Since I’m both a fan and a fandom journalist, my biggest challenge is making sure that my passion for my topic is helping, not hurting my ability to report the truth.

At least, that’s the theory I discussed last fall in my Otaku Journalist Manifesto. Today, I tested that hypothesis when I profiled @Bronys4RonPaul.

Last night, I reached out to this Twitter user after one of my co-workers tipped me off. I sent him a tweet with my email (it’s a bad habit, but one I have to keep at until Twitter lets me DM strangers.) And then, I sent him a picture of my My Little Pony alter ego, illustrated by Kevin Bolk.

“Here’s a picture of my cutie mark just so you know I’m a real reporter!” I tweeted. It’s a joke only fans would get; in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a young pony acquires a design on her flank once she figures out what her true calling is.

I was only half joking when I commissioned this drawing. On the one hand, I’m a grown woman, and this is a kids’ show. On the other hand, I’d be hard pressed to say that I’m faking being this happy.

In the end, it paid off. Here’s what @Bronys4RonPaul, who asked me not to reveal his real name, wrote to me:

“I’m very surprised that someone would want to interview me and I normally would not grant one to anyone but you showed me your pic with a pony drawing and I figured no harm should come from this.”

He was right to be wary. As it turns out, he has his fair share of trolls. Plus, mainstream brony coverage can be pretty snarky.

For the record, I don’t think fandom reporting has to be snarky to get hits. Fandom is already so wacky that an objective take is more engaging than belittling ever would be. I don’t get, for example, why Gawker had to be so snarky here. A week later, they had some equally fascinating brony coverage just by letting the fandom speak for itself— and got quadruple the traffic.

That’s exactly how I wrote about @Bronys4RonPaul. I let him speak for himself. Was it successful? Hitwise, it didn’t crack our top ten stories for the day. But it did get a mention from Gawker reporter Adrian Chen.

I know I got this story because I’m not just a reporter, but a reporter AND a fan. At the same time, I don’t want to become known for writing fluff pieces that make fans look good no matter what. I’m happy with this story because I didn’t give myself a voice, snarky, apologetic or otherwise. I just let the subject speak.

This isn’t a secret, but I’m not sure it’s something obvious either: I don’t write any of my own article titles at the Daily Dot. Sure, my editors take my suggestions and often ask for input, but they’re more adept at choosing headlines that will catch peoples’ attention and get their eyes on the page.

That might be especially clear with one of my stories today, 4chan’s Four Leaf Studio releases erotic, dating simulation game. While it’s a perfectly true statement, it’s clear we’re playing up the sex angle here. And personally, I don’t think that’s the part of the story that makes the game in question- Katawa Shoujo- so interesting.

I’ve been waiting to write this story for two years. After I read Leigh Alexander’s story on Katawa Shoujo in early 2010, I was fascinated. I’d never played an eroge before, but I immediately downloaded and played this one. My review- Katawa Shoujo: Empathy or Exploitation?- went up a month shy of two years ago from today.

I wrote about the game again in 2011 for Japanator’s yearly Ero Week- Katawa Shoujo: How an eroge changed my mind. I’d been working with a disabled teen for a reporting project in between writing these two articles, and it shows. In this opinion piece, I asserted that Katawa Shoujo does not fetishize disability, but presents it as one of many defining character traits.

Originally, I’d thought that I found this game so fascinating because it, as Alexander asserts, “combines the sincere with the unsettling” in its treatment of disability and sexuality. I’ve always been interested in disability rights, but I was especially immersed in 2010 as I completed a project about muscular dystrophy for graduate school.

However today, I realized that the most engaging- and impressive- part of Katawa Shoujo is its status as a fan project. Katawa Shoujo appears to have as high production values as any studio-produced eroge, but everyone on staff is an amateur. They’re just 21 people who banded together on 4chan, decided to make a game, and worked together for five years to do it.

And in the end, they simply gave the game away. This speaks volumes about their purpose: it was never their intent to become professional game developers. It was never their intent to do anything other than express their fandom for this doujinshi page of five disabled, hand drawn girls.

I interviewed 2DTeleidoscope for the story both because of his involvement with the game as well as his articulacy; I knew if anyone could express why my mainstream audience should care about the accomplishment of Katawa Shoujo, it was him. And he didn’t disappoint. Here’s what he wrote to me:

“Think of every novel that never gets written, every Internet community that dies in flames. Realize that Four Leaf Studios endured five years of rewrites, revisions and personal drama to produce this product, shuffling through staff like cards in a game of Old Maid. And yet the idea survived. The work is done. This is great and worthy of our admiration, no matter what you think of romance with disabled girls.”