Lillian Trawic, is a southern charmer who has used her family-inherited work ethic and explorative spirit to cultivate the kind of brand and community others could only dream about. Through four years of hard work and a commitment to success, QueenEliminator is ready to show why you can’t keep a monarch down and how the crown came to be firmly planted atop her head. “When somebody asks you what do you do for a living and I’m like ‘I play video games for a living,’ it’s actually kind of cool. You know, I’m a streamer…it’s surreal,” she shared in a phone interview with Lifewire. “I definitely have to stop myself sometimes and be thankful and make sure I’m being humble.” And being humble has been the modus operandi for this versatile streamer. She is primarily a Facebook Gaming talent, and over the past year, she has mostly recovered her audience from Mixer. She gained a whooping 204,000 Facebook Gaming followers and coveted Partner-status on the emerging platform that distinguishes itself with a creator-first approach. Her streams blend her talented Battle Royale gameplay with all the charisma and nerve one would expect from a self-professed queen, complete with a thriving community of willing subjects.
Life on the Range
Trawick grew up in the rural countryside of Louisiana, where her small-town upbringing would breed a love for nature, animals, and tight-knit communities. Her mother, a nurse in the gynecology field, was one of her biggest influences. A single mother to four children, Trawick was the youngest of the bunch, and seeing her mother’s work ethic and flexibility would inspire the industrious streamer in her vocational pursuits. She was introduced to video gaming and the world of nerdom at the age of 8 by her stepbrother. Animal Crossing and Runescape were some of her earliest gaming experiences; however, she recalls internalizing this idea that “games weren’t for girls” causing her interest to wane through her adolescence. “It wasn’t normal for girls to be playing video games so I did gymnastics and cheer, but I hated them. I either wanted to be outside on the farm helping my mama in the garden, riding the horses, playing with the dogs, or inside playing video games on the computer,” she said. An on-again-off-again relationship between Trawic and gaming emerged as she traversed the real world after high school. She worked on a tanker in the oil industry for conglomerate Smith Tank and Steel while moonlighting as a bartender. As jobs in the oil industry dried up, she reconnected with the world of gaming. She found herself at a crossroad and her love of work would push her to delve into the streaming side of gaming via her newly acquired Xbox One with its built-in connectivity to the Microsoft-based streaming platform, Mixer. “I realized I was working my life away in the construction and oil industry. I never got to see my friends, never had free time, never got to see my family. So, when I found out what streaming was, understood it, tried it, and saw that I was good at it? It seemed like a no-brainer… I taught myself and it took off,” the streamer recalls.
Switching Gears
She recalls her first few streams on Mixer back in 2017 in her tiny bedroom, seated atop her bed with a web camera facing down as she attempted to court audiences. People started peppering in, but it wasn’t until she attended PAX South 2018, where she met her now long-time streamer friends, that she noticed her little makeshift stream started to gain momentum. Within three months, she was full-time on the platform, with 50,000 followers, and three months later she became a Partner. Between 2018 and 2020, she would stream Battle Royale games such as Fortnite and Apex Legends on the Mixer platform, where she became one of the platform’s top 10 streamers, according to information compiled by Influencer Marketing Hub. In June 2020, the now-defunct platform famously announced its closing: blinding streamers like QueenEliminator. Today, her royal subjects can enjoy her daily streams on Facebook Gaming, which she decided to make her official home. She boasts a lively, inclusive community and a new kind of partnership with the Facebook Gaming team that she said is defined by a more attentive, diverse corporate strategy. One lesson she learned from the Mixer implosion was to never put all of her eggs in one basket. She also now has a presence on platforms such as Twitch, where she streams occasionally, and TikTok. Her queendom is ever-growing and she has her sights on conquering the rest of the industry, thanks to the community that has stuck by her through it all. “[They are] my everything. I would be nothing without them. I’ve got to remember how thankful I really am for this community because it took me out of a dark place,” she said. “They gave me a home; it wasn’t just me giving them one.”
