Look, I'd never heard of James Somerton before Hbomb's video but I have to tell you that his release schedule was already a glaring red flag.
I don't make video essays but what I do have is a PhD in chemistry, published papers and a ridiculous 320 page thesis. That thesis consists entirely of my own work, the results of experiments I carried out on materials that I made in the lab. Do you know how many citations I have? 366. I checked. A lot of that is putting my work in context and, believe me, that it doesn't even cover a tiny fraction of the papers and textbooks I read over the course of the 4 years it took to make that thesis.
All of this is to say is that one) citing correctly is fucking easy if you're not a hack and two) proper research takes a LONG time. Now these video essays aren't 320 pages of script of course but I have also written 8-20 page long papers too. I've even edited papers for friends from my degree and the latest one took 3 days cause it was in a different area of chemistry than my expertise so I had to research it as I went to make sure that I wasn't getting technical jargon wrong or changing words that were correct in the scientific context even if it seemed like awkward English. And that was just me editing a paper. Writing one takes weeks, if not months. It's not enough to just report your results, you have to put it within the context of the other research in your field. After all, it has to be novel in some way so you have to KNOW what is already out there in order to add to it. This is, or should be, a pretty similar process to making a academic style video essay on YouTube, but also adding in extra steps like making a video and editing it too.
This is not a process that you can churn out in a fucking week. If you are watching someone making long form academic style video essays that are >30 minutes long on a weekly basis, they're either paying a LOT of people to do all the research and writing and editing for them or they're a plagiarist. It is blatantly obvious to me that there's no way Somerton could have ever been such an expert in such a diverse field as queer theory that he could make these seemingly professional and well researched videos on many different forms of media once a week or fortnight. It's simply not possible to do that level of research, digest it and then synthesize your own thoughts and opinions on it AND THEN film and edit a video in that time. It's... Just very obvious to me.
I've seen actual academics say that they were supporting him until now and I just can't believe someone who also does their own research didn't notice this?? You do this! You know how long this takes! Did you think he was The Flash of YouTube creators??? I guess I also know a lot of let's players so I also know how long it takes to make videos ontop of research but, please, people, take some time to engage your critical thinking skills and not just mindlessly consume.
Anyway, fuck that guy. Thanks Hbomberguy for the great video that has taken over my brain for the weekend.