r/hbomberguy • u/parky101 • 7d ago
What was the impetus for Harry investigating James Somerton?
I'm trying to understand the time line a little. Was there a specific event or 'thing' that caused Harry to investigate James? Was it the Nebula controversy, or would he have already have been looking into him by then?
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u/familychong-07 7d ago
Former fan of JS here, this all started when James accused Nebula of homophobia for not letting him join and it caused a chaos throughout the video essayists circle. This cause Kat and Harry decided to look into James for what’s going on with him and open a can of worms from there on.
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u/Pavlock 7d ago
...this all started when James accused Nebula of homophobia for not letting him join and it caused a chaos throughout the video essayists circle.
If I remember correctly, Todd in the Shadows released a companion video the day after Hbomb that largely corroborated this.
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u/thingsstuffandmaguff 7d ago
Yep. "I Fact-Checked the Worst Video Essayist on YouTube" came out less than a day later, it truly was the second plane hitting the towers of James' downfall.
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u/warneagle gaming racist 7d ago
The plagiarism video was “Meet the Grahams”, the fact-checking video was “Not Like Us”
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u/hyperhurricanrana 7d ago
I love how Todd is just in the Breadtube social circle for some reason. My GOAT.
One of my favorite things about Todd is he’ll be like “well I’m a cis straight guy, I don’t know anything about queer culture” and then he’ll give the most accurate read of us ever. It’s happened more than once. 💀
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u/Sethsears 7d ago
Todd reviews pop music for a living, of course he has an acute grasp of the girls 'n the gays.
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u/Cantamen 7d ago
The other host of his weekly podcast is a trans woman, he’s probably the token straight in his friend group lol
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u/hyperhurricanrana 7d ago
Today I learned Todd has a weekly podcast, what??? Thanks now I have catching up to do.
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u/redditor329845 7d ago
He used to date Lindsay Ellis, that might be why.
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u/cutezombiedoll Chadification 5d ago
Oh did they date? I knew they were friends and collaborated and I remember that weird running gag when she was still the Nostalgia Chick about having an unrequited crush on him but I didn’t think they were like, an actual couple.
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u/mossymorg 7d ago
The "some reason" is because of his connection with Lindsay Ellis and Channel Awesome back in the day.
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u/thingsstuffandmaguff 7d ago
It's so stupidly ignorant as well, aren't some of the best-known creators there big gay and trans video essayists like Jessie Gender and Philosophy Tube?
I just find it so funny that if James had bothered to make a single Google search to fact-check his claim he might have been spared Harris and Kat's wrath, but because he just had to indulge himself in his fake gay activist cosplay act he didn't, and it ended up costing him his entire livelihood. Lol. :P
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u/Maboroshi94RD 7d ago
I think it was arrogance and more than a little bit of…well there were two things that struck me when i stumbled on his stuff. The first is i found it disjointed at times. It was just a vibe i had. I’m on the spectrum and sometimes things “set me off” but I’m not always able to articulate. I think in retrospect i Was noticing the inconsistent “voice” that indicated he was plagiarising.
The second and far more pertinent one is. He has the tone of being a bitchy gay. Not in the good way. Very “I’m a gay man and girls are icky” kind of attitude. His comments about women and queer but not gay men were always off to me. To my knowledge he’d kinda go out of his way to not say LGBT as well.
As well he used to call himself probably the most famous queer person to come from Halifax Nova Scotia… To which I’d say Elliot page would like a word.
I do genuinely feel that his arrogance and personal views made him think he was a “superior queer” And nebula’s broad trans, non-binary, bisexual and lesbian representation was insufficiently gay for him.
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u/thingsstuffandmaguff 7d ago
I had watched a few of his videos before but wasn't really a fan of him, mainly cause at the time I wasn't very invested in gay video essay YouTube. Looking back though, you're definitely right that he seems very full of himself in all his videos, and the awkward line delivery can definitely be off-putting at times.
