Special Interests Make You Stand Out

13 Aug, 2026

If you browse the top creators on Twitch, YouTube, or TikTok, you may find yourself thinking the same things I did: I don't do that; I don't talk like that; I'm not that good at that game; I can't perform like that. There is intense pressure to fit into the mold of being a creator—over-the-top energy, impeccable skill, a support network of other creators. Where many creators have an online persona that is different from who they really are—a mask, if you will—many autistic individuals are actively trying to unmask, which puts us in yet another uncomfortable position.

Instead, autistic creators can lean into their authenticity in a way that neurotypicals cannot. Our authenticity can be our greatest asset because of our special capabilities–like hyperfocus and special interests. This post explores how embracing your special interests and allowing yourself to be authentic—without masking—can lead to more engaging and sustainable content and help you connect with your ideal audience.

Your Untapped Content Superpower

I find that my special interests are the things that I can hyperfocus on both at will and by accident. It's not the most scientific definition, so let's consult a proper source. Kaitlin Schifano defines special interest as, "An intense fixation that far exceeds a typical hobby or passion" ¹. She identifies that autistic individuals are likely to spend "large portions of their time ... [and] their money" ¹ on their interests. For a fun little tidbit, I currently have five capture cards—only two of which are being actively used. I have three microphones and four cameras—using only one of each. Am I going to sell any of them? No. I might need them one day. Special interests differ from normal interests or hobbies in that they are often lifelong and become a part of that person's identity.

The Autistic Advantage in Technical Expertise

Through research, trial, error, and perseverance, you're quickly becoming an expert in the realm of streaming. You understand the difference between AV1 and H264, even though Twitch doesn't yet support AV1. You know that YouTube accepts a higher bitrate than Twitch but has vastly inferior tools for livestreams, leading you down a rabbit hole of which platform is best to stream on. You might even know that TikTok is a surprise up-and-comer in the realm of game streaming, with streams on TikTok having tremendous reach, but a very fluttery viewer scene. Your ability to not only absorb information but also find everything you need leads you to having a well-curated setup where everything has a perfect place. You might have spent way more money than you needed to get there, but everything is perfect. For now.

Authentic, Enthusiastic Passion Fuels Engaging Content

When you identify the type of games you enjoy the most, you will find your genuine excitement quite infectious and will draw in viewers. In 2025, I saw a surge of growth on TikTok when I began a series titled, "Playing Apex Legends every day until I'm good enough to play with my Predator son." At the highest level of the rankings sits 750 of the best players in the region: the Apex Predators. To queue into a match with my son, I had to reach the Platinum rank on my own. I went through Bronze -> Silver -> Gold -> Platinum, each with four subdivisions to work through. This was a months-long project that had me smiling, laughing, and sometimes screaming my way through the ranks until finally reaching Platinum and doing a livestream with my son.

After achieving that goal, the game shifted for me. It became work. Bad matches dragged my mood down and good matches were harder to enjoy because they were sandwiched between bad matches. Ultimately, I realized that without a goal I was invested in, the game stopped being fun. I dabbled in Marvel Rivals before deciding to take another approach: crush my backlog. That quickly fizzled as I realized there were a lot of reasons I didn't play games for more than an hour after buying them—I didn't like them. This realization came thanks to Final Fantasy Type-0 HD, which I tried desperately to enjoy and just couldn't.

If you're the train type of autistic, there are plenty of train games to enjoy. If you love city builders, or theme park builders, or whatever type of game Factorio is, your interest will shine through on stream and your stream will be more interesting for it.

Seeing Content Differently

Maybe you're a deeply analytical person, or maybe you see patterns in everything. Whatever your strengths, you see things differently than most people—and that perspective is going to give you a different approach to everything you do, including the games you play and the ways you stream. Your uniqueness creates a freshness that will set you apart from others; just make sure you figure out what makes you unique, and lean into that. Make it your "hook."

My strengths lie in analytics and pattern recognition, a clue perhaps identified at the start of this section. I have always loved playing MMORPGs—so Everquest, Final Fantasy XI and XIV, World of Warcraft, Elder Scrolls Online, etc. Especially in games where you can customize your builds, I would spend hundreds of hours theorycrafting and testing ideas. I probably spemt more of my World of Warcraft gold on respecs than I ever spent on equipment. I apply this same approach to single-player RPGs, most recently Clair Obscur, Expedition 33 and its Pictos system which enables incredible build customization for each character. I've always enjoyed systems like this, dating all the way back to the original Final Fantasy, where I experimented with weird party combinations just to see what I could pull off. Final Fantasy VI's materia system offered some amazing choices—I enjoyed the not-particularly-original Terra with Genji Glove and Master's Scroll, scoring 8 attacks per turn, each one doing 9,999 damage, on a character intended to be a magic wielder.

Once you've identified your strengths—and every autistic person should be on a journey to identify and lean into their strengths—you can start to hink about how you're going to apply that to your stream.

