It has been five months since Hbomberguy released his "Plagiarism and You(Tube)" video essay on 2 December 2023, which set off a YouTube plagiarism scandal, with another YouTuber James Somerton being the main focus of Hbomberguy's video essay. I do not write this post to recap or rehash the entire James Somerton debacle. Instead, I want to talk about something personal related to one of James Somerton's videos — James Somerton had used one of my video game footage in one of his videos without crediting me or asking for my permission.
On 5 November 2021, James Somerton released a video essay on his YouTube channel titled "Video Games and the Choice to be Gay". As of this writing, the video has been made private, but Somerton's videos have been archived on the Internet Archive with two playlists: James Somerton youtube archive and James Somerton- Public Records, so you can still watch "Video Games and the Choice to be Gay" directly on the Internet Archive in both the Youtube archive and the Public Records playlists. Alternately, you can watch the video through one of the Wayback Machine snapshots.
I first discovered "Video Games and the Choice to be Gay" through a Dragon Age fan blog on Tumblr shortly after the video was published. The video piqued my interest because LGBTQ+ representation in video games is relevant to me as a queer, non-binary lesbian gamer, and the video games discussed in Somerton's video included Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age and Mass Effect, which was also relevant to me since I used to be a huge fan of BioWare games. As a result, "Video Games and the Choice to be Gay" ended up being the first and only James Somerton video I have actually watched.
Before finished watching it, one thing from "Video Games and the Choice to be Gay" that caught my attention was when Somerton talked about Juhani from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, who was the very first confirmed gay and lesbian character from both BioWare games and the entire Star Wars franchise, including the old Expended Universe, one of the Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR) footage shown on screen in the video included one of my KotOR footage about Juhani and her romance with the female player character.
Specifically, the clip from Somerton's video at the timestamp from 12:09 to 12:13 was actually from my 5 March 2016 video footage of Juhani's love confession with the Juhani Romance Enhancement mod, specifically at the timestamp 0:10 to 0:16.
Here is a back-to-back comparison between the clips from my original footage and Somerton's video respectively, proving the clip from Somerton's video was originally from my footage:
I immediately recognised my clip through the appearance of the female player character and her outfit, which was from the Segan Wyndh Jedi Armor mod. Furthermore, there are not many videos about Juhani's romance out there, so the player character's appearance, which can vary depending on how the player customises their character in the character creator or with mods, in Somerton's video only stood out to me even more. My footage of Juhani's love confession was part of my Juhani romance and conversation video series, to compliment my Juhani romance guide, which I am still proud to say is the most comprehensive guide about Juhani's romance on the internet.
To be honest, even back then, I was already a little disappointed that James Somerton used my footage in his video without a single word about the clip's source, both in the video itself and the video description, nor had Somerton ever reached out to me about using my footage in his video (on a related note, Somerton and I never had any direct interactions). I do not own the intellectual property of Star Wars or KotOR, but capturing video game footage requires one to actually play through the game, which takes time, especially role-playing games like KotOR. In addition, I had spent a great deal of effort on promoting Juhani's romance, including writing a guide and recording video footage about it because Juhani's romance is also infamous for being buggy and tricky to successfully complete, to the extent many KotOR fans were not even aware that Juhani can actually be romanced by the (female) player character.
However, I did not dare to say a word about Somerton's usage of my Juhani romance footage, because Somerton was already a fairly popular YouTuber with 138K subscribers by the time the video was released (at least according to the Wayback Machine snapshot of the video on 5 November 2021), while I do not even consider myself a YouTuber, since my YouTube channel only consists of video game footage I recorded myself without commentary. I did not bring up Somerton's usage of my Juhani romance footage because I did not want to come across as trying to start a drama or gain attention. I also tried to look at the positives by considering it an honour that at least my Juhani romance videos get noticed by a popular YouTuber.