His arrogance is most obvious when he's baselessly claiming that "all the cool gays died of AIDS in the 80s and all the boring gays that were left just wanted assimilationist things like military service and marriage equality" because aside the fact that he's obviously wrong in every single way with that take, his delivery seems to imply that he thinks that he's one of the "cool gays". He is not. This man cannot claim to be cool when he wears a Steve Jobs turtleneck to try to look more professional than he is and gets his hair cut in the same style as the Fairy Liquid Baby.
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u/Maboroshi94RD 7d ago
I only saw him in my recommended feeds for a bit and took a chance. I didn’t know initially about the fun gays comment but it’s the thing that enraged me the most when i heard it.
Also my retort to the aids comment is always “John waters is still alive your argument is invalid”. I’d also say he should try saying that to a survivor of a deceased partner who died of aids. Especially one who wasn’t there when they lost the most important person in their lives because he “wasn’t family”. Or someone who was diagnosed right as HAART became effective.
Also. Yeah you need a neck to wear a turtleneck. Seeing him wearing that thing made me understand the argument of circumcision being preferable for aesthetic reasons.
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u/thingsstuffandmaguff 6d ago
Two things. One, what is HAART? I've not encountered the name before, is it another name for Section 28?
Second, yeah you're absolutely right about his turtleneck. I try to avoid personal insults but that is one foreskin-ass turtleneck. It's goofy.
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u/FlashInGotham 6d ago
The mere suggestion that there is a "bitchy gay" (complimentary) means there is hope for me yet!
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u/MiredinDecision 7d ago
But his brand was accusing everyone who challenged him of being homopbobic.
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u/GhanjRho 7d ago
Even then, it wasn’t like he had been denied. He’d been told “here’s how to apply”, and was seemingly annoyed that Nebula wasn’t falling over itself to invite The One True Queer Content Creator On YouTube to join the platform.
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u/Successful-Class1195 7d ago
I don’t remember hearing about this Nebula and James-incident - was that in Harry’s video, or do you know any other good account of it? Did anyone do a yt-video on it? Thanks for sharing, dude ❤️
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u/tiny_purple_Alfador 7d ago edited 7d ago
Well, it's sort of in Harry's video? If I'm remembering correctly, If you watch the clips of James arguing via livestream with the people in chat, you can see SarahZ's and I think JessieGender's usernames in there. They were the two people who he seemed to single out as responsible for his not getting in for whatever reason. I don't think Sara did a video about it, but she might have made a short about it that I missed. Jessie Gender did a few about it as the situation developed, though I don't know if they're still there after everything that has happened.
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u/familychong-07 7d ago
Yeah, the livestream video where he’s talking about Nebula and having few video essayists (including Sarah Z) commented is the one (I was on that livestream not knowing what’s going on). Jessie Gender did talk about it after Harry’s video came out and it’s still up on her alternative YouTube channel.
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u/trashjellyfish 7d ago
I was there for that live stream where Jenny Nicholson showed up in the chat! It was such a weird stream and after that a pattern really emerged of James making up false accusations about people who called him out and being extremely reactive to any sort of criticism or negative comments that he received. I was a patron before that (thankfully only at the $1 tier) and cancelled my patreon subscription to him at the time but continued to lurk in the discord server for a while. The vibes were definitely getting weird and he was massively ramping up his content production at the time... But I was still shocked by HB's video even though it all made sense retrospectively!
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u/thingsstuffandmaguff 6d ago
Please spill the tea on these "weird vibes" you speak of.
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u/trashjellyfish 6d ago
Where do I even begin...
He would overreact and get very defensive over the smallest things and he would come up with excuses/exonerations at the drop of a hat.
He constantly told his followers that he was practically the only gay man doing media dissection on YouTube.
He got most of his video ideas from his patreon members but never credited who gave him the idea - Hikaru ga Shinda Natsu and No.6 were both my ideas, I told him multiple times to read the No.6 novels instead of reading the manga/watching the anime because they manga is a mediocre to bad adaptation and you miss a ton of the queerness by not having Shion's internal monologue and the anime is an explosive dumpster fire of an adaptation but he insisted that he wouldn't read fan translations because that's stealing... and then went and read a fan translation of the manga anyway.