Avoiding Burnout Through Authenticity

You might realize that you love streaming, but you also need to love the content you're streaming. I struggle to play the same game for long periods at a time—even my favourite MMOs. When I quit a game, I usually quit forever. This makes me incapable of being a one-game streamer. In a previous post, I talked about gaining a following playing Apex Legends, but when I got bored and moved on, I watched my follower count and concurrent viewers plummet. Despite identifying as a variety streamer, a lot of people got invested in my specific journey—it was doomed from the start, and a part of me knew that, but I enjoyed riding the wave for a while. I let those viewers get attached to my journey, and what a journey it was, but it ended. This isn't to say the journey wasn't worth it. I had a lot of fun, and I did meet a few people who stuck around. But I probably got too close to burnout on that push. It's a warning to myself, and others, not to ride the waves of what's popular for any longer than it's fun for you. The biggest clue I found was if I enjoyed playing off stream. If the answer became no, then that's a sign to start moving to other things.

Where Special Interests Meet Niche Audiences

Something I haven't explored is how I can attract an audience of similarly analytical minds who may help me see things I haven't recognized yet—people who can work with me to see the inner workings of new games. This could be a way to utilize my YouTube and TikTok channels, which are embarrassingly sparse of content while I try to figure out what I want to do with them.

If your special interest overlaps with an established niche, you may be able to capitalize on that to enhance growth. I understand that retro games have a fairly large niche audience, so if you're discovering new things about retro games, there's a lot of potential there. Speedrunning is another area that I know little about, but records are constantly being broken in 20-year-old games. This is where it probably helps to be a part of associated subreddits, Discord servers, or other community centres based around that interest.

But what do you do if you haven't identified an overlapping special interest yet?

Finding (and Focusing) Your Content Superpower

You find it! You probably actually have special interests, even if you haven't connected them directly to your autism. There's something out there that gets your motor running, and not in a weird way.

Identifying your Core Interests

What do you spend hours thinking about? Researching? Doing? When you go to bed, do you make a mental note about what you're going to look up tomorrow morning when you get up? Do you sometimes get up in the middle of the night after waking up to a random thought, just to search right there and save the results for the morning?

What topics do you love to discuss? When have your friends or family said to you, "Okay, that's enough talking about {subject}."? Whenever I heard colleagues discussing MMOs, I would try to join in the conversation. There was a time, when World of Warcraft was at its peak, and every new game that came out was the next "WoW Killer." Games like Rift, Warhammer Online, and Aion. Even games like Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault tried to break into what World of Warcraft built. I loved them all. MMOs came out so fast in the mid-2000s, and they all had physical releases. I would race down to Future Shop on release days to pick up the newest game—they were all $60 back then, plus a $15/month subscription fee.

When you think about the areas where you may fit into a niche, like the aforementioned speedrunning, retro gaming, etc, what problems do you like to solve? A lot of speedrunning seems to be finding the next time-saving exploit or optimized route. Many MMOs offer customized builds, but you're still bound by the strength of your equipment. Some games, however, may have lower-strength equipment with unique qualities that can make an otherwise-weak character much stronger. This is more common in single-player RPGs, where you might equip a Ribbon in Final Fantasy to become immune to afflictions, but some MMOs have dabbled in such systems as well.

I've talked about some of the very common, widespread content niches, but that doesn't mean you have to. Special interests can vary wildly, and the niches attached to them can be just as varied. The Legends of Zelda timeline and branching realities were anybody's guess before 2011, but games have come out since then, and many people posted their own version, modified versions, or deep explanations after extensive looks through the lore. When you add in a 10,000-year time skip that tries to merge all three timelines into one, as Jeffrey Parkin from Polygon notes, things get even more complicated.²

The takeaway here is compelling content comes from a variety of sources—and you can be one of those sources if you focus your special interest in a way that can share that content with others.

From Interest to Content

Let's roleplay for a moment. You're an RPG fanatic. You can't get enough. You've played every Final Fantasy, every Dragon Quest, and every Persona game. You can speak in depth about the story, the characters, the bosses, and the mechanics of every game you've ever played. What you liked, disliked, how you beat the secret boss, what level you were. It's all right there. How do you turn that into content?

Are you going to do tutorials? Reviews? Maybe analyses? Prove, definitively, that Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics, despite both being set in Ivalice, were actually in alternate universes, and here's the proof. If you're looking at something like analysis, you might need multiple videos or articles to cover all of the topics. Can you break it into multiple pieces?

Unmasking for your Audience

As a late-diagnosed autistic adult, I am all too familiar with the pain of unmasking. A lifetime of learned habits and behaviours that needs to be undone while still managing a job, a family, and other responsibilities. The first place I began unmasking was at home, and that meant I unmasked on stream—I show my quirks, my strengths, my weaknesses, the faces I make and the songs I sing. They're all part of the show, and I do it without shame or embarrassment.

What does Authenticity mean for Autistic Creators?

As a child and teenager, I spent hours in front of a mirror practicing my smiles so that the next time someone said, "Say cheese!" for a picture, I'd look normal. This was an age before digital cameras, so it's not like they could check and re-take the picture. I wouldn't find out I'd "done it again" until the class photos came out, and there I am at the back of the class (I was abnormally tall), dead eyes and open mouth, forcing a half smile.

