I was considering posting a thread about this but I don't think there's enough to actually make Leon Thomas a total lolcow albeit he does lolcowish things. I'm honestly surprised that there are Kiwis who happen to be fans of Leon Thomas, I'm assuming that it's because most people don't know about his particular bucket of dirt. Let me know if this needs its own thread.
It's a little known fact in certain circles that Leon Thomas plagiarizes Cracked articles. Any attempt to call him out on this is typically met with blocking, shadow banning and if it's public, erasing comments pointing it out. I will now list the most well known example:
Page #1, topic #4: Bullets Make Everything Spark | Paragraph 4, sentence 4
Renegade Cut: Predator | Topic at 3:00 minute mark | Plagiarism at 3:14
EDIT: he removed the section he plagiarized when he published it to Youtube, how hilarious. I tried finding the original copy but it seems to be gone now. Maybe somebody will have better luck:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150817135134/http://blip.tv/renegadecut/60-predator-6876802
He rips it off almost word for word and does not provide the Cracked article as a source. The final kick in the pants is that when he's describing bullets throwing sparks, he's actually attempting to discuss muzzle flare, which, back when TGWTG was still up, everyone in the comments section pointed out and proceeded to laugh at.
Now that I have a tighter grip on your attention, there are also some more somewhat minor and fucked up things to note about Leon.
Leon's original fans know him for something called "Heart of Gaming" where he would play himself as a character telling fictional & occasionally not-so-fictional stories about his past regarding video games, discuss legal concepts in gaming and so on. What it was most notable for was the fact that it used disturbing dark humor and functioned much like a podcast with a single image spanning the entire episode's length [until Blip told him to not do that and he began using public domain movies in place of the infinitely lasting title cards] This was the time before Channel Awesome picked him up as a producer. After he joined Channel Awesome, Leon started filming himself as the host of the show, initially this was considered a good thing because it added more meat to the visual aspect of the show. However, Heart of Gaming episodes became repetitive, he ended up rewriting old episodes and shitting them out as new ones. Addressing this [if I recall correctly] in a vlog, he announced the end of Heart of Gaming. He ended it with a 50th-something episode where the character announces his leave, noting that his behavior has resulted in him contracting an STD that's going to kill him and that he doesn't have long to live.
If you're trying to find Heart of Gaming episodes, it would interest you to know that he deleted all of them a short while after becoming a feminist after he began Renegade Cut. This is when he began stupidly
screaming about right wing politics in movies, professing ridiculous extremist feminist opinions and getting mad that
Superheros are Caucasian in majority. In other words, he joined Tumblr and began cultivating Tumblrites to bolster his fanbase. You can imagine how writing for an STD ridden criminal would reflect poorly on his new image of being the paragon of Tumblr policies, the irony being that his Heart of Gaming character was more understanding and down to Earth than he is now.
There's also a rumor floating about that he and his wife, during the days of Heart of Gaming, wrote a guro slashfic of Samus Aran and Pikachu in their appearance in Super Smash Bros. Brawl or something like that but like I said, it's a rumor.
