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rin7713 · 5 months

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Speaking as someone that trusts people too easily and was subscribed and patroned to James Sommerton, I have some unfortunate insight into this.

So in the afterglow of the Sommerton expose I feel a bit icky honestly. I have realized I have not been paying enough attention to the media I have been engaging with, that I put things on sometimes just to have on in the background, even if there is something more thoughtful being said.

I ignored the red flags of someone looking kind of bored while delivering their video because I thought, "maybe that's just how he is", I know I don't always deliver words with the passion people expect from me. I trust and give grace to people without a lot of thought sometimes, it's something I'm working on to protect myself.

What was appealing about Sommerton's work, to me, was I wanted to engage with more queer content because queer anything was missing or hidden (there's a lot of tangents my ADHD brain wants to make here but honestly my Dad's taste in music was pretty heckin queer and it baffles me to this day that I grew up with such queer music but had no idea the history it represented) from my childhood growing up in a conservative Christian household. So in adulthood I've sought out queer content, sought out content from people with very different life experiences from my own so I can see another perspective and learn from it. Princess Weekes, Lindsey Ellis, Kat Blaque, Jessie Gender, and Khadija Mbowe were some of the first queer content creators I came across. And then there were others that they were in community with like FD Signifier, Foreign Man in a Foreign Land, VerilyBitchie others that I found I enjoyed too. And also I was around for the early days of TBSkyen, this is a funny tangent I just cannot help but add but I remember the very cute announcement Skyen made when they were talking about updating their channel page because people were starting to actually follow the channel and they wanted to have the effort of how their channel page look reflect that the professionalism mattered. Actually I think this tangent will prove a point later, hold onto it.

So I trusted Sommerton, and I even supported him on Patreon because I am a sucker for marketing, and I thought he might be a good cause to stand behind because he seemed to be doing a lot to illustrate a queer history I never knew, and I didn't think to do much work to look further than what was being presented on the surface. But things were starting to feel weird. Like it was weird when he had Mother's Basement quoted for his anime episode but didn't have like a cameo of him or something, just a mention of him. And it was weird how he kept saying straight white women were deniers of the gayness in Yuri on Ice, when that contradicted my own experiences with other women, and despite not being straight or strictly a woman myself, it kind of contradicted me who . It was also becoming really weird how he didn't seem to be getting in community with other creators I knew of (I'm not on Twitter or whatever it's called now so I had no idea about the previous Nebula creator drama he had). It was weird so I did start engaging with his content less, kind of by accident and I probably missed the re-uploaded content that would have been a red flag and I know I missed the live streams because it just seemed to be a bunch of AMAs instead of "Let's talk about X thing" I say all of this to illustrate, I do have taste, I do have some critical thinking skills and I also have a lot of trust in people, and I am probably an example of the average person that watched Sommerton's content.

Funny story I watched Todd In the Shadows' video before I watched Hbomberguy's video and I was appalled at myself that I had missed so much, thought so little beyond the surface of what was being presented, that I had just let my brain just absorb things so uncritically, that I didn't question much even when things felt off, that I had perpetuated the him getting away with it all by being this way. I blamed myself first.

But to others that have been fooled whether it's by Sommerton or other people in your life, it was not your fault that you trusted someone, that you believed them, that you took what they said at face value. The only thing you should do instead of blaming yourself is to reflect and learn from this experience. The power of hindsight can empower you to trust again but to trust with more boundaries in place for yourself.

In hindsight Sommerton's lack of passion should have been a red flag. In hindsight I have not adored his content or his brand the way I adore other content creators I engage with, there is not an adorable memory I can recall with fondness like I can with early TBSkyen giving his channel a facelift for the sake of telling their viewers "you matter and deserve professionalism". In hindsight my own lack of passion for Sommerton's content should have been a red flag. In hindsight there were some big red flags that I ignored just because I go to YouTube just to enjoy myself, because I have the privilege of being perceived a certain way that makes most of the queer history within Sommerton's mountain of plagiarism something I don't have to think about on a daily basis.

Should we have to be this vigilant just to enjoy content on a platform? Well look I'm not going to tell you what to do but I certainly suggest you should if you don't want to feel bamboozled again. I know I don't want to feel bamboozled again. It sucks but just like "Who Watches the Watchmen" was spray painted on the streets in Alan Moore's Watchmen, Hbomberguy's video posed the same question but for YouTubers. And the answer is it's other YouTubers and it's us as viewers. The consequences of not holding people accountable to their actions is, that they keep getting away with it and keep getting to spread their harm. And we should all do better.

re: Somerton

Not for nothing, but I think we should remember that James Somerton's fans and subscribers are normal people, just like you. They are people who received his output in good faith, and extended to him a normal amount of grace and benefit of the doubt, which he took advantage of.