It took some time after my diagnosis to fully understand what the doctor meant when he told me that being autistic now means I was autistic growing up. But looking back and analyzing my behaviour, my interests, my social interactions—it's clear as day to me now. My internal monologue—and my parents—would constantly criticize me for not thinking the same way. People would ask me why I was different; they would tell me I was weird. A Henry Ford article summarizes something I want to highlight: "Masking is a life skill [autistic individuals] develop to blend in with their peers"³. While other kids were building their life skills, the autistic kids were focusing their efforts on basic survival. We seemed weird or wrong or broken because we were. We were effectively stunted in our development due to the intense pressure to mask our authentic selves. Almost like it should be considered a developmental disability—what's that? It is now?

Your content is your portal to authenticity. It's not about being perfect. It's not about a performance—even if it is sort of like performing. It's about letting your natural communication style, your thoughts, and your quirks shine through. Even as I write this, I ask myself, am I putting too many personal anecdotes in this? Am I not including enough? Will people even read this? But you know what? I'll read this—I'll post this—and I'll be proud of myself for contributing something to the community that I feel has value. And one day, someone will read this article, extract value out of it, and hopefully email me a note about how they got value out of it.

How to be Authentically You

If you don't feel comfortable looking directly at the camera during a livestream, don't. Position your camera on the opposite side of your monitor from your chat so it's obvious when you're looking at chat—but you absolutely needn't look directly into the lens to connect with people.

Be direct and clear—the same way you would appreciate people communicate with you. If you use jargon, make sure you define it—someone will be there who is there because you're you, not because they like the subject. They won't understand the jargon, and we don't want to alienate the people who like us for who we are.

Embrace your quirks. If you use fidget toys, make that a part of the show. If you have unique mannerisms that reveal feelings—you squeal when you're excited, you bounce in your chair when things get intense, you stick your tongue out the side of your mouth during intense focus—embrace those moments. Define those moments. Bring your audience on a journey of understanding exactly what makes you special. Consider things like an animated bounce emote so when things get intense, your chat knows it's time to start spamming your bounce emote. They can celebrate you while you work through the feelings that might have otherwise made you feel self conscious. By owning and embracing it, you make it a part of your unique experience. You say, "Yes, this is me. And this is why I'm awesome." I did the tongue thing when I was a kid, but I think I don't anymore.

Set expectations. I identify my autism in my social media and on my Twitch and YouTube channels, though I don't highlight my quirks in my about me sections. I do highlight inclusivity in my rules, but I don't even truly know all of my quirks yet.

*Your passion will shine. As you embrace authenticity, your enthusiasm and passion for your special interests will shine through and create entertainment for your viewers.

Connecting with your Niche Audience

By focusing on your special interests and being authentic, you will naturally attract an audience who appreciate that type of content. Remember, though, that your audience might not be on just one platform, and may be underrepresented on a given platform. For example, X (formerly Twitter) has become a place far less comfortable for those with disabilities. This led to a lot of growth on Bluesky—so much that now a lot of official company pages have Bluesky pages, eliminating the need to revisit the cesspool that is Xwitter. Eric Garcia highlighted some of the policy changes at twitter, where the accessibility team was laid off in late 2022.⁴ Later, in early 2025, many Twitter users moved over to Bluesky, with a huge push from Reddit users, as subreddits began banning Twitter links en masse. By putting yourself out there on multiple platforms, you increase the reach your content has—though you also increase the amount of time and effort required to contribute, so a healthy balance is critical.

Communities Thrive with Shared Interests

By creating content that drives conversations to the areas you are interested in, you get to have meaningful conversations on topics you and your viewers or readers are interested and knowledgeable in, making for more educational and impactful content.

If you create video content on YouTube or TikTok, your comment section is a living, breathing beast. Engaging with your commenters, especially those who comment int he first 24 hours of a video, gives every video the feeling that you are engaged in an ongoing conversation. If you write for a blog, replying to comments or emails you receive goes a long way in solidifying your authenticity and passion. Something like Discord may also benefit you—I struggle with Discord myself, but I must concede that as far as community building goes, it's top tier. Someone skilled in community management would find it an invaluable resource.

Niche communities are often both inclusive and engaged. If you find yourself overlapping with one of these communities, you are in for a treat—they will welcome you and everything about you. Keep an eye out for niches you may not even realize you're a member of. I'm sure that community of from-scratch croissant bakers just haven't found your recipes yet.

Your unmasked and authentic approach to content will naturally create a space where people feel comfortable being themselves—an inclusive community where they can be their authentic selves as well. Make sure you embrace that inclusivity with appropriate behaviour and rules for your community.

Your Greatest Strength is your Voice

Trying to conform to what society expects of us is exhausting and unnecessary—especially online. Be yourself, and let your true voice shine through. Hyperfocus, depth of knowledge, info dumping—these quirks become strengths: valuable and engaging. Embrace them and others will embrace you.

Stop trying to fit into a society not built for you. Your unique autistic voice, empowered by your special interests, is the content the world needs.

Ozject is an autistic content creator with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and a Master of Business Administration. He streams on Twitch; produces videos for YouTube and TikTok; and writes blog content for other autistic content creators on the OzHole.

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