 In the beginning, Lord Bung created confinement and the SCP community saw it and thought it was good, and it was good. So, uh, hi. I've been trying to do internet archaeology over the last couple of weeks involving a former member of the SCP community, Lord Bung. Lord Bung is the creative mind and creative hands behind what may be the most popular animated content ever produced about the SCP Foundation, a series called Confinement. But recently, Lord Bung's channel was completely deleted from the internet, and this was following a long period of drama and broken promises to the community as a whole. So I think it's fair to examine the question on the mind of a lot of the SCP community, what happened to confinement? Full disclosure, this video is going to involve me talking about someone who I've spoken with quite a lot behind the scenes. I've done an interview on a podcast with Lord Bung. Lord Bung was never really a friend of mine, but we've spoken off and on since 2018 or thereabouts. And in fact, Lord Bung is why I joined Twitter in the first place. Lord Bung prefers to speak over Twitter, and it was just easier to do it that way. So Lord Bung was my first Twitter follower, believe it or not. Additionally, I was a voice actor in episode 7 of Confinement, and at least theoretically supposed to have an expanded role playing the same character in the now never going to be finished episode 8. Just to answer a couple of questions real quick, no, I never saw a script, and giving how long ago that particular discussion was, that whole thing might not even have been true anymore. That character might not have even been in the episode, because it's been four years, I think, since we had that discussion. But I'm only mentioning this because I feel it would be dishonest to try and speak on this topic, as though I didn't have at least a minor connection to the events involved. But any connection I have is extraordinarily small. Also, this video will have to discuss certain topics very briefly, hopefully, involving sexual assault in the second half. There will be clear content warnings before those topics are covered, so you don't have to worry about it coming up out of nowhere. But first, we're going to talk about what Confinement the series is. So Confinement is a YouTube-based web series created by Lord Bung and featuring content based around lore from the SCP universe. The first teaser video dropped in July of 2017, so about six years ago. And it was followed up only about a week later with Episode 1, The Cannibal. And to say that the SCP community went nuts for it would be an understatement of fairly epic proportions. As someone who was a part of the community at the time, it was quite interesting to see how much love SCP animation was getting. That's right, the writer and on-site fanbase were actually super interested in SCP animation, like wild stuff. But the premise of Confinement the series was simple. There's a D-class named Connor, who is used to test SCP objects. Connor is immortal, so the deadliest stuff doesn't permanently take Connor out of the story. And the character eventually develops a requited love interest in a therapist, and really that's about it. The strength of the story was less than how complex the characters were, and more than looking at extremely serious and horrifying subject matter through a comedic lens. Since Connor cannot permanently die, it doesn't matter that, you know, the erudite brute from Episode 1 kills Connor over and over and over again. What would be a horror story for a regular character becomes comedy instead. And it wasn't long at all before Episode 2 came out, only three weeks after that. And again, it was highly praised both on and off the site. The series was doing incredible numbers on YouTube as well, with the videos getting around 10 million views or even more. But it should be noted that during this time, updates were coming quite quickly. Starting on August 1st, 2017, Lord Bung released five videos in five months. But it's fair to say that pressure was mounting as well. Something unsaid about high levels of success in any creative endeavor is that it pushes you to try and top the last work you put out. And another thing to note about Early Confinement is that it made extremely heavy use of copyrighted music. I think this lent a lot of weight to the seeming professional nature of the works as well. Like, here was SCP content long thought of as a completely amateur endeavor. But the finished confinement episodes were the kind of thing that if longer, you could imagine seeing on television or streaming. Behind the scenes, this actually wasn't as good a thing as it might have seemed. This is something I know from personal discussions with Lord Bung, but Bung wasn't 100% aware of how the content ID system worked on YouTube at the time. So these extremely successful videos were actually being claimed by the copyright holders of the music producers and record companies. And sometimes I imagine musicians whose work Lord Bung had used, which meant that the first few videos at the bare minimum, which by the way had like 50 to 60 million combined views, that's an insane amount of money, made Lord Bung no money at all. And they were not at all small projects or low effort creations. As we get along into this, we're going to talk a little bit more about money because it's actually at the core of some of the issues towards the end here. But that is something to keep in mind that the actual, like you may look at these videos and be like, well, you have a video with 16 million views. Why don't you just live off of that money? Because that's roughly on YouTube, like it's extremely rough and every person is different. But it's a good average to say that for every million views, you earn about $1,000 in ad revenue. Or at least at the time this was being created, that was probably about true. Today, it's a little bit probably worse, I would imagine. But imagine that you put these works out and you get 50 to 60 million views and you can even see the amount of money it would have earned you going to someone else. And like I would estimate 50 to 60 million views probably would have been 50,000 to $60,000. That's not an insignificant amount of money. But making content on this level is not easy. It's very time consuming. So you got to have a regular job and then make this at the same time because it's not making you any money. But in a half a year, Lord Bung managed to produce four episodes of fairly high quality work and almost 40 minutes of content. That's basically a full episode of a television show, two if you're going for half hour content. And this was, as far as I know, a passion project. So outside of the voice acting, almost 100% of the work was being done by a single person who, again, was unpaid. Later on, I'm going to be a little harsh on Lord Bung and part of that is going to