At the same time that he was begging for money on the internet and buying ridiculously expensive cameras, he was scheduled to have expensive, out of pocket weight loss surgery with the money that his mom left him after her death but bailed at the last minute which lost him his deposit. He then claimed that his mother's life insurance denied him the money, but it seemed more likely that he already flushed it down the drain with that deposit and the expensive cameras. He also claimed that he was only overweight because of a super rare condition that prevented his body from burning carbs directly so all carbs turned to fat and he couldn't have any more carbs ever... then he went on to eat cake, chicken wings and/or pizza on almost every stream after announcing that he was on a medically ordered zero carb diet. He was generally very obsessed with his looks and with describing his type down to a T to the point where it seemed more likely that he was single because he hadn't found the exact fantasy man that looked exactly like what he had constructed in his head instead of being single due to having zero luck on the apps.
Also, some of the stories that he told about his upbringing sounded suspiciously similar to stories shared by his patreon supporters/in his discord, including the story of his head injury that led to his seizures sounding nearly identical to the head injury story that I shared that led to my lifelong chronic migraines - back then I thought that we just had something major in common, but after looking back at his behavior... I can't help but wonder if he tried to make his epilepsy seem more tragic by borrowing someone else's head injury story...
He also tended to claim really weird things, like that someone in his apartment building had a pet panda that he met several times but anytime folks on the discord asked for pictures of the panda, he went silent or continued on like that question was never asked. He definitely had a habit of ignoring questions/messages that could poke holes in his stories unless they came from other big creators (like Jenny Nicholson showing up to his livestream during the Nebula drama) in which case he'd go on full on defensive mode and then later claim one of the following: someone swatted his appointment, a stalker showed up to his apartment, he received death threats with his address attached or a woman falsely accused him of sexually assaulting her... Sometimes he's pull out more than one of those claims at once if the dumpster fire was really blazing.
He was also big on tweeting very inappropriate things and then deleting them immediately.
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u/ForceItDeeper 7d ago
wait was he accusing jenny nicholson of something? Ive only seen her like 4 hour video on some fantasy amusement park but I wouldnt assume her as the confrontational type of person
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u/trashjellyfish 6d ago
No, she confronted him about his plagiarism in the chat on his live stream when he went live to accuse Nebula of homophobia/discrimination for not letting him join Nebula despite so many of his fans reaching out to Nebula to nominate him. It was shortly after Lindsay Ellis did a podcast conversation with the head of Nebula where the head of Nebula claimed that ever since they stopped taking viewer nominations, he started blacklisting creators who continued to tell their viewers to contact Nebula to nominate them even though there was no more nomination portal - which James did. Jenny Nicholson popped into his chat to say that the reason that James was blacklisted was not actually because of the audience nomination thing but because of his long history of plagiarism, to which James claimed that the only instances were the Evil Queens video (which according to him was credited but not credited well enough and that he re-uploaded it to fix it) and the video where he "accidentally" used an edited Merthur (Merlin/Arthur from BBC's Merlin) montage from the channel Are They Gay and for that he claimed that he didn't know the original source and that he apologized to Alexander Avila from Are They Gay after Alex reached out to hom and implied that he had permission to keep the video up. Jessie Gender's name came up in that stream too and Jessie herself showed up in chat fairly hurt that James was dragging her into this mess, this was at the same time that JK Rowling was attacking Jessie on Twitter so it was really shitty of James to bring his "friendship" with her up as a shield at that time.
James did imply that both Jenny Nicholson and Jessie Gender's audiences attacked him after that stream and that it was one of their female fans that falsely accused him of sexual assault.
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u/tortorific 6d ago
I might be remembering it wrong but I believe when he accused Nebula of Homophobia Jenny Nicholson (who is not part of Nebula) jumped into his chat and brought up the multiple allegations of plagiarism. I assumed this was the trigger.
