The Internet Historian plagiarism debacle is kind of uniquely funny to me. I'm "a fan" of Internet Historian, by which I mean specifically The Cost of Concordia, which is an excellently paced recounting of a personal interest of mine and is thus video crack for me, especially in the first half. While I did register some of his more 4chan opinions, I mostly ignored them because those videos generally weren't as tightly scripted and didn't hold my interest. ADHD brain y'all.
Even before Man in Cave I had mostly drifted away from his channel. The Area 51 video was the start of this. I only watched it once when it came out, but I vaguely remember it being sluggishly paced and packed with internet reference humor, especially that of the 4chan variety. I don't remember if I saw Man in Cave when it first came out or only saw the worse, rewritten version. Given that the original plagiarized article is excellently written, and that I don't really remember Man in Cave having that much of an impression on me, I probably never saw it, or only saw it one.
The really funny thing for me, though, concerns The Cost of Concordia. You see, because nautical stuff is of interest to me, I can attest that The Cost of Concordia is an exquisitely researched, extremely accurate retelling of the Costa Concordia disaster. Internet Historian was so committed to accuracy that he intentionally made the dialogue worse by using direct translations of the transcripts of the Costa Concordia's data recorder. A lot of it sounds slightly stilted and repetitive because of that direct translation, and because Captain Schettino kept asking the same questions over and over again.
In the Q&A for The Cost of Concordia, Internet Historian also goes into some of the creative process behind making the video. He talks about some of the ideas they had for the project, many of which actually had a lot of work put into them and later had to be scrapped. He talked about scrapping title cards, specifically because they broke up the flow of the video. Thank fuck he did, because again. Video crack.
It's just so funny to me that unlike iilluminaugtii and Somerton, who were all plagiarism, no substance, with just a tiny little heaping bucket of shitty personality, Internet Historian and his team are clearly capable of doing actual research and making well animated, well written, accurate videos. Even more strangely, he readily admitted to a few factual errors and misrepresentations in the Q&A, so he clearly doesn't mind admitting minor goofs for the sake of accuracy. What happened here? Did he get bored or something? Was he just assuming he could get away with it?