I don't think it's helpful to respond to the exposé on Somerton with sentiments along the lines of "wow, how could anyone ever think THIS GUY'S videos were any good, ha ha ha, how did he ever get subscribers?" because 1) you have the substantial benefit of hindsight and a disengaged outsider perspective, and 2) it's a rhetoric that creates a divide between you (refined, savvy, smart, sophisticated) and Somerton's audience (gullible, unrefined, easily taken advantage of, terrible taste), which is a false divide, with a false sense of security.

Somerton's success happened because he stole good writing. He found interesting, insightful, in-depth work done by other people, applied the one skill he actually has which is marketing, and re-packaged it as his own. He targeted a market which is starving for the exact kind of writing he was stealing, and pushed his audience to disengage from sources that conflicted with him.

Hbomberguy makes this point in his exposé video: good queer writing is hard to find and incredibly easy to lose. The writers Somerton stole from were often poor or precarious, writing freelance work for small circles under shitty conditions, without the means or the reach or the privileges necessary to find bigger markets. And, as Hbomb demonstrated, when people did discover Somerton's plagiarism, he used his substantial audience to hound them away and dissuade anyone else from trying to hold him accountable.

He stole queer writing by marginalized people, about experiences and perspectives that people are desperate to hear more about, and even if his delivery and aesthetics were naff, his words resonated with people because the original writers who actually wrote them poured their goddamn hearts and souls into it.

Somerton also maintained a consistent narrative of persecution and marginalization about himself. He took the plain truth, which is that queer people and perspectives are discriminated against, and worked that into a story about himself as a lone, brave truth-teller, daring to voice an authentic queer perspective, constantly beset by bigots and adversaries who sought to tear him down. As @aranock, who works with some of the people he targeted, writes in this post, Somerton weaponized whatever casual bias and bigotry he could find in his audience to reinforce his me vs them narrative (usually misogyny and various forms of transphobia), which is what grifters do. They find a vulnerable thread in a community and pull on it. And while you may not have the particular vulnerability that he exploited, you do have vulnerabilities, and they can be exploited too.

People felt compelled to support him, even if his work was sometimes shoddy, because he presented himself as a vulnerable, marginalized person in need of help, he pulled on that vulnerable thread.

Again, he has a degree in marketing, and just like propaganda, nobody is immune to marketing.

YouTube as a system is set up to push for more, constantly more. More content, more videos, more output, more more more more, and part of Somerton and Illuminaughty's success was their ability to push out large amounts of content to the hungry algorithm, even if it was of inferior quality. The algorithm rewarded their volume of output with more eyeballs and attention, and therefore more opportunities to find people who were vulnerable to their grift.

It is a system which quite literally rewards the exact kind of plagiarism that they do, because watch-time and engagement are easily measurable metrics for a corporation, and academic rigor is not. There is pressure to deliver, and a lot of rewards to gain from cutting corners to do it.

Somerton and Illuminaughty and Internet Historian are extreme and very obvious cases, so blatant that you can make a four hour video essay exposing what they've done, but the vast majority of this kind of plagiarism isn't going to be obvious - sometimes it might not even be obvious to the people who are doing it. Casual plagiarism is endemic to the modern internet, and most people don't get educated on what the exact boundaries are between proper sourcing and quoting vs plagiarizing. We had an entire course module at my university aimed at teaching students the exact differences and definitions, and people still made good faith mistakes in their essays and papers that they had to learn to correct during their education.

All of this to say: it is extremely easy in hindsight to call Somerton's work shitty and shoddy, his aesthetics flat and uninspired, and to imagine that as a sophisticated person with good taste and critical faculties, you would never be taken in by this kind of grifter. It is extremely easy to distance yourself from the people he preyed on, and imagine that you will never have to worry about your fave doing your dirty like that.

But part of the point of Hbomberguy's video is that plagiarism is extremely easy to get away with, and often difficult for the average person to spot and call out, and with the rise of AI tools blurring the lines even further, it is not going to get any easier.

So I think we should resist the temptation to think of Somerton's audience as people with bad taste and poor faculties. We should resist the temptation to distance ourselves from the perfectly normal people he preyed on. Many times in your life, a modestly clever man with a marketing degree has fooled you too.

On a personal note, by the same token, I am resisting the temptation to assume that I am too good to be vulnerable to the systemic pressures that produced Somerton and Illuminaughty. No, I've never made a video by word-for-word reciting someone else's work, but I know for a fact that I could do a better job of double-checking my work and citing my sources. I feel the exact same pressure to get a video out as fast as possible, I have the exact same rewards dangled in front of me by YouTube as a platform, and I can't pretend it doesn't affect my work. To me, Hbomb's video felt like a wake-up call to do better.

#james somerton #todd in the shadows #hbomberguy #plagiarism #youtube #confession

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