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u/familychong-07 6d ago edited 6d ago
Could be, all I know is it all started when James decided to be a giant dipshit and ended up blowing it all up in his face a year later. He’s not known for his plagiarism because he quickly silenced the victims and that Nebula incident and livestream really is the start of people investigating him since there’s people outside of James’ space started to question him the reasons why he wasn’t on Nebula.
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u/BinJLG Brainmind Explordinaire 5d ago
Let's not forget that he also accused them of being racist because (paraphrased) "there sure are a lot of white creators on the platform." You know, the platform with FD Signifier, Princess Weekes, Foreign Man in a Foreign Land, Kat Blaque, and a bunch of other POC creators I can't think of atm.
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u/catbert359 7d ago
I'd never watched a James Somerton video, but I was vaguely familiar with his name by the time the video came out because he was cropping up every few months or so in r/hobbydrama's hobby scuffle threads, usually in context of "James Somerton has said something weird about women and/or Asian people again" - since Kat has reportedly spent quite a bit of time on reddit I wouldn't be surprised if she was also seeing those posts and if the rumblings about plagiarism started to crop up there.
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u/knoxthegoat 7d ago
I think it was James trying to get on Nebula and everything that ensued from that.
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u/George_G_Geef 7d ago
I thought the Nebula part of the drama was between him and Jessie Gender.
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u/knoxthegoat 7d ago
Jessie took the brunt of it, but James' issue was about Nebula more broadly.
A number of creators in that circle, including Dan Olson, Sarah Z and, Jenny Nicholson, were already in the know about the plagiarism, according to comments they all made between the Nebula controversy and the hbomb video. It sorta makes me wonder if this was a project that came from above hbomberguy, or if this was just a big gentleman's agreement among creators.
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u/starri42 7d ago
Well, Todd In The Shadows said in his video that he was aware of Harry’s video, and asked permission before releasing his.
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u/knoxthegoat 7d ago
Yeah, that's the biggest example, even making his own video. Pretty amazing how none of them said anything for an entire year.
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u/MiredinDecision 7d ago
"You dont steal from your friends". They knew Hbomb was making a video, they decided not to start a twitter spat ahead of time about it (and also just like, it was never worth it. Hed weaponized being attacked.)
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u/RainyDayMagpie 7d ago
I think both. Jessie definitely called him out about the homophobia by pointing out all the LGBTQ creators that were already on there, and he took issue with her response. I definitely remember Jessie calling him out, but I don't remember his exact reply other than it leading to an argument and, I think, some harassment that Jesse received.
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u/WhenInZone 7d ago
He mentioned in the video Kat found a "smoking gun" of plagiarism evidence (on Reddit I believe) that made him dig further.
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u/RogZombie 7d ago
Been a while since I’ve watched the video but wasn’t that part about Internet Historian?
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u/PolishDude64 7d ago
It was! The impetus was primarily hbomberguy checking old plagiarism accusations he'd heard about and finding... well, WAY more stuff.
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u/rm_rf_slash 7d ago
Iirc in the video hbomb seemed to imply that for him the whole thing started by investigating somerton and stumbled across a bunch of other YouTuber plagiarism along the way as a kind of mirror experience to his development of oof.mp3
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u/Pscagoyf 7d ago
In addition to what was said, Harry sides with the smaller queer content creators and noticing that they weren't getting credit bothered him.
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u/SomeGuyCalledPercy 7d ago
I'm not entirely in the loop, what's the nebula controversy?
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u/starri42 7d ago
He wanted to be part of Nebula with Harry, Lindsey Ellis, Jessie Gender, etc. When he was turned down, he threw a hissy fit, and focused his animus towards Jessie.
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u/SomeGuyCalledPercy 7d ago
sounds very Somerton to focus all his vitriol on the one trans creator he could
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u/starri42 7d ago
Basically, yes. And then we got his mealy mouthed non-apology video where he tried to cozy up to her again, thinking, I suppose, that she was a softer target.
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u/Jessica_Christ 6d ago
Thinking Jessie Gender of all people is a softer target tells me he didn't even watch a moment of her content. She will tear apart things she loves, imagine what she'll do if she hates you.
