So the new HBomberguy video has had me mentally stunlocked since it came out. Mostly because it's a good video, but there's also another reason I kind of feel like sharing because I think about it a lot.
2021 was the height of my Omori phase; loved that game, still do, it makes me feel seen as a very autistic shut-in with bad coping mechanisms and I think it's a beautiful piece of work. Also as an autistic shut-in, I like video essays. You might've figured that one out since I named HBomb earlier, but I'm setting up here, you get it.
So naturally around that time I would have been interested in a particular video; at the time it was titled "The Devastating Way Omori Portrays Trauma", but it has since been renamed "The Game with a Perfect Portrayal of Trauma". It's a video released in August of 2021 by one Clark Elieson, a Youtuber with now a decent number of video essays under his belt, looking at his channel. I didn't know him because at the time he was new, and he only had two other videos up at the time. With the above in mind, and me mistaking him for Jacob Geller for some reason (I'm bad at names and their voices are kinda similar okay), I was the target demographic of course, so yeah, I sat down to watch.
So here's me, at 3 AM, curled up in bed trying to be comfy. I'm dozing a little bit, I'm half paying attention, I think at one point I start scrolling twitter while nodding along, like 'yes, yes, I played the game too, I was hoping you'd impress me a little more.'
And then out of nowhere, I have to stop, because I need to tab back into the video, rewind, and make sure I'm not having a dissociative episode.
Because, see, there's this part.
(In case this ends up broken, this is a clip of roughly one minute of footage surrounding the 13:52 mark. If it doesn't work, I guess you can go check out the video for yourself and go to that.)
And, I'm having a moment, because... well, okay. For one, my favorite song in Omori is playing at this point in the video.
"Sinking" is an incredible track reserved for Deeper Well, which if you haven't played, it's this really lategame area where the conceit of the whole game taking place primarily in the main character's dreams is really playing its hand. Things are getting physically and emotionally dark; the physical space and the metaphor are kind of starting to fall apart; NPCs are present, but barely have coherent shapes, named things that are either high-concept or pointed and accusatory; the things they say are sharp, seemingly not taking place within the narrative of the dream, but being aimed at the dreamer themself; the party members start questioning why they're here and what they're doing, because they genuinely do not remember, as if their memories are being repressed by the space itself.
The music accompanying this moment is unique, and powerful, and has stuck with me ever since. It's this synthetic, primal collection of noises without melody, only a vague rise and fall of pitch and volume that dives in and out of being subtle and completely overpowering. It is noises that feel like an auditory realization of how it feels to think back to traumatic memories and simply stare into a wall vacantly, not letting yourself think about how much time is passing. The feeling of tricking yourself into thinking you have reclaimed your life, and that this is your 'me' time, despite the fact that you're doing little else but letting an old wound hurt you. A sound of self-awareness that what you are doing is not okay, but that doing something about it may be painful. Literally, writing about this right now, I'm giving myself chills all over again. This piece of music is important to me.
If it sounds like I have a lot to say about this track, I do!
And I had a lot to say about it back around the start of 2021.
(Oh, and just for the sake of fairness: I know the comment is edited. Scout's honor, I promise that was just me cleaning up typos and later deciding 'hm this one specific part was kind of repetitive. I'm gonna fix that.' In fact, here's a screenshot I took of this comment from 2 years ago back when I first discovered this video, to both prove that and put down more solid dates than youtube's comment section can usually provide:)
Now, like... this had me fucked up a little bit. Obviously I was surprised at first just to hear my own words being read back to me by a youtube video essay man at fuck o'clock in the morning and that shit was maybe a little scary. But I went through the whole five stages of grief I think trying to figure out what happened and how I felt. Like, on the one hand, maybe I'd just hit the nail on the head, and said something so smart that a dude who would make a video essay with over a million views would come to the same conclusion.
But then I thought about it a little harder, and like. If you were an amateur youtube video essayist and you were looking for Dark Depressing Omori Music to put underneath your commentary, you would likely be going through the official uploads of the soundtrack. If you were doing that, and you found Sinking (which, reminder, is playing under this portion of the video), you would likely not miss the long comment with at the time several hundred upvotes, second or third from the top.
And... I mean, I felt a lot of things. I was annoyed that he didn't make any real attempt to make it clear those words weren't his own, but... I could rationalize that away. This is a Big Long Psychological Analysis Video, surely it would've looked unprofessional to properly cite a youtube comment just for some prose. And I mean, at the end of the day, words I said that I thought were cool got spoken in front of an audience of, at the time I'm writing this, nearly 2 million people. That's reach I sure as shit don't have. I mean nobody knows it's me but maybe I impressed somebody. Clearly it impressed this guy if he stole the quote.
I left a comment under the video, trying to take it in stride. You can probably still find it, though it only got like 8 likes and it's from October of 2 years ago, it's almost certainly buried. But it was mostly just a short, good-faith 'haha, wow, didn't expect to hear my own words back at me! Glad you liked my comment' message. I was kind of hoping for, I don't know, a reply or one of those hearts a video's uploader can give a comment. Nothing of the sort. Oh well.