As for Somerton's "Video Games and the Choice to be Gay" video itself, my initial thoughts after watching were that it was an interesting take on queer representation in Video games. I elaborated my thoughts when I shared the video with a friend:
Your mileage may vary on his opinions on certain individual examples from BioWare games that he brought up, and I cannot comment on Hades and The Last of Us 2 because I've never played them, but I very much agree with his main points about how LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream video games tend to be superficial and shallow because major game companies want their games to appeal as many people as possible, thus they're still unwilling to take too much risk so they won't offend the gamer bros too much. Honestly, this is how I feel about BioWare's games in general, despite BioWare's reputation as a progressive game company, especially when it comes to queer representation. I would give BioWare the benefit of the doubt for Juhani because she was the first confirmed queer character in both BioWare games and Star Wars, but when it comes to BioWare's original IPs, they could have done better.
I also strongly agree with him about the importance of us LGBTQ+ gamers supporting indie queer developers and their work, instead of relying on mainstream video games (and mainstream media in general) for queer representation.
That said, I did not bring up the fact that Somerton used my KotOR footage to my friend back then.
As mentioned above, "Video Games and the Choice to be Gay" was the first and only James Somerton video I have ever watched. I did not subscribe to Somerton's channel, nor did I have the time nor enough interest to watch any other Somerton's videos. No YouTubers I followed referenced Somerton's videos or were associated with him, and no one in my social media circles talked about him either. Therefore, after watching "Video Games and the Choice to be Gay" in November 2021, Somerton simply went off of my radar until his plagiarism scandal broke out in December 2023.
After the James Somerton's plagiarism scandal broke out, it was revealed that "Video Games and the Choice to be Gay" plagiarised a paragraph of Robert Grosso's article "Queer Characters in Gaming - A Brief History" on TechRaptor and ripped off Verity Ritchie's (also known as verilybitchie) video essay "Hοѡ Biѕeхυаlity Chaոɡeԁ Video Gaⅿes".
"Video Games and the Choice to be Gay" was not covered in Hbomberguy's "Plagiarism and You(Tube)" video, so I did not realise that Somerton's video essay about queer representation in video games was also largely built upon other queer creators' works without credit, until one day before I began to write this post, when I searched about the video myself and discovered the sources through the website James Somerton Transcripts. This led to me watching Verity Ritchie's original video as well as listening to and reading their Patreon post and podcast episode about Somerton ripping off their video, realising that the main framework and talking points from Somerton's video was actually from Verity's video.
I felt guilty about giving Somerton credit for Verity's takes about queer representation in video games, although I still firmly stand by what I said about the importance of supporting indie queer developers and their work instead of relying on mainstream video games for queer representation. I was not aware of Verity when I discovered Somerton's video in 2021, but I became aware of Verity and their YouTube channel in early 2023, after discovering their "The Consumerist Dystopia of Harry Potter" video, which I included and recommended in my Anti-Harry Potter and Anti-J. K. Rowling Masterlist, so I recommend fellow queer gamers to check out Verity's "Hοѡ Biѕeхυаlity Chaոɡeԁ Video Gaⅿes" if you are interested in the topic of queer representation in video games.
The final push for me to write this post, was seeing Verity crediting the source of the gameplay footage featured in "Hοѡ Biѕeхυаlity Chaոɡeԁ Video Gaⅿes", as well as listening to them and their co-writer Ada Černoša talking about Somerton's lack of gameplay footage in "Video Games and the Choice to be Gay", doubting the gameplay footage in the video are his own, and that recording gameplay footage take time and effort. This made Somerton's usage of my video game footage without credit leave a more sour taste in my mouth, enough that I decided to, at last, talk about this and confirm that James Somerton had indeed used someone else's gameplay footage without credit or permission, with I being at least one of that someone else.
I do not expect anything from writing this post. James Somerton has destroyed his own reputation and internet career at this point without my help, so I merely just want to get Somerton's uncredited usage of my video game footage off my chest after being hesitant to bring it up since 2021.
(Update, 17 May 2024: Re-uploaded my comparison video for better quality, and updated the links to Somerton's video on the Internet Archive)