Today is, canonically speaking, boy wizard Harry Potter’s birthday. He is 38, it seems. (Not coincidentally, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is 53 today.) As of the writing of this article Rowling is yet to publicly celebrate the birthdate of her most famous creation in her traditional fashion of tweeting a new Harry Potter character detail that is completely immaterial to the story and not even hinted at in the books. While we wait to learn that Harry suffered from rickets or whatever, let’s celebrate The Boy Who Lived To Be At Least 38 with this new YouTube collection of unintentional Harry Potter ASMR.
ASMR, for the uninitiated, stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” a feeling of tingling moving down the scalp, neck, and spine. It 100% seems like a sex thing, but its proponents will tell you very forcefully it is not a sex thing. It can be caused by any number of triggers, including whispering, crinkling noises, and, per Wikipedia, “receiving altruistic tender personal attention.” (It is not a sex thing, though.) The majority of ASMR videos on the internet take the form of breathy young women whispering while making direct eye contact with the camera (again: absolutely not a sex thing, please stop asking.) Here, however, YouTube user FunWithGuru has achieved the same effect through, uh, clips of Alan Rickman.
As it turns out, the Harry Potter films contain a whole bunch of quiet quill-scratching, wand-unwrapping, and spell-casting. They also feature a number of characters who speak almost exclusively in British whispers, such as Luna Lovegood, Severus Snape, and of course, mean ol’ Voldemort himself. Hagrid does not make an appearance.
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