YMMV / H.Bomberguy

• Adorkable: Just look at him. He even gets turned into cute ferrets in fanart for some reason.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • In "ROBLOX_OOF.mp3", Hbomberguy refers to the Guinness Book of World Records as "a spin-off of a beer company" in what sounds like a throwaway joke about Guinness beer. However, the book actually was started by Guinness Breweries as a compilation of facts to help settle bar arguments. It eventually became so popular that it was established as a separate commercial enterprise, which has been bought and sold many times over the years and is currently owned by the parent company of Ripley's Believe It or Not!.
  • In "Iilluminaughtii and the perils of lazy video essays" (a supplemental video to his "Plagiarism and You(Tube)" video that was published on his secondary channel H.Burgerguy), he at one point talks about the themes of Silent Hill, before ending with "But it's mostly about circumcision" in what sounds like a non-sequitur joke. While the game obviously wasn't about it, the Silent Hill wiki was once subjected to a user (later revealed to be an admin to boot) who posted lengthy rants about circumcision despite the game not having any references about circumcision whatsoever, as recounted by Whang from Tales From the Internet.
• Broken Base:
  • His video on PewDiePie. It's either a gutsy and deserving criticism of Felix's actions and how he needs to take responsibility for the consequences from them, along with defending the critics of Felix, or it's a rather insufferable and dismissive video with Harry kicking Felix while he's down along with blaming him for everything. Alternatively, the second half is a good case of him defending Felix's critics, but it’d be far better without the first half.
  • The Serious Lore Analysis on Ctrl+Alt+Del. Some liked that he made a case of its good points and how he points out how it’s not really any worse than other comics frequently touted as better, others were annoyed that he dismissed the comic’s detractors as hypocrites while misunderstanding their problems with the comic as a whole.
  • The video on RWBY is easily one of Harry's most polarizing videos to date. Some view it as a challenging dissertation of the creative aspects of the series, including the fundamental faults present in its production and structure. Others see it as a meanspirited attack on the series and its creators, repeatedly and unfairly putting Monty up on a pedestal while overlooking many story aspects for the sake of making the series look worse than it actually is, especially as Harry's comments on Something Awful at the time of the initial airings included multiple mean-spirited insults deriding Monty's talent and work.
    • One case that makes the video especially polarizing is that Harry mixes common and serious problems with the series, like the handling of the Faunus arc which even the show's creators admitted was very poorly done, with minor complaints not nearly on the same level or even necesarily true, like calling it a ripoff of Avatar: The Last Airbender while citing a bunch of arbitrary similarities like the use of four as an Arc Number, an opening narration, and a sea serpent.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Reasonableist Bear from "Climate Denial" was popular enough to spawn his own fandom and even his own YouTube channel. Not bad for a character who died in that same video.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • His video on the game Pathologic and its sequel, which are about characters trying to survive in a plagued town, brought many people's attention to the series. However, a few months after the video's release on YouTube, it became disturbingly fitting in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic. Of particular harshness is a line he says while expositing on the plot of the second day in-game: "So a plague is starting, but no one with the power to take proper action will help because everyone has their own agenda." This exact circumstance played out in reality in a number of locations around the world as governments handled the COVID pandemic with varying levels of competency and politicking. Those that acted quickly typically avoided the worst, and the inaction of those who didn't often lead directly to more outbreaks and deaths.
  • In his video "Plagiarism and You(Tube)", Hbomb says he could find no evidence of plagiarism on the part of Nick's, James Somerton's writer. Hbomb argues that this makes James praising Nick's writing secretly insidious, as Hbomb speculates that such praise was going to be used to throw Nick under the bus if James was ever accused of plagiarism. Hbomb also says that Nick was inadvertenly made into a liar when Nick claimed that James had never stolen anything, with Hbomb adding that he feels genuinely bad for Nick after his trust was broken. However, a separate video on James Somerton released by Todd in the Shadows sees Todd going into a brief tangent about Nick. In this tangent, Todd highlights a Discord post in which Nick himself says that he doesn't want to look things up, so he is one to "just kinda take something and ruminate on it", along with another post where Nick admits that he has "not been able to find supporting evidence" on some of the claims he's written but included anyway. So while Hbomb may have painted Nick as an innocent victim because of the lack of signs to suggest otherwise, Todd's video says that Nick is at least responsible for a few of Somerton's lies.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
  • His "In Defense of Dark Souls II" opens with what reads as damnation by faint praise for the first game followed by much of the runtime holding it up in poor comparison to the second. His focus on the first's negatives rather than trying to offer a new perspective on the controversial second has contributed it to getting a significant amount more heat and dislikes than many of his more intentionally controversial videos. Some have commented that the video isn't really a defense for II, in the sense of trying to praise the game with things it did right, but rather it beats down on the first game as much as possible to make the sequel look superior, resulting in the video failing to do what the title set out to achieve.