So that's where I was at for the past two years. I thought of this as just, a funny, slightly unfortunate thing that happened to me once. I would've liked credit, but all I did was make a youtube comment; I posted it out in the open, with no intent or ability to profit from it, I just wanted to share some cool words I thought of in a neat order. Like a net-neutral effort in the cosmic sense. Who cares. Small thing.
This was before I watched the HBomberguy video about plagiarism he uploaded a few days ago. And now I'm really overthinking it.
Because, I think the real thing that made me notice I had gotten stolen from-- and that's what this is, it's still plagiarism-- was the fact that it didn't fit the video at all. If you were to watch the rest of that upload right now (which, I mean... more power to you, I'm telling you it contains plagiarism but if you want to see for yourself by all means), it would be very obvious that most of its runtime is meant to be focused on the professional Jungian psychology that went into the construction of Omori. You know, diagrams of the Ego, the Persona and the Shadow, relative to the unconscious mind. Why did he stop to randomly wax poetic about this one part of the game that just happened to sound neat? Why did he steal someone else's words to do it?
That's not rhetorical, I'm asking the genuine question. What does this add? "Here's such and such about how trauma physically alters the chemical makeup of the brain, here's how the persona and ego can splinter with psychology papers cited in the corner, and here's 'this part of the video game that I just think is neat :)' vaguely looped into a followup that is quickly discarded about the idea of repression."
It got into my head because, in a video otherwise about facts and analysis, what he took from my silly little youtube comment was my sentimentality. He took my emotions that I associate with the imagery present in game, and presented that as if it were objective, or worse, as if it were his own. Why would THAT be something someone would plagiarize...? Does he not even feel strongly enough about the subject to editorialize with his own thoughts? I thought that was the fun part of the video essay, why would this ever be what you cheat at? Why would you substitute someone else's feelings instead of showing your own?
And, you know... that sucks. I hate the idea of having to be paranoid about this from now on-- that some people would be willing to just regurgitate another person's genuine emotional attachment to something, and just take that for themselves and present it as dryly as line #46 of a psychology paper.
I'm a writer. I at least plan to be. I have like 83,000 words across various google docs all pertaining to a story I've been writing obsessively for a year, which I really hope to share with yall one day in some form, once I finally feel like it's presentable. I say this because I am both a creative, and a sentimental bitch. I genuinely believe the most important part of the creation process is where you do the part that you love in a way only you could do. Even in a world where we've long since run out of original ideas, there's beauty in taking something you care about, working it into your favorite shape until it's unrecognizable, and leaving your scent on it. And the one thing I truly like about the English language is that there are so, so many ways to communicate one idea that I don't think we'll ever run out of versions of the hero's journey to tell. Your voice is unique, your voice is important, you are capable of so many things with just a blank page (and occasionally a thesaurus, used responsibly).
This Clark Elieson guy took something that, I think at least, resonated with the however-many people who upvoted it because I said it in my voice, and pretended it was his. Not as if it was scientific fact, and 'there's only so many ways to present facts', but because he thought my words were more resonant than his own.
And I just think that's sad.
... You might notice this post keeps going. This is my funny callback to Hbomb doing the 'and now you can all leave' bit halfway through the video. I know this has been long as shit and I'm not gonna pretend I'm not probably boring most of you, and emotionally, I think I've made my point.
But also, uh, like I posted at the top: this got out of hand, because... then I started checking the video for other counts of actual plagiarism. And.
OOF.
Because see, I was totally going to leave it there, but then I really started overthinking myself. I got a bit less rhetorical asking myself, "how much CAN I trust what this dude is saying to be his own words?" Because I scrolled down, half-remembering the idea that he did have a sources cited section in the description, and found... uh, well.
That's not... that's not really proper citation form, now is it? Like, they're credited by title, sure, without any other MLA-appropriate markdown like author name or date of publication sure but 'it's a youtube video who cares'.
But something really sticks out to me about linking... the Amazon storefront pages for these books. I can't verify whether or not this is foul play... but that's the whole thing, isn't it? Like, I can't check to see what he may or may not be referencing or quoting, because he's showing me directly to the paywall between me and his sources. To be perfectly clear here: I'm not pretending this is, on its own, ammunition to start slinging shit. But it sure did worm itself into my brain.
And rewatching the video to skim for anything else that sounded suspicious... Again I can't say for sure what words are his own, his Sources are paywalled, but I sure noticed that the... 'verboseness'? of his commentary sure seemed to peak after he 'finished' reading quotes, such as at 19:35 when he, admittedly, does give a precise title and page number for a quote he reads for ~20 seconds.
Which, maybe I'm just the guy who thinks every movie is like Boss Baby because he's only seen Boss Baby, but I'm rewatching this video to prove my point, and recognizing a lot of tricks Harris pointed out were used by Illuminaughtii-- a LOT of quotes, from the game or otherwise, and then every seemingly original thought injected is... kind of dry, like a really basic observation given the subject. The biggest stretches of things I could find that I didn't suspect as anything out of the ordinary were just, 'him literally explaining what happens during the ending and final boss sequences'.
