Unbelievable, but believable at the same time. James Somerton is not only not dead—as we discovered soon after the “suicide note” business a couple of months ago (also: that was ONLY a couple of months ago?), he was in alive after all—but also not offline.
And in the meantime he’s been using yet another alt account to defend himself:
So yeah, not only alive and well but evidently never in any real danger from himself after all. Needless to say, Peter Coffin is still blaming everyone else, as you can see from what he’s posting and reposting:
Yeah, “his DICK and BALLS” is apparently quite literally what he was posting on his alt account while threatening suicide on main. There have, of course, been jokes about who he plagiarised his genitals from…
Anyway, NO ONE IS DISAPPOINTED that James Somerton is still alive. We’re disappointed that he’s still a fucking idiot. Everything that’s happened to him over the last six months and he’s learned FUCKING NOTHING from it. He is apparently completely incapable of not being online, and I am of course the last person who can criticise anyone else for that, but I’m not putting myself out in front of a vast audience as a professed expert in whatever subject, and I haven’t built my reputation for being that on mass plagiarism and misinformation. And I haven’t tried to fake my death to avoid criticism. Slight difference between me and him.
I don’t actively wish Somerton harm, but I have reached the point where I no longer actively wish him well. I suspect I’m not the only one now in that position. If he actually does do better and finally learn from the experience, great. And if he doesn’t, well, whatever. I don’t think anyone but Peter Coffin will waste any sympathy on him.
So James Somerton might indeed be OK after all? Someone reached out to his writer Nick Herrgott and got this response:
So that’s… OK then? Cos “nothing to worry about” is a bit vague; as others have said, it could mean James did try something but failed and is being cared for, or it could mean James was full of shit all along and faking for attention/sympathy. The former situation is bad, obviously, but the second one is a lot worse.
In any case, Peter Coffin’s still having a normal one:
Although for champion bad take on the affair, I think I have to give it to some Twitter shithead who said that if Hbomberguy’s not responsible for the bad behaviour of his fans and followers, you can’t hold Trump responsible for his either. Because there are SO MANY PARALLELS AND SIMILARITIES between an English Youtuber and a self-avowed would-be dictator, aren’t there.
So l’affaire Somerton may have taken a somewhat… bleak turn, with the Internet’s favourite content thief having possibly offed himself.
From what I understand, this is still just a rumour at the time of writing, the source being, well, James himself apparently posting a suicide note on Twitter, though whether or not he actually has done himself in appears to be unconfirmed as of yet. Obviously this is not the end to the story anyone actually wants… but needless to say some are pointing the finger at one particular individual:
The idea that we should perhaps wait for confirmation of Somerton’s death or otherwise has evidently not occurred to some of us. Also, ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED in making Hank Green swear, dickhead…
Peter Coffin is a Youtuber I dimly remember following years ago but for whatever reason I lost interest in them (Peter may be a shithead but I still don’t like misgendering) and they seem to have turned really shitty after becoming involved somehow with the dubious Caleb Maupin; indeed, Coffin fell so far off my radar that I’d practically forgotten them, until they responded to the now legendary Hbomberguy plagiarism video with a video called “Plagiarism is AWESOME” and complaining about Harry attacking Somerton specifically rather than capitalism in general because how dare he make a video about what HE wanted rather than what Peter thought it should be about.
At the time I think this was mostly greeted with scorn, as Peter was clearly trying to bandwagon Hbomb’s original video and he was pissed that he wasn’t getting millions of views like him. He seems to have made more videos in that vein, though, cos getting attention with good takes would be selling out or something I suppose, and, well, now this bullshit on Twitter… where the whole thing is turning into some culture war flashpoint cos THE BAD LEFTY drove THE GAY FELLOW to (supposed) suicide, as those rightoids would’ve given a fuck about Somerton before this and wouldn’t have wanted him dead.
On the plus (?) side, very few people otherwise seem to be buying Peter’s bullshit, and the sensible people in the discourse are basically saying that, if James did off himself, then that was his responsibility and his choice, and holding Hbomb or anyone else to blame is spurious. Which it is. And, of course, this is assuming James has left us, and I do see a few folks on the socials doubting that; I don’t know if I share the line of thinking some have expressed that he is the exact sort of person that would fake this, but it’s out there. I don’t know. I suppose we’ll have some news eventually one way or the other…
I thought James Somerton’s arse had been so comprehensively handed to him after that Hbomberguy video last year that he would never have the temerity to show his face in public again (which, admittedly, he did briefly with that apology video he made, but he withdrew it so quickly it barely counts). However, it seems no one told Somerton that… cos he’s back with another apology and explanation video, full of excuses that I don’t think anyone is buying (though I am a little surprised that no one seems to be cracking jokes about who he plagiarised this from; maybe we got that out of our systems with the first apology). I offer here Mack Attack’s response to him, which is pointed and brutal and so it damn well should be; this dickhead is either delusional or else hoping the rest of us are…
For Harry, the shocking success of his four-hour video has itself brought a few internal issues surrounding a pledge he made to give away a portion of its profits to those who had been plagiarised.
