#i saw a tweet the other day post hbomb that was like.

[tiktaalic]

What did Sarah Z do ?

tbc my beef w her is not a beef its just a matter of personal preference n not liking the two (2) vids ive seen from her . i dont like that she does tumblr summaries with the vibe of and aren't these people crazy. arent these people cringe. couldnt be me. i just have a tumblr accoutn and rubber neck them. i remember her johnlock vid got flack from ppl involved in tjlc for being inaccurate. and i remember a lot of ppl i follow preemptively blocking her when she announced she was making a destiel vid based on the way she would yoink tumblr posts for her vid without asking you if it was ok to like. put your post on blast to 2 million views while she implied it was embarrassing and cringe. um and then the destiel vid she made didn't live up to my standards of accuracy and completeness . in my memory she actively reached out to someone for their recollection of johnlock the cultural moment and did no such thing for destiel just based it on what was hitting the top posts part of the destiel tag in november of 2020. thats all. went back to look for my posts abt it at the time and here's one sample.

havent finished the vid yet but i think there are more points to be made about parasocialism – she mentions that it was easy for fans to interact with creators/cast because of the simultaneous rise of social media/conventions/the cultural shift where shipping wasn’t taboo, but i think there’s definitely something to be said about how the creators were a large part of encouraging that. they were using fan inserts back in season 4. they Knew what was going on in fan spaces to the point where they referenced names of real bnfs, and they made the decision to goad and wink and play it up instead of adhering to the norm of looking the other way. like. there is a parasocialism there to be sure, but no one MADE them say the words wincest and destiel and sastiel on the show. creators/writers played a fairly significant part in crafting the fan environment that was crafted. imo

and now im mad again lmao bc you cannot talk about fans being parasocial and then not say and isn't it FUCKED that eric kripke name dropped real forum mods and forum members as stupid and cringe in his television show. oh and she was a chronic name searcher. she was always reblogging untagged posts abt her to argue with somebody. and they werent like. [accusation] [response saying that's not true] it was like. harmless disagreement. sarah getting their ass with her much larger following, but to be clear my main gripe is i think i know more about destiel than you do genius. which is petty but arguably valid criticism of someone doing a literal destiel retrospective and mocking it the whole time

[icharchivist]

Watching the hbomberguy video finally (it's long and I didn't have time previously) and I just had such a bizarre experience.

Because I used to know Illuminaughty. Or rather, I'd heard of her in passing. I used to keep "people reading Reddit posts" videos on as background noise (and yes, I know it's low effort shit and I fell off at some point, but hey. It was a fad) and she came up in a playlist and I watched half a video before switching to something else, mainly because I disliked her presentation, it's difficult to explain and it's been years, so that doesn't help.

Then, a few weeks ago, before the hbomb went off, I saw a video on my home screen that had her in the title. It was one of those drama YouTuber videos he'd mentioned, making a video cannibalizing his Tweet and everything. By that point I hadn't even known Blaire did video essays and I only really clicked on the video because I vaguely remembered her name. But the video was just talking about some tweets and didn't provide any context and it was just too vague, so I clicked off again, none the wiser.

Anyway, started watching the hbomberguy video and I'm finally getting that context for everything, it feels so good!

Sorry if that's not relevant to anything, it just hit me like a pile of bricks. My vibe checks are immaculate, apparently.

Source: trust me bro

YOU'RE ALL GOOD NO WORRIES

first of all, no harm with being """late""" (hell you're not even that late, it's a few days old, it's nothing lmao), it's a super long video with a lot of content and honestly, i'm more surprised that this video took the internet by storm as fast as it did. I mean, it's a good thing considering the subject matter, but i did not expect it. (i've been following hbomberguy for years personally and i always wait for his videos with bated breath, i genuinely didn't expect the whole internet to react to this one as well. but i guess it also kinda happened to the previous video he posted. good for him!)

second, no wonder you felt like rambling about it, it IS quite a wild experience. I think there's something so eerie about seeing something you were kinda aware of from afar and then suddenly seeing it all come to light like this. Especially that way.

i rambled a bit myself so lol

(also while it's true the content kinda suck i do not think that people have to like... watch only perfect intellectualism content all the time. sometimes some dumb shit to keep in the background helps a lot just to have a bit of company. I think it's important to be mindfull of content mills but it's no use beating oneself up about it).

since i follow hbmb for years, i actually saw the Illuminaughty debacle he talked about live when it happened, since he replied to her back then and some creators i followed addressed it then. There is a whoooole lot of others things wrong with Blair on the problematic side that Harris didn't touch because he was focusing on the plagiarism, but it was a ride in itself.