I want a heavy asterisk behind this whole coming section because I am just a fucking guy, with no practice in doing plagiarism research beyond being halfway decent at using google before AI made it bad. I might incorrectly attribute something, or point to a quote of a quote as if it's a source. But my point here is to showcase things that are, at the very least, not this dude's words, even though he is pretending they are, at least by omission.
Anyway, in no particular order, here's a couple of my hits from playing HBomb's 'pick a random line and google search it':
15:22 "Each door leads to a different personification of OMORI's fears and memories, twisted through a grim lens." -- One sentence, but I found this verbatim at https://breezewiki.com/omori/wiki/BLACK_SPACE under the Sunny Route section. This is literally just a wiki.
20:45 "In trauma the self-system breaks down, and parts of the self become polarized" -- Another single-sentence, but thanks to an instagram post, I know that this is apparently a direct quote from "The Body Keeps The Score", one of the books he names earlier in the video and conspicuously stops crediting here. If you scroll down a little further on this post, you might notice the things he says after this exact sentence are a vague paraphrasing of the idea of an 'inner child', a concept addressed within the Inner Family System mentioned in the text, which is not named in the video. This is a good example of the sort of shit that makes you unreliable at quoting properly.
21:00 "The burden of pain, terror and betrayal placed upon these childlike joys makes them toxic, parts of ourselves that we must deny at all costs" - https://mikehoolboom.com/?p=19876 Ctrl+F'd 'Toxic' on this page and yeah sure enough there's this quote before it was run through a blender
28:10 "Forgiveness does not relieve someone of responsibility of what they have done [...]" -- This is a big long quote I found courtesy of Goodreads.com literally under 'forgiving quotes', attributed to Desmond Tutu from the 2014 book "The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World". This book is not cited in the description. This un-cited quote literally continues for 32 seconds.
And then the video ends on another big long properly sourced quote just to be different.
Same shit as Illuminaughtii-- a lot of quotes, but then a lot MORE quotes that just happen to not be cited, so you don't know they're quotes. The Video Essayist illusion of having more original thoughts to bring to the table than you actually do.
So, uh, yeah that's just what he verbatim plagiarism that I could find in this video, JUST starting at the halfway point. I don't have a greater conclusion here, other than to supplement HBomberguy's original thesis, and say, "Wow, this guy's a piece of shit, actually! Forget being nice about him using my quote, fuck that guy!"
Okay so I wrapped this up last night genuinely thinking it would be the last I have to think of this dude for the rest of my life, barring maybe replying to some comments in the day or two it takes for this post to lose traction. Except I'm not that lucky, actually, and I woke up this morning still thinking about it, so here's me ventilating this nonsense garbage.
I was showing this post to some of my friends, whom I'd only told this story in passing to years ago, before the mental breakdown I had towards the end just last night. One of them, who asked to be anonymous but is an absolute darling and, as it turns out, has a much more helpful journalistic brain than me, did some slightly deeper digging. Because you see, I had just written the Amazon linked 'sources' section off as some kind of cocky dickhead 4th dimension chess move, a 'yeah I dare you to catch me plagiarizing anything, it'll cost you about 100 dollars total'.
This friend of mine, however, asked the much smarter question of 'how could he be making money off this?' And now I think this might just drive me crazy.
uh-oh.
Not pictured: They didn't try every link in the description, they only tried 2/8 of those Amazon links, but both were hits that turned out to have shortened his name out of the URL. I would try the rest to be thorough, but I actually think it would be more confusing and damning if only certain ones among those links secretly had his fingerprints on them, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and just assume the whole thing is tainted.
We're all in agreement that this isn't what a 'Sources' section is for, right? The entire point of listing your sources is so that anyone who wants to learn more, or in this case know you're not committing an academic crime, can do so with relative ease. Maybe I'm finally losing the last of my sanity here, but I don't think this qualifies as academia anymore, because these aren't just 'sources' when some non-zero indeterminate unlisted amount of them are sponsors, and I can't help but feel there might be a conflict of interest there!
So, just to recap here:
This motherfucker Video Essayist™️ plagiarized significant portions of the narration in his video, from places both listed and not listed in the video description,
used his 'Sources' section in his description to direct you towards the Amazon storefront paywalls between you and some of the books he was reading out of verbatim, and sometimes without proper citation so you'd think at least some of the smart words were his,
AND he was directly profiting off of anyone who tried to catch onto this, with the only hint towards any of this being the case getting shoved to the bottom of the description in vague legalese terms about 'making commission of these purchases'.
I just. Please understand, I went into this post expecting to tell a dumb story about a trending topic, I didn't expect to stumble into this... is it right to call this a 'grift'? It's not like he doesn't mention making commission off the links, but it is the bare legal minimum. And, while the Amzn link shortening is standard for affiliate links, it really does feel like deliberate obfuscation to reduce the connection to a footnote at the bottom of the description. Any other Youtuber tells you happily in the video 'hey go to this link slash My Name to get a discount/support my channel'. Not this guy, I guess, he was too busy getting all his best wham lines out of youtube comments.
I need to go fucking lie down. If anyone can reassure me that actually this is fine and I'm misunderstanding something I would genuinely welcome it by now because I'm having some kind of existential crisis.
