After my profile on Jackie Lee last week, both of us got a lot of feedback. When it was positive, it was fantastic because it affirmed that the Magic: The Gathering community is moving forward. When it was negative, it was fantastic because people were talking.

Most people sent me feedback on Twitter since that’s where I spend the majority of my waking hours, but I did get one encouraging email from a supporter who asked me to forward it to Jackie. When I sent it along, Jackie replied:

“It’s interesting, because even though the article is about me and I’ve gotten many responses like this, I continue to feel like it’s not about me at all! It’s really about a shared experience.”

It’s true. It’s a story that could resonate with anyone—not just other women or other Magic players—who’s ever felt unwelcome.

Just as Jackie’s story is a shared experience, in a different way, so was the one I wrote. As I said myself on Untapped Cast, I don’t keep up with the Magic community enough to be an authority. Instead, I relied on the knowledge of two guides, Bill Boulden (@ThaGatherin) and Chris Mascioli (@dieplstks), to suggest sources and offer two perspectives on the state of Magic today. Neither of them are quoted in the story, but their contributions are just as essential.

I mention Bill and Chris because I want to convey how much reporting goes into a story before it’s published. A reporter I admire once told me he only puts about 10 percent of his reporting into a story. (For me, I’d say it’s more like 25 percent for a profile like Jackie’s, but 50 percent or more for the three quick news stories I publish on the Daily Dot every day.) On a similar note, when I was a source for the Washington Post’s story on anime fans, I was a guide to Josh duLac, but not quoted.

One final insider note: I actually considered spiking this story. Not because Jackie’s story isn’t incredible, but because I was worried a story about a minority player in a somewhat obscure game wouldn’t resonate with a wider audience. Then, I worried that a story simplified for non-players would be too watered down to resonate with Magic players. Luckily, my editor urged me on, even though he wasn’t sure whether Magic was a card game, board game, or video game. Also luckily, I was wrong on both counts.

The reception of Jackie’s story has got me excited to write more about developments in other niche groups and fandoms. If you think I should write about a phenomenon in your community next, I’d love to hear about it.

Photo by Wizards of the Coast.

The title of this post is, first of all, a quote from Stephen Colbert, back when he acknowledged his brony brethren on his show back in August. Second, it’s a title suggestion from my boss, who encouraged me to blog about my latest high-traffic story. And third, it’s a thank you to everyone who read my story and proved there’s still a (big) audience for fact-driven reporting.

Fandom is a tricky topic. It’s full of detailed minutia, inside jokes and memes, fanart and fanfiction that delves so far away from canon that even the original creators might not understand it. Frankly, it’s a lot for an outsider to handle, and a reporter’s job is to inform even somebody who is hearing about the group for the first time.

As a result, a lot of fandom stories follow simplified themes, dumbing down or even misconstruing what the culture is actually about. It’s usually well intentioned, but still kind of difficult to read for somebody who’s embedded deeply in the fandom.

When I wrote Researchers strive to understand brony culture for the Daily Dot, my goal was to write a story that informed outsiders without dumbing the culture down. Something both my mom and Mister Spectre could read, in which they would each find something of value.

After my editor ran it over, I knew it was outsider-perfect, but I wasn’t sure what bronies would think. Everything in this story is either a quote from one of the researchers or a sourced fact. There’s no flattery or pandering to the fandom. If they did find it, I knew it’d have to be based on its informational merit.

For two days, they didn’t find it. And then I sent it to Sethisto, the webmaster of Equestria Daily. For the uninformed, that’s the brony community’s most highly trafficked news hub. Seth’s verbatim response to my email: ”SCIENCE! Totally postin!” It spread from there.

The blog post with my story in it has 140 comments and counting, and I’m going to try to read them all (brony comments are much, MUCH more pleasant than comments in virtually any other community). It’s not just because I’m happy to have a hit. It’s that it’s more proof of my belief that fandom reporting doesn’t have to be opinionated to get clicks. It’s already interesting enough on its own.

Screenshots via Equestria Daily. 

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.”