  • The sheer announcement of his RWBY video ruffled feathers in the fandom, with some dismissing it as Harry cashing in on a trend of hating the show for clickbait. Both the Patreon and public releases of the review saw a bit of pushback with negative reactions and comments from fans to the point where he had to change the title of his video to a more neutral sounding one.
  • Despite having one of the shorter segments in the "Plagiarism and You(Tube)" video, fans of Internet Historian were quick to accuse Harry of being a "leftist shill" who disliked the Internet Historian simply due to IH and IH's fans having more right-leaning viewpoints. The fact that the video led to further allegations of plagiarism from the Internet Historian, such as in "The Cost of Concordia" (a section of the video talking about the trapped South Korean couple seems to be lifted from a Vanity Fair article on the Costa Concordia disaster) and the discovery of a Nazi dogwhistle in "The Bikelock Fugitive of Berkeley" (a Freeze-Frame Bonus showing the durability of the bikelock as 14/88 to make fun of the attacker) didn't help matters. In Harry's own fandom, this is often considered rather humorous, considering the IH section of the video is extremely brief and — like the other segments that comprise the first half of the video — only exists to help familiarize the viewer with the concept of online plagiarism, before transitioning to the second half of the video, where the actual focus of the video — James Somerton, a gay man with left-leaning politics — becomes the primary target.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In The Sarkeesian Effect: A Measured Response, he says that he could have made a long, "40 minute" researched rebuttal to Davis Aurini's and Jordan Owen's claims, but that all one could do was laugh at them. This is funny on two levels: first, Hbomberguy's content nowadays is MOSTLY long video essays debunking right wing claims; and second, he acts as though a 40-minute video would be extremely long when, nowadays, that wouldn't even run in the top half of his longest videos.
  • In The Golden One: A Measured Response, he mentions always wanting to be on the cover of a Chuck Tingle book. Over two years later, Chuck Tingle wrote a tingler inspired by Hbomberguy.
  • During his infamous "Sherlock Is Garbage and Here's Why" video essay, Hbomberguy comments that Sherlock Holmes is one of the few pop culture exports that still keep Britain culturally relevant and, referencing Steven Moffat's work on Doctor Who and Jekyll, begs for Mark Gatiss and Moffat not to be given creative license over any more of these iconic stories. Come 2020, and The BBC allows Moffat and Gatiss to give the world their own version of Dracula, with many viewers taking to forums and blogs to criticize the series for its treatment of its female cast and LGBTQ+ themes and continuing Moffat's trend of bending the original story concept to focus solely around Moffat's chosen rude charismatic undefeatable ubermensch character at the expense of other cast members, to the point where some have accused Moffat of seemingly hating most elements of the original story—accusations that exactly mirror those Hbomberguy leveled at Moffat over his Sherlock adaptation three years prior. This, after Hbomberguy (in his video on "Twice Upon a Time") wondered aloud whether Moffat had watched his Sherlock video and was deliberately calling him out.
  • His RWBY video includes a part where he gushes about how much of a guilty pleasure "Caffeine" is, saying "It's like if the Sonic Adventure soundtracks vomited into my mouth!" Four years later, the Sonic Symphony Tour would bring Casey Lee Williams - the series' lead vocalist - and Adrienne Cowan - a recurring guest vocalist - on separate dates of the tour, and the dates Casey performed on would be joined by Jun Senoue himself.
  • In "Plagiarism and You(Tube)":
    • HBomb's Phoenix Wright parody exposing proof of James' plagiarism in his own Twitter ended with the comment "Also, delete your channel". While James did not delete his channel, he did set every video to private five days later.
    • During his call-out of Internet Historian, HBomb specifically pointed out how IH uploaded "I am become Fancy: Theatre" three days after reuploading a heavily edited (and much worse) version of "Man in Cave" to distract people from looking deeper into his plagiarism. The very same day, IH uploaded "2 Fancy 2 Furious: Wine", a sequel to his theatre video, which was promptly inundated with people calling him out for plagiarism.
    • Three days after James Somerton's second apology went up on Youtube, an edit of HBomb's dissection of Filip's apology would be uploaded to Tumblr showing how Somerton fell into the exact same pitfalls as Filip. Even funnier, numerous people thought that it wasn't an edit, and that it was just Hbomberguy's actual response to Somerton's apology, because of just how accurately it got it.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The "X is garbage, and here's why," really took off as a popular YouTube title because of H. Bomb's videos, most notably his one on Sherlock. Many even try to mimic his format. His own variations on the title have lead to jokes about his review scale being from "Garbage" to "Disappointing" to "Genius".
