hbomberguy

In December 2023 a British essayist uploaded a video called “Plagiarism and You(Tube),” nearly four hours long, and spent roughly the first two of those hours building a case — the method, the lesser offenders, the slow stacking of evidence — before naming the person the whole thing was actually about. James Somerton, a video essayist with more than 300,000 subscribers, had been passing off other people’s scholarship as his own. Within a day of the upload, Somerton had shut his accounts. Tedium named it the best YouTube video of the year. Nobody who was on the platform that week remembers it as an upload. They remember it as weather.

Call the model what it is: the event-essay. Harry Brewis doesn’t run a channel in the sense this magazine usually grades — a cadence, a relationship, a weekly appointment you keep. He runs something closer to a theatre that opens a few nights a year, sells out every time, and leaves the street arguing for a month afterwards. The Essay Issue was always going to have to price that model, and the price is 89: EXCELLENT, NEW at #17 in the Top 50, and stopped at ESSENTIAL’s door by exactly one thing, which is the calendar.

What It Does

Brewis is from Halifax, West Yorkshire, and read English literature at Aberystwyth, and the degree surfaces in places a casual viewer would sail straight past. His 2024 two-parter on Oreos took its titles from a single line of The Tempest — “Hell is Empty” in November, “All the Devils Are Here” on New Year’s Eve — one sentence of Shakespeare split across two uploads by someone who knows precisely what he’s quoting. That year was, by this channel’s standards, a flood: “How Newgrounds Ruined My Life” at the end of June, then the Oreos pair, three mainline essays in six months. In August 2025 came “Adobe Must Die First,” roughly thirty-five minutes and pegged to Adobe ending updates for Adobe Animate — at house length, a pamphlet. At press time we could not verify a mainline essay from 2026. One to three a year is the honest description, and they don’t arrive so much as erupt.

What It Does Extraordinarily Well

The Plagiarism video is the clearest demonstration of what a Content Quality of 96 is paying for, so it’s worth being exact about why. The two hours before the reveal aren’t padding; they’re pedagogy. By the time Somerton’s name arrives, the viewer has been taught how to recognise lifted work, so the verdict lands as a conclusion you reached yourself rather than one you were handed. The essay as heist, the argument as a trap the audience walks into willingly and thanks you for afterwards — that structure is the X-Factor at 95, and nobody else working at this scale runs it with the same nerve or the same comic timing.

hbomberguy spent two hours on evidence before he named the defendant. No other essayist at his scale would dare the wait — and no other audience would have sat through it.

The same video turned its lens on Internet Historian’s “Man in Cave” and on Illuminaughtii over citation, and our Issue #018 feature kept that reckoning in proportion; it stays there. One honest sentence is owed all the same: the channel we seat at #17 filed a charge against Internet Historian, which sits at #25 in the same table, and we have decided both seats are right — one documented lifting incident does not relitigate Internet Historian’s catalogue, and the willingness to file it against a bigger, beloved name is part of why hbomberguy’s catalogue earns its number.

Then the receipts that sit outside the catalogue entirely. In January 2019, after Graham Linehan campaigned against a planned £500,000 grant to Mermaids, the UK charity supporting transgender young people, Brewis sat down to play Donkey Kong 64 for roughly fifty-seven hours and raised around $350,000. The drop-ins became internet folklore — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chelsea Manning, John Romero, Mara Wilson, and Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints, three places below him in the Top 50. The stream and the Plagiarism video are the same act in two formats: a creator spending accumulated attention on something other than himself. Call it the channel’s conscience. The Community at 86 is built on it, along with a Patreon in the tens of thousands of members who, between them, fund the long silences. Replay Value at 92 follows from the craft: the event passes, the essay stays, and the Plagiarism video is already less a news item than a reference text the form uses to audit itself.

Where It Falls Short

Which brings us to the 52. Consistency is the axis this model cannot win, and the cost runs deeper than the gaps themselves. When every upload has to be an event, anything smaller registers as minor — a sharp, topical half-hour on Adobe reads as an interlude because the audience has been trained to expect four hours and a body. A habit cannot form around a schedule that isn’t one, and the community is convened rather than continuous: it gathers in force, then disperses for months. Compare Jenny Nicholson, who holds ESSENTIAL on a Consistency of 65. Thirteen points is the gap between sporadic and eruptive, and it accounts for most of the distance between her 91 and his 89.

The verdict. In Issue #018, Fall of Civilizations entered the Top 50 at #16 on an 89 held under the line by its calendar. hbomberguy enters directly beneath it, on the same number, for the same reason — the second 89 in three issues stopped at ESSENTIAL’s door by cadence alone. The rubric is doing exactly what it was built to do, and it is not comfortable to watch. EXCELLENT, 89, NEW at #17. If 2026 turns out to have an essay in it after all, you’ll know before we do: the whole platform will be talking about it.