wolf cosplay video. "I made the dress and stuff. It was a long time getting into this dress and making sure it stayed and everything. That's what happens when you ask me to make a dress!" DragonSoul was acquired by Gree International when the company decided it wanted some of the mobile gaming pie, but in 2019 users received an unwelcome update from the owners: "We must inform you with a heavy heart that we have decided to close DragonSoul." The game is no more, but SSSniperWolf needs only to go to her wardrobe when she wants to resurrect Spirit Wolf for the afternoon.
SSSniperWolf is a real night owl
The amount of content that SSSniperWolf puts out is pretty amazing when you consider the fact that she makes her videos in the middle of the night. The YouTube star went into detail about her unusual shooting habits during her 2018 interview with TubeFilter, revealing that she's often still awake by the time some people are getting up for work the next day. "The only schedule I ever follow is that I can only record at night, usually after midnight," she said. "I procrastinate A LOT, and I stay up very late — until 6 a.m. most nights." Why does the process of recording what might end up being a ten to 15-minute video take so long? Because she doesn't like to go in with a prepared script in hand.
"I never really plan anything," the YouTuber explained. "It's more like it will happen when it can. I used to record, edit, and upload one video a day, every single day, for over a year, which wasn't really working out and made me BEAT." YouTuber burnout is a very real thing, especially when you're uploading content on a daily basis. According to SSSniperWolf, she used to experience creative blocks once every couple of months back when she was pumping out the daily vlogs. Fortunately for her, her fans are never short of a few ideas. She told TubeFilter: "My subscribers will tweet me ideas for videos, which is very helpful."
SSSniperWolf never has to wait in line for the bathroom
There's no denying that SSSniperWolf is one of the biggest gamers on YouTube. There's also no denying that the vast majority of her peers are male. During her 2020 interview with Vogue, the British-born YouTuber bemoaned the fact that people have referred to her as a "girl gamer" in the past. "[They] just don't really expect a girl to be a gamer," she said. "You don't call men 'boy gamers' so the term 'girl gamer' shouldn't even exist. Why bring gender into it?" The internet star revealed that she was bullied over her love of video games as a child, but does the female gamer stigma still exist today?
It might seem like there's a huge chasm between male and female gamers, but stats show that the gap is closing — a 2019 study proved that 46 percent of gamers were now female. "The past few years have witnessed the rise of female streamers, community managers, game developers and so on," SSSniperWolf happily conceded. "The best thing about being female is you don't have to wait in line for the bathroom at a gaming event. But jokes aside, most of us struggle getting on mic while playing for fear of being judged or scrutinized." Perhaps there's still some way to go before the wider world takes female gamers seriously, but when it inevitably does, the so-called "girl gamers" of tomorrow will have trailblazers like SSSniperWolf to thank.