  • HAIL SOBEK! ^ExplanationIn "Flat Earth: A Measured Response", Harry jokingly portrays the crocodile-headed Egyptian god Sobek as the mastermind behind the alleged conspiracy to make people think the Earth is round. The phrase "Hail Sobek!" has since become a big running joke in the fan community.
  • Pretty much anything related to the Donkey Kong 64 stream, including, but not limited to:
    • SAY TRANS RIGHTS
    • #thanksgraham, to make fun of Graham Linehan unintentionally raising funds for the charity he hates so much
    • The Skeleton Krew, the people keeping the stream running while Harry was buying tofu/sleeping/writing SOBEK on his forehead.
    • TEETH GANG
    • (X) go on Hbomb
    • Do you know how to beat Beaver Bother? ^ExplanationBeaver Bother is a notoriously difficult minigame. When Harry got stuck on it, fans took to Twitter to spam Linehan with questions about how to beat him, trolling him with reminders about how he's unintentionally raised awareness for the charity he wants to defund.
  • SELL THEIR HOUSES TO WHO, BEN?! FUCKING AQUAMAN?! ^ExplanationThis is from Hbomb's climate change denial video, said as a response to Ben Shapiro's recommendation that if sea levels rise by ten feet in the next century, people whose homes are threatened by rising sea levels can just sell them. The buildup to the line is Hbomb breaking through his set's wall from behind with an axe and sticking his head through the new hole in the wall, all to pose the Captain Obvious counterargument: nobody is going to buy a house that's underwater. Since Hbomb rarely does anything where he has to Trash the Set in his videos, it's led to this scene being used whenever Shapiro says something "incredibly smart", and also because it's such a striking visual.
  • The sargon ^ExplanationA unit of time equal to five minutes. This comes from Harry's "Antifeminism vs. FACTS" video, which features a comment by right-wing YouTuber Carl Benjamin (AKA Sargon of Akkad) commenting on a response video to one of his own videos, demanding that said video "summarize this in under five minutes." On left-leaning YouTube, this led to five minutes being jokingly referred to as "one sargon," referring to Benjamin's short attention span.
  • Weapon: Trumpet. ^ExplanationFrom his RWBY review, his breakdown over how accidentally racist Flynt Coal as a character is caps off with him laughing at how Flynt's unnamed weapon is just called "Weapon: Trumpet" by the RWBY Wikia.
  • Several memes originate from "ROBLOX_OOF.mp3", all regarding Tommy Tallarico:
    • It's always Joey! ^ExplanationTommy likes to take credit for work on sound effects that were actually done by Joey Kuras, former employee of Tommy Tallarico Studios. This has been turned into Joey being responsible for anything and everything good.
    • My mother's very proud. ^ExplanationTommy always uses this joke when talking about his world records. The line sees reuse to make Mrs Tallarico seem proud of her son for less acclaimed things, like peeing in his own fountain.
    • "We don't even know if his mother is actually proud of him!" ^ExplanationA variant of the aforementioned meme, after the video proved that various claims from Tallarico turned out to be false, from several Guiness World Records to even a video of what is supposedly Tallarico and his home appearing on MTV Cribs (with a video of it even uploaded on Tallarico's YouTube channel as such) being revealed to be a segment from the British TV show that just so happens to resemble Cribs, many fans stated that at that point they were expecting Harry to reveal that his mother wasn't actually proud of him.
    • Tallarico's mother is actually proud of Joey Kuras. ^ExplanationA mash-up of two memes mentioned above - Tommy reiterating how "his mother is very proud" of his world records, and him taking credit for things done by Joey.
    • Tommy wants money. ^ExplanationA sound byte from an accountant at the Intellivision Amico offices, used out of context to refer to Tallarico's attempts to get royalties from the Roblox Corporation's use of the "oof" sound effect from Messiah.
    • "can anyone tell me who made the roblox oof sound" [incomprehensible] "you are absolutely correct it is now my life mission to kill tommy tallerico" ^ExplanationA hyper-abridged version of this video condensed down into a single image, this joke got passed around a lot whenever hbomb or ROBLOX_OOF.mp3 are mentioned for how accurate it was to many viewers' opinions, in addition to looking very funny out-of-context for how nonsensical the thought process appears. A second variant (with the child asking about plagiarism on YouTube, and ending with them desiring to kill a bunch of Youtubers they never heard of before) has since cropped up in response to his later video, Plagiarism and You(tube).
