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CONTENT WARNING: Discussions of school shootings, sexual violence, sexual assault. Brief mention of child sexual abuse material.

In July 2024, it was brought to my attention that I'd been plagiarised. My 177 video essay, unbeknownst to me, had been lifted wholesale by Brazilian channel Contos do Abismo, my thesis torn out, given a clickbait title/thumbnail, and earned almost twenty times the views in a fraction of the time. Though this obviously hurt me, in reckoning with the circumstances it dawned on me just how harmful my production can be when it falls into the wrong hands. Plagiarism is a fact of life for writers and researchers, especially outside the strict bounds of academia. Prior to this, I had been plagiarised a number of times while writing on Backloggd, but never for something that materially mattered to me. Never on this scale. Never without it being noticed shortly after it happened. My video had been up since October 2023, and Contos do Abismo's since April 2024. In only a few months theirs reached 170,000 views while I was scraping 10,000. It wasn't just the difference in reach that haunted me, but how my work had been taken and misrepresented, my findings on the realities of rape media in Japan distorted into a laudatory showcase for dehumanising acts. My audience had the reasonable expectation of nuance and care, collaborating with me in meaningful dialogue to better synthesise conclusions. Theirs was reveling in forbidden knowledge.

The damage lay not in the stealing of material, but in its removal from the necessary context.

The video was exactly the same as mine apart from some extra screenshots, CRT filters, and Portuguese text atop my quotations. Shamelessly, they left my citation markers in without providing sources in the description -- hollow monuments to nothing. When confronted their dishonesty deepened, stating my footage was used to 'contextualise the script,' and that the citation markers were taken from another source they had found: my written version. Their casual admission underscored how little care they had put into the presentation, not even deigning to look at my description and its contextual information. This wasn't a heist, just petty theft.

They took it down as a token gesture for a couple hours before relisting it, asking me to collaborate with them in the future on a video about RapeLay. In the meantime I submitted a content claim through YouTube and was astonished when it was granted. I opted to delete the video from their channel permanently.

That only took care of one issue. The larger problem was what the theft actually meant for the argument presented on 177, and my work more broadly. This wasn't my video being localised into Portuguese without credit -- upsetting but still meaningfully getting my message across -- this was a misappropriation of my work for clickbait which exposed thousands of people, many of them children, to a work which is harmful. With the back half of my argument removed, wherein the context for the perpetuation of rape myth in Japan is problematised through consumer media, there was no problem presented to the viewer.

In the absence of context and challenging the subject matter, 177 could only be construed as a spectacle to gawk at. The comments confirmed this as I read hundreds of young adults and children simply spout that 177 was shocking, was messed up, was funny, was sexy, asking where to play it and laughing at RAPE on the manual. There was no opportunity to understand the crux of the problem or draw their own conclusions around 177 and other media depicting sexual violence/assault. To have one's worldview challenged is, well, challenging, but it is necessary for growth and to substantially learn.

This is an instance where I was lucky to have caught the infraction, and to have action meaningfully taken against it, but the harm was already done. Those viewers weren't now going to watch my nuanced take, they already consumed the product and moved on. With how blatantly and easily my work was stolen, one is left wondering if discussing this work at all is itself harmful. In bringing the material to attention, is that not exacerbating its hurt?

Those who have followed my research might know I had originally intended to write on far more than just 177 and Morimiya Middle School Shooting. Some preliminary research went into My Lolita, Lolita Syndrome, and RapeLay, but I quickly dropped them as topics of discussion. The answer then was that I don't want to be that guy, but this event highlighted a further concerns. I do not want to bring undue attention to these works, nor do I want to make it all the easier for others to come across these works.

On my 177 and Morimiya Middle School Shooting histories, I semi-frequently get a comment asking where to play these games. Sometimes where to find more like them. I have the power to just not respond, but this shows that documenting these works increases their visibility. After publishing my MMSS history on Backloggd, play counts and joke reviews skyrocketed, as did complaints of me being an 'SJW.' Am I not simply amplifying the reach of harmful media in trying to educate others about it?

The concern goes beyond plagiarism - I worry that I may breed the conditions for greater attention to be given unduly to something heinous. Yet it is my role to educate and ellucidate as a historian, to engage critically with difficult materials so others might understand their implications and context without engaging with the works themselves. Those unwilling to engage meaningfully will never be swayed by my arguments, but there's value in trying to make the world more informed and more compassionate through honest, contextual examination and reflection. Being plagiarised forced me to confront this truth. If I don't present my own work faithfully, others certainly won't. If historians abdicate their responsibility to share difficult histories, those histories will forever be warped in their retelling.