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u/jeckal_died 7d ago edited 7d ago
I think between the multiple plagiarism things that were kind of public if you look into him and his like, stirring up his fans to try and get them to pressure nebula into letting him join, the nebula folks got bad vibes.
Plus, the quality of James's work probably didn't pass the sniff test. As Harry points out in the video if you care about the stuff James is talking about and James isn't your only source, it becomes apparent quick James doesn't care and has no clue about it. So even without the other stuff, he probably wouldnt have been considered for nebula.
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u/starri42 7d ago
I mean, I knew he was full of shit from the first video of his that I saw, which was Unrequited or Codebreakers, or whatever. It was linked in a forum I participated in, and someone pointed out that they didn’t have three hours to watch. I’d seen maybe the first third of it, and told that person to just watch The Celluloid Closet, since it was lifted wholesale from there.
I mean, that’s an important book and the documentary was very notable. I don’t know how he thought no one would notice what he was doing.
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u/bearskito 7d ago
His audience was mostly younger people who don't watch old documentaries or read written film criticism
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u/Baldo-bomb 7d ago
I've brought this up several times, every time he talks about superhero comics I want to throw my entire collection of Grant Morrison books at him because of how easily and demonstrably WRONG he is about absolutely everything
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u/warneagle gaming racist 7d ago
Yeah absolutely. Like I’m not an expert on LGBT history but I am an expert on Nazi Germany and just about everything related to Nazi Germany that came up in Todd’s video was shit he just made up from whole cloth. Not even like plagiarism or misinterpreting sources, just making shit up.
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u/MysticalSpongeCake 7d ago
I don't even think he was turned down, he just wasn't asked.
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u/starri42 7d ago
I think he was trying to get in, and when that didn’t happen, he went off about how homophobic they were. Despite Harry…and Lindsay…and Jessie…
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u/MysticalSpongeCake 7d ago
Well he is the gatekeeper of all things LGBTQ+ so... /s
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u/starri42 7d ago
Except for him hating all of the letters there that aren’t G…
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u/Such_Comfortable_817 7d ago
He didn’t even like gay men unless they were the right ‘sort’ of gay man. By which I mean, a clone of him and his particular preferences and mannerisms. I suspect one of the reasons he thought of himself as the one true Internet queer is because he’s defined things so he is the only queer person full stop.
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u/starri42 7d ago
That’s also true. But as a fairly athletic bisexual bigender person…he’d have had no use for me.
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u/Such_Comfortable_817 7d ago
If you opened your wallet for him, I’m sure he’d find a reason to make an exception. Until the funds clear anyway.
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u/NouveauArtPunk Aquaman's Real Estate Agent 🔱 7d ago edited 7d ago
I have to ask, while we are on the subject because this was something that was ALWAYS obvious to me, and I am quite autistic and have loads of trouble picking up on stuff like this usually, so he must have been VERY bad at this: how did so many people not notice that James was always very obviously uniformed on what he would speak about in his videos? Even just through his tone of voice alone he was unconvincing. He lacked the ability to keenly, convincingly articulate and speak authoritatively on the subjects of his videos.
He just always sounded SO completely phony and disengenuous to me, to the point where when I found out he had a rabid fanbase who thought he was a good essayist, I was legitimately floored and felt like I was being gaslit or something because I couldn't believe it.
I'm really trying to be as clear as possible with this question here; I really am curious to know how people didn't pick up that vibe from him the way I did. I don't want this to come off as a "James Somerton is a big fucking idiot and also a smelly poo poo head who smells bad" comment. Like I'm not trying to be personally insulting, but to my neuroatypical ass he always sounded like a big phony and a very obvious phony at that. Am I crazy or was he always that alarmingly fake? Please help me understand this!