    • Credit to Tommy Tallarico for X/being the first American to X. ^ExplanationThese comments satirize Tallarico's penchant for embellishing his accomplishments by facetiously crediting him with doing things that other people did. The "first American" template specifically refers to his debunked claim to have been the first American to work on the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. These quotes became especially common after the release of the December 2023 plagiarism video, and YouTubers accused of plagiarism have gotten frequent comments "thanking" Tommy Tallarico for his hard work on their videos. Cue replies sampling from the above: "his mother must be so proud," "actually, Joey Kuras did it," etc.
  • H.bomberguy killed James Somerton's career. ^ExplanationAfter having an extensive critique of Youtuber James Somerton in his plagiarism video, Somerton has since nuked his social media, Patreon, and eventually, even his channel. Many people have◊ made◊ jokes about Harry smiting him as a result.
  • Several from this incident are shared with fellow youtuber Todd in the Shadows.
    • "Todd in the Shadows with a steel chair!" ^ExplanationAfter Todd released his own essay on James Somerton within a day of Hbomb's, many were eager to reference the old Professional Wrestling joke about an unexpected blindside on someone using a steel chair.
    • Sometimes Folding Ideas gets to wield the steel chair. ^ExplanationBased on a thread of tweets wherein he explained why, back in April 2023, he all but accused Somerton of scamming his audience. TL;DR: Dan kept noticing how expensive his camera equipment was (at least CA$12,000) and how much of it he had when his filming style didn't seem to justify it. In April, Somerton put up a vague sob story about how his Patreon income had dropped unexpectedly by half and managed to get 1200 new patrons in a day. Three weeks later, Somerton bought a new CA$8000 camera.
    • "Sir, a Second video essay has hit the James Somerton"
    • Plagiarism Month ^ExplanationThe proliferation of videos on plagiarism in December of 2023 from Hbomberguy, Todd, and numerous others led fans to declare December 2023 "Plagiarism month."
  • Horses aren't real ^ExplanationA joke from "Climate Denial: A Measured Response in which Hbomb claims to have done "research" and found that horses aren't real. While horses do in fact exist in the real world, fans like to pretend that horses are fantasy creatures.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Hbomb's infectious giggle.
• Nightmare Fuel: In the "Vaccines" video, Hbomb mostly pokes fun at Andrew Wakefield as he tears his study apart and exposes him as the scam artist he is... until section 8, wherein Hbomb describes, in detail, just how much the children suffered, something that's not often discussed when talking about the study. Autistic children as young as 3 years old received procedures like lumbar punctures^note sticking a needle between the vertebrae to draw out spinal fluid, colonoscopies^note inserting several feet of tubing with a camera on the end into the rectum to look inside the intestines, something that is largely safe for adults but very dangerous for children under 5, were frequently sedated, and were given drugs they didn't need with possibly life-threatening side effects. All of these procedures can be traumatic even for neurotypical adults, let alone young, autistic children who often couldn't understand what was happening to them. Some of the kids were left with permanent physical disabilities from this, all just to give credibility to a man looking for a disease he knew didn't exist.
• Signature Scene: Harry's response to Ben Shapiro's comment to climate change is easily his best-known joke. The slow buildup of him chopping up his backdrop, poking his face out to be just visible in the hole, and then loudly dropping his Armor-Piercing Question in the form of a Captain Obvious counterargument is perfectly paced and delivers a great punchline.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The entire section about what Andrew Wakefield did to autistic kids is not only horrifying to think about, but it's also just so sad to think about how much damage Wakefield caused. Not only did he hurt kids in order to make a profit, it was in the name of research for a disease that Wakefield knew didn't exist. In highlighting the victims and what they had to deal with (including several permanent disformaties and injuries), Hbomb highlights just how monstrous Wakefield was, but also how gutwrenching it is that these poor kids had to suffer for no reason at all.
  • In the "The Cost" section of his video "Plagiarism and You(Tube)," Hbomb tells how much James Somerton's plagiarism has silenced queer writers and creators and the problem of the society erasing its queer history. He informed that Midlands Zone, the now-defunct UK regional gay magazine, went away during the Covid-19 pandemic and have their archive of articles disappeared from the internet, yet Somerton earned money from the video that quoted its published column regarding the erasure of queer history without crediting the author Stephen Spinks^note The original passage from Stephen Spinks' article was: "So as we start out on our lifelong personal journeys, how do we discover our community identity if we don't know much about those who have gone before us?". Hbomb then goes on to explain that he only knew this because he personally remembered Midlands Zone, with the heavy implication that if not for Harry and this video, James would have been seen as the creator of this line. While Hbomb is telling this, he tries to hold back from tears falling out of his eyes due to how angry and frustrated he is with James Somerton stealing this quote. The same section also has Hbomb speaking with Tranquil Fury, calling Somerton a Hypocrite for speaking about how terrible it is that LGBT people are being erased from history while Somerton is, at the same time, erasing LGBT people from history by passing off someone else's work as his own.

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