This video is monetized, so if you don't want to support him, a reddit user imsmartiswear gave a ~neutral summary:
- he apologized for plagiarism, and has reached out to "every author he wronged" and personally apologized (as we've seen online)
- he calls his choice to steal from others his misled way of giving a voice to other minority (read: non-white and trans) queer people, but he knows now it was wrong
- he blames the algorithm for making his videos popular, them describes how his layoff and struggle to be hired due to his epilepsy led him to try and feed the algorithm what it wanted (i.e. a shit ton of videos as quick as possible) and he copy pasted stuff into his scripts to save time
- he planned to revise the copied sections, but his memory issues (apparently well documented) made him forget which parts were and weren't copied- blames his laziness in not keeping track of that kind of stuff during research. Worsened when complications in paperwork after his mother's death (his father can't read) and Nick moved.
- (not neutral but accurate) hurls Nick under the bus for not catching his plagiarism
- on Telos: his mom had life insurance that didn't pay out because of a bullshit paperwork problem (believable), she willed it to him for the purpose of making a movie. He filled in what he didn't get from the policy with crowdfunding. Nick moved to be closer to family, James followed and, in the process, ruined any chance of Final Girl ever being produced.
- no $$$ was ever to go to Nick and James, only to pay actors and crew (but well below Union rates, he called it, "community theater but for film")
- goes through the plot of his FG script, says it's very different from FGSG (it's not, it's at the very least extremely derivative and, apparently, Nick thought it was so bad it needed to be completely scrapped).
- he kept announcing films really early into production, before he even knew of he could afford to film them, which is my they kept getting cancelled
- he's putting the vids written 100% by Nick that contain no plagiarism back up, along with editing out the plagiarism from a few of his "more important videos" and putting those back up soon.
- he's deleting his patreon and starting anew, all proceeds from old videos and the apology vid will go to Hbombs fund (but he didn't ask if he could before posting the video so if Hbomb says no he'll donate to Wikipedia and trans lifeline)
- some drama between him and Jessie Gender? Unclear. Received death threats, called the police, blah blah blah... Sorry it really feels like a boy who cried wolf situation I won't lie.
- I can't recall all of the things he kinda went through at the end because it was kinda disorganized, but one stood out. He said that Unrequited was based on Vito Rouso's book, not the film, and that he greatly expanded what the book talked about with his own ideas. (BULLSHIT BULLSHIT BULLSHIT)
- he's going to post 2 plagiarism free vids that Nick and him were working on before everything exploded, then he's going to start posting his own "documentary-style" videos with proper citations and "none of his opinions"
- refers to when he tried to end his life and some emails he received, idk that's really about it.
SRC
Me @ what's left of James Somerton's Career:
Bengali (Bangladesh) · 
English (United States) ·