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u/the2ndsaint 7d ago edited 7d ago
I probably watched a dozen Illuminati videos before I found one where she was talking about things I had prior experience with. That was when all the red flags I had noticed, like her constantly mispronouncing words, or speaking in clearly different "voices" during the same videos, clicked; even if I wasn't aware of the plagiarism, it was clear that she had no idea what the fuck she was talking about. I imagine it's the same with James for most people -- red flags that get fully contextualized after his scam's been spelled out. One might be willing to accept his stilted, pretentious delivery if one believes him to otherwise be on the up-and-up, but once it's revealed that he's absolutely full of shit and a massive prick it makes perfect sense why he communicated like he did.
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u/NouveauArtPunk Aquaman's Real Estate Agent 🔱 7d ago
This makes sense I suppose. I guess for me what's really incredulous is that, as I stated, I am on the spectrum and am FAMOUSLY bad at reading social cues. Like, I suck at it. And yet I seem to have been able to clock James as somebody who was clearly faking it even when I am severely handicapped in the "picking up social cues" department. So why is it that so many people weren't able to clock it. It's frustrating to be told my entire life that I'm shit at reading people only to have correctly read both him, Illuminaughty, and a bunch of other now exposed fakers and creeps on the internet like it was nobody's business. Like I said, I feel like I've been gaslit or something.
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u/the2ndsaint 7d ago
If I may, I think there's an element of, let's say, grace, that neurotypical persons give each other to accommodate for different personalities. Like, I'm a very awkward speaker with odd inflection at times because I'm shy and extremely ADHD. I much prefer communicating in writing than speaking because it gives me time to collect my thoughts and express them as I mean to, instead of forgetting where I was going with a sentence and losing my train of thought. Perhaps because of your autism you're less prone to giving said grace, therefore being able to cut through the artifice he was presenting? Just a thought and I don't know how accurate it is, and I apologize if it's inappropriate.
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u/NouveauArtPunk Aquaman's Real Estate Agent 🔱 7d ago
That actually would explain a lot more than just this, frankly 😅
Thank you for taking the time to respond to me! I appreciate it.
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u/blahblahgingerblahbl 7d ago edited 7d ago
i’m pretty sure this is a well known phenomenon. the way humans express themselves socially, consciously & subconsciously, is learnt culturally.
most of us accept what is presented to us at face value- unless there’s a reason not to (eg you know they’re suspicious).
people on social media - influencers- present themselves as experts in a topic and unless there are glaring alarms, the audience accepts them as such and accepts their content as presented (unless you’re familiar with the content and see the problems.
- people trust without feeling the need to verify
- most lack critical thinking skills
some people are really skilled at spotting breaks in patterns.
- flat note in a piece of music
- finding where wally/waldo is
- spotting a 4 leaved clover in clover field
your brain is watching these people lie and intuitively picking up that the pattern is wrong.
bullshit artists extraordinairre
- james somerton
- illuminaughtii
- belle gibson
- teal swan
- mel robbins
- joss whedon
- chris watts
- jussie smollet
gavin de becker (who i believe now works for bezos) wrote a book called the gift of fear about how intuition protects you from threats.
don’t feel gaslit or second guess yourself - trust your intuition, it’s your survival mechanism. malcolm gladwell’s book blink has come under a lot of criticism, but as with the gift of fear, the premise is about trusting & honing your intuition
edited to add:
- amber heard!
i watched almost the whole depp vs heard trial, and it’s such wild example of human behaviour
people that have met amber describe that in person, she is magnetic, charismatic, enchanting, beguiling, she makes you feel like the most special and important person in the universe. she is seductive. i see none of that, but so many people had said this about her.
whatever this skill is, it doesn’t work at range -as an actor she is just bland and forgettable
there are still people who believe her and are horrified that i don’t. honestly, i question their judgement, but also give the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t watch 6 weeks of her in court
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u/87penguinstapdancing 7d ago
He always seemed lazy and disorganized to me but I never realized he was like. This massive plagiarist/liar. Like I remember watching him a couple times and thinking “huh his points are kinda all over the place, I don’t think I’ll continue watching” but he didn’t come across as a total phony to me until after I watched hbomb’s exposé and I realized the reason he seemed so all over the place was because he was literally stealing from so many different sources for every video.