“We said we were going to give away all the ad revenue that video raised and now because ad revenue’s higher in December, the video is four hours so there are more ads, and a lot of people have watched it, it’s an order of magnitude higher than we expected it to get.”
This means that the payouts Harry and the Hbomberguy team promised have increased dramatically, and, coupled with Somerton’s reaction, things have become much more hectic.
“Now, like, taxes are involved,” Harry says. “This is a substantial amount of money to be taxed on before we give it to people. It’s actually made it harder for me to do the intended purpose of the video.
“My wonderful producer, Kat, has had to set up a database to keep track of all of the things that were stolen from just to make sure we have everything correct… This isn’t like 300 bucks, which is what we expected it to be, this is a lot more.”
Good to know that something worthwhile has come from the debacle. The REALLY unexpected outcome from the whole thing, though, is surely this:
I will indeed be DAMNED. James Somerton returned just two weeks after he was blasted off the Internet to… apologise? And to reactivate his Patreon, too, but this video is what’s drawing most of the attention. Understandably so. And… YIKES.
These last two items raise an important point. I did try and watch Somerton’s video, and he basically started by talking about, frankly, having been hospitalised since Harry’s video came out. And I couldn’t watch it beyond that point, not because that’s, you know, grim as fuck (I’m assuming he’s telling the truth about this, I find it believable and I feel the people I’ve seen questioning this point are being unnecessarily uncharitable), but because I knew what the tone of the rest of the video would be if this was how he was kicking it off. From what I can see, I don’t appear to have missed much.
You may have noted, though, that my first screenshsot was of a reupload of the video… that’s cos not only did James upload what appears to have been one of the worst Youtube apology videos ever (a truly cursed subgenre), he also removed it a few hours later. Unsurprising, given that all the comments I saw before he whacked the video were bracingly negative. Alas for him, it’s so easy to download YT videos these days, and Somerton’s well enough known now, that someone was bound to save it in case he did that. Mind you, I’m still not going to watch it. I feel somehow that even watching someone else’s save and reupload of his video is just going to encourage him…
Needless to say Hbomberguy’s now-famous plagiarism video has provoked a lot of discourse on Youtube, some of which I’ve watched, but this particular example offers a different perspective on James Somerton: where Harris looked at Somerton’s plagiarism and Todd Nathanson looked at his misinformation and lies, Courtney and Royce look at, frankly, giving him money:
This video’s more about Somerton’s business practices with his production company Telos Pictures, which seem to have been as shitty as anything else. These creators have further particular beef with him over what they consider his poor showing when it came to asexual representation (I did rather enjoy the bit where she says how they gave him a bunch of potential resources and he never plagiarised any of it), but their more obvious problem is that, frankly, they put money into Telos, a fair bit thereof, and the return rhey got from doing so was… well, bugger all.
The more I hear about this character, the less I like him, and the detail about him literally calling the cops on some of his critics for “harrassment” makes me lose that rather pointless feeling of vague sympathy for him I had after watching Todd’s video. I can’t do it. He’s brought all this shit on himself and HE FUCKING DESERVES IT. And his Fandom page that I linked previously has been updated with some new bullshit, looks like he may have engaged in catfishing and some sort of scam on Patreon and he may never have got those business degrees he started out his career with (having sold himself as a media expert before YT). I’m kind of glad I never watched any of his stuff now…
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.
GODFUCKINGDAMN, I’ve long wished that Harris would make videos more often than he does cos they tend to be really interesting, but when he springs a nearly FOUR HOUR extravaganza on us, I can’t accuse him of slacking off. (And the fucking thing’s already had two and a half million views…) Most of this is about one creator in particular, a guy called James Somerton, who was sprung by one of his own fans when she caught him plagiarising her work. I’m not sure that I’ve ever actually watched anything by the latter (I might’ve seen one or two but can’t remember offhand), but I have had him recommended to me by The Algorithm quite a lot and I think I’ve got quite a few of his videos in my YT watchlist. Think I might be removing those now, much like he seems to be removing himself:
Woof. I know Harris tells him “delete your channel” at one point in the video, but I didn’t expect Somerton to actually go to ground quite so hard so soon. And that’s not the only video about him that’s just appeared on YT in the last couple of days; I’m just going to watch the other one now…
You must be logged in to post a comment.