James Somerton Plagiarized Me

Hello. It’s been a long time. I don’t intend to return to writing on this blog, but it’s been brought to my attention that a YouTuber named James Somerton plagiarized portions of my 2013 blog post The Possible Disturbing Dissonance Between Hajime Isayama’s Beliefs and Attack on Titan’s Themes in his video Attack on Titan and the End of Media Literacy and I must address it.

He has apparently been found plagiarizing before, so I want to make it clear that Somerton never asked permission to use my work in his video and I do not approve of him using my words now. He uploaded the video in September of 2022, so his inability to credit his sources remains ongoing.

Here are screencaps of the video at the relevant times:

Look to the transcript on the right for the full stolen text. As you can see, be plagiarized my writing about Japan’s colonization of South Korea:

This outrage should come as no surprise knowing the history between Japan and Korea, but that is exactly what people may not be aware of. Korea was occupied by Japan from 1910 to 1945, only one of the East Asian nations colonized by Japan as part of its growing imperial presence. During that time, the Japanese army enforced changing Korean names to Japanese style, destroyed and stole Korean cultural artifacts and locations, murdered the Korean empress, forced Korean men into hazardous war efforts, forced Korean women into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers, and tortured and massacred and experimented on innocent Koreans. However, history textbooks and classes in Japan have glossed over if not outright ignored these events.

Later in the video, he also plagiarized my point about Hange:

Would not Hange be just as disgusted with Japanese politicians denying war crimes and textbooks hiding history as with the wall cult and government that keeps secrets about the titans from the public?

Frankly, I don’t see why my sentences were lifted wholesale for the video script. The reluctance to paraphrase the same factual information speaks to a lack of imagination, not to mention a lack of research into the complex history available beyond my single outdated blog post.

His video names some anime-focused YouTubers when quoting them (not that he actually links to the videos or in some cases even specifies the source), but not my blog. Why? Because I’m not a popular male YouTube personality? Even though my piece is one of the primary sources of the controversy around Isayama? The selective use of citations obfuscates the origin of my uncredited passages even more.

This is not a call to harass Somerton. I do not have an opinion on the video itself, besides that using my work without permission or credit was inappropriate. Again, I do not approve of my words being plagiarized by him. He should be ashamed of the laziness of copying entire sentences into his script as if he wrote them himself. How can you say a fandom lacks media literacy when you can’t even conduct your own research or compose your own analysis?

Farewell, again.