Casey Holmes, the man behind the Lucidfoxx moniker, comes to the world of streaming a bit differently than the typical streamer. At 36 years old, he’s older than the average audience goer, which data suggests hovers around 21. He’s lived an entire life before donning the streaming mic and revving up his video camera, from 15 years in the service industry to opening a restaurant. He’s not your average streamer, and, in many ways, that has aided his success as he continues to evolve on the platform. “I like being transparent about who I am, what my ideas are, and how I feel about the world,” he said in a phone interview with Lifewire. “My community probably sees me as a comedian, maybe not a good one, some of them might say, but a person that tries to bring some silliness to the harsher topics of the world every day.”
The Dawning of The Fox
Born and raised around the Norfolk area of southern Virginia, Holmes inherited a different life than the one he’s since created for himself. His parents were divorced, and his dad worked hard as an electrician, barely scraping by. They didn’t have much, but gaming was the future, and his dad knew it. “It was the one thing our dad would afford for us outside of his 80-hour workweek… He was making sure we had video games because he said he thought it was the future,” the Twitch star recalled. Ironically, his son would be one of those anchors to help usher in that cultural shift. Around 2016 he started his journey to become a Twitch streamer and found success by utilizing the skills he learned in the service industry. Using those captivating people skills, he was able to enrapture audiences and executives alike. “When I was working as a bartender and server, I realized how people like to be talked to and how to compel people to come back and become regulars,” he said. “I’ve just translated a lot of those skills to what I do today.” He became a Twitch partner within seven months and soon after a Nintendo Ambassador as a top Mario streamer. Everything was seemingly going well, but once again, he found the joy he once had in gaming slowly waning. So, he pivoted. From a gaming streamer to a variety streamer, and once that well ran dry too, he shifted once more. “As things started ramping up with the 2020 presidential election in 2019, I started looking at everything, I had already pivoted my content to general discussion, but I wanted to talk politics… By the end of 2019, I become a politics channel,” he said.
Lucid Dreams
Few streamers have the opportunity to have a single life on the platform. Holmes has had three. Charming an audience for the better part of five years is no small task, and to watch them change and grow with you and your content is a phenomenon other streamers could only dream about. Twitch, the once apolitical gaming space, had a shift in culture around 2019. The political sphere was revving up, and social responsibility became a hot topic reaching a fever pitch in 2020. Although his change in content predates the cultural shift on the platform, in some ways, Holmes took advantage of that switch, and it has paid off. Now, the political side is one of the platform’s most enduring elements. With the politically charged nature of his content, it’s easy to breed an audience of the browbeaten, but Holmes distills the seriousness through a crackling dry wit that filters the inevitable existential dread into a kind of latent hopefulness. And that, he says, is all he could ask for. Make no illusions, however, he’s not an activist. One thing the quick-witted streamer was adamant about was distancing himself from the real work of those people on the ground. “I’m an entertainer. I don’t want anyone to take me as anything more than that; I’m not trying to start a political movement. But I am trying to keep people informed and encourage them to go out and do more if they can,” he said. “That’s my end goal, so if…I’ve encouraged people to get involved in community organizing then that’s cool. I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something.”
