YIKES. Honestly, if that Hbomberguy video hadn’t already driven James Somerton off the Internet, this one would’ve ended him on YT; as it stands, this serves neatly as the final nail in the coffin. It comes from a channel called Todd in the Shadows, and Todd Nathanson doesn’t usually do this sort of thing, his channel’s more about music, but he was sufficiently offended by something Somerton posted that he felt the need to make this… and he acknowledges knowing Harris was doing his video about Somerton and that it was something of an inspiration, but the two videos take separate approaches so they’re both worth watching.
Todd’s video is more about the facts than the knocking off of other people’s work, and the sheer amount of things that he’s caught James being verifiably wrong about is just… oy. Why, though, would James lie about something like this that can be, you know, independently verified? (I use the word “lie” because Todd assumes malice rather than incompetence in almost every case here.) Well, he has a Fandom wiki entry that currently reads in part:
He generally has left leaning political views, although has made multiple statements condemning a group he calls “straight white women.” This is likely a masking of misogynism: focusing on their race and sexuality in an attempt to deemphasize the gender aspect, and thus, making it appear acceptable him to make statements that would be hateful and bigoted if these qualities were not brought up. James has also misgendered transgender creators in some of his videos, as well as erasing mentions of the word transgender when covering transgender specific topics. He has also described the queer community at large as “LGB,” a transphobic dogwhistle.
So there’s a certain propensity, as noted by both Harris and Todd and various of their commenters, towards James promoting himself as a champion of the LGBT but arguably only really caring about the G and trying to paint the L, the B, and the T as historically having had an easier time of things than gay men have had. Haven’t seen enough to really confirm that for myself, but that seems to be the broad consensus about how he works as a queer creator.
It still begs the question of why he’s telling these bullshit stories. I can kind of understand him calling The Rocky Horror Picture Show the film that saved 20th Century Fox if he’s trying to push queer art and history (despite it not actually being history, cos RHPS was bugger all of the sort). I don’t even remotely understand his retelling the origins of messrs Gaiman & Pratchett’s Good Omens, which has been told by Gaiman at least (not sure how much Pratchett wrote about the subject), and Somerton’s telling is… kind of entirely different from Gaiman’s, and Gaiman strikes me as the sort of creator who’s actually honest about these things; what’s the point, therefore, of James spinning his bullshit narrative?
I don’t understand a lot of this stuff, and consequently I’ve had great difficulty articulating that lack of understanding, I’ve cut and/or rewritten huge parts of this post while writing it since last night. What is the point? Cos these details are all things James Somerton could’ve verified before stating them as fact, we know cos Todd managed to verify them; James not doing so makes him look kind of grossly incompetent at best. That should be enough to end whatever credibility he had on YT. And what if it was deliberate…? Was he just hoping no one would fact check him? Why did he do it at all?
Having given more thought to the situation, I find myself increasingly perplexed by it, but also oddly sympathetic somehow towards James Somerton. I sense some sort of sad personal flaw that makes him feel like he’s less than he wishes he were—a feeling I know myself better than I’d like, to be honest; I’m sure it’s a thing that drives a lot of people really—but it also made him try to be something in a way that he really shouldn’t have done. So whatever sympathy I might feel really is wasted, cos this shit is something he’s ultimately brought on himself. And there’s still something kind of sad about it.
Oh, and one final irony: The Algorithm suggested one of Somerton’s videos while I was watching Todd’s as something I might like to watch next. I decided against it.