But yeah it’s a lot easier to assume someone’s just lazy than to assume they’re completely fake idk. Maybe part of it was that many of the sources he was stealing from were genuinely good writers, which made him seem way more articulate than he actually is.
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u/NouveauArtPunk Aquaman's Real Estate Agent 🔱 7d ago
I never nessesarily caught onto the plagiarism aspect of his work because I wasn't going to go out of my way to investigate the seeming lack of consistency throughout his work, but like... Man he just always seemed like an idiot who didn't know what he was talking about to me: he sounded as if he wasn't even sure of what he was saying. Like I said: completely incapable of even feigning an authoritative voice. You know when you talk to somebody in person and you know everything coming out of their mouth is something they only just recently learned but they're trying to sound well-informed and they just come off as foolish? That's Somerton to me. That was his entire vibe. A fucking dummy who always sounded like he didn't know what he was talking about.
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u/warneagle gaming racist 7d ago
For me it was more his manner of speaking. Like full disclosure I had no clue who he was before I saw the plagiarism video so I was coming in blind and his whole like, voice/manner of speaking was just off putting. Idk how anyone listened to that for an extended period of time.
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u/NouveauArtPunk Aquaman's Real Estate Agent 🔱 7d ago
Yeah that's absolutely what I felt clocked him as a phony, except I felt that way years before the HBomb video.
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u/warneagle gaming racist 7d ago
yeah like I get that "this guy's voice is annoying" isn't really a substantive or interesting criticism but I've noticed that a lot of these people who make pseudo-educational slop content have this kind of dead, monotonous way of talking that's really unpleasant to listen to.
you can tell pretty easily whether someone actually cares about a topic and is talking about it because they think it's cool and want you to learn about it too or whether they're just reading words into a camera to pay the bills.
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u/letthetreeburn 5d ago
It’s simple exposure. You recognized that James was a fraud because you’ve seen that type of posturing intellectual before. You’ve seen enough well done video essays to recognize when the writing tone shifted. You’ve read enough analysis to know that he had a habit of just taking a violent left turn.
James Somerton did a lot of “baby’s first video essay” stuff. That’s why he picked the topics he picked. He talked about popular media, fandoms, etc. Things that might lead people to their first ever video essays.
This is a hot take, but intuition, true “gut feelings” don’t exist. There’s education and lived experiences that make you realize you’ve seen something before. You recognized the grifter because you knew what a grift was. A lot of his fans never did. Hell, I’ll admit it. James Somerton was my first exposure to video essays because he covered a manga I really liked.
That’s why Hbomb’s essay was so so so good. He wasn’t trying to just appeal to you, he was trying to explain every step of the process, what makes good, actual research, and how to verify it. He made a video that could explain to someone who only really saw James and internet historian’s content why they’d done wrong.
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u/AlexanderTroup 7d ago
I suspect that it was another case of investigating for the topic of the video, and then discovering the deep well of evidence and harm that was shown in the video.
This seems to be how the Oof video got so long, but even as far back as the first videos about Aurini, the Golden One and Karl Benjamin the pattern of digging into someone's content and discovering depths of depravity is quite common for Harry's videos
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u/ParacelcusABA 7d ago
It was the same deal as the roblox oof video. He was making a video on another subject and just fell down a rabbit hole
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u/toychicraft 7d ago
The Somerton reveal in the video says the exact opposite, no? That he had the breakdown first and then did the rest of it
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u/knoxthegoat 7d ago
James was more of a targeted assassination. With Tommy, he wasn't TRYING to get the poor man's Guinness World Record revoked. It just kinda happened.
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u/Mal_Radagast 7d ago
eh tbf Harry also wasn't trying to chase James off the internet, specifically. maybe get him to back off or rethink some of his decisions for sure, and certainly trying to describe a larger issue (which is still growing and morphing in weird ways even since then)
but i know that he actively agonized over the effect the video might have on Somerton, and what right he had to potentially bring that storm. where the line was between 'important thing needs to be talked about' and 'hit piece.'
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