But the timing in which you were reminded of Illuminaughty right before the video is truly one of a kind. because the whole debacle had died down a bit since then, so it was truly quite the timing??? the universe preparing you for this...

and if you're just starting the video you can stop here but i have more thoughts about it about the second half of the video, but the tldr is that i had the same reaction as you, but on the later part:

And also, like, i feel you because somewhat same but with James Somerton. He's been in my recommanded a lot on youtube, but i never watched his videos because a lot of the topics he talked about were things i had already read about, and i didn't really feel like hearing someone else's opinion about it. (though after watching hbomb's video, considering some of the stuff he plagiarized *are* the stuff i heard those topics from to start with.... really adds to it all.). I think i watched ONE video, and i genuinely don't remember what it was, but i remembered thinking it was kinda surface level and i didn't really like his take then.

But i shrugged it off thinking it's just some creators i didn't vibe with, it happens. just because a creator is queer doesn't mean their takes will resonate with me on that point, so i moved on with my life.

but then James Somerton picked some fights on Twitter a while ago against a handful of youtuber i follow, especially Jessie Gender, and i was genuinely so angry on her behalf that i kinda blacklisted Somerton in my mind back then.

for those who don't know, Somerton made a whole public drama on twitter about how Nebula "faked being queer friendly" but "refused to reach out to him and inviting him in" which means they were actually super homophobic and never actually cared for queer people. Which is a BEWILDERING thing to broadcast considering how many of the funders AND video makers of Nebula are LGBT+.

Jessie Gender called him out gently about it on twitter (because Jessie is always really sweet and calm about things), telling him that as a trans woman, she disagreed with his reading of it fully and no platform has given her the freedom to express her experience like Nebula did, and she hoped to reach out to him to discuss what exactly where the Nebula returns that made him feel that and if there was something that could be done about it.

And Somerton then immediately went on about how because of Jessie, he got hundreds of homophobic death threats and that it was the real face of Nebula, and why his fans needed to boycott Nebula. Jessie got *mad* harassed out of it. she had a very hard time following that.

(she recently made a video about the Somerton issues following hbomb' video - i didn't have the time to watch it yet but i definitely need to see if she addresses it since she mentioned it on her twitter a couple of times since then)

And it was genuinely horrible to see. I've seen so many trans creators and others LGBT creators trying to reason with Somerton and Somerton dug his heels insulting them and putting himself as the victim of an homophobic campaign and having his fans harass the trans creators who called him out, as well as the fem-presenting or afab LGBT+ creators who called him out. (like in insight it was obviously misogyny. he includes trans women in his misogyny but he also treats anyone afab as women to start with. In insight it truly is the man so misogynist that he has to broad his definition of a woman in order to hate as many of them as possible, even when he's wrong and those people aren't women (speaking of the trans men and nb people he misgendered in his search for misogyny, to be clear)) It was a horrible debacle.

Turns out that Jessie had actually tried to invite Somerton into a discord server with Nebula's people so he could eventually make his case here, but he refused to join then, and then he threw Nebula under the bus on twitter -- and turns out Nebula wasn't actually considering him because of the plagiarism' claims against him they wanted to investigate (Harris being a major voice of Nebula to start with. also similarly, it may also be why Todd in the Shadows, also a major voice of Nebula, was pulling his own investigation on Somerton (that he published after Harris' videos))

Like i'm not going at it with "it's obvious Somerton was a fraud", don't get me wrong, i just didn't vibe with the guy and found the little of his content to be so surface level it looked like any random tumblr post you could read (which,imo, i think a lot of the things Harris might not have found being obviously plagiarised, probably came from tumblr, since it's harder to find the source of posts there). I was just very angry at the twitter thing that happened, so i remembered his name and kinda flagged him in my brain as "this gay dude who only cares about his own letter in the LGBT+ community".

So huh. going into Harris' video, i did expect the Illuminaughti stuff because the drama was fresh in my brain and all. But when i saw the Somerton bit i was just "holy shit WAIT FOR REAL???" and i've stayed in shock the whole time.

I think even without knowledge of any of these people, the video is a bombshell in the way we interreact with content especially on youtube. but knowing even slightly anything about the content he's talking about makes it all more eerie and bewildering.

So i totally feel you on being super weirded out that this creator you kinda crossed path with but never was super involved in suddenly returns to hit you in the face like this. it's a really weird experience so i feel you 100%

so no worries about that and i'm glad you're watching the video and are learning something out of it! i do think it's more than just drama and it's an important video about the way plagiarism manifest itself and the way this type of people prey on more vulnerable communities to start with. so if the video can also struck a cord in other way, it's a nice thing imo.

so o7 very glad to hear it, and i know i blogged a lot about the video so i get why you felt like talking to me about it.

(but check hbomb' catalogue if you can. the Roblox video is in the same vibe and it's one of my fav video of all time. The Pathologic video he made is a master piece. He has so many good content. Truly worth a watch ;D)

Take care and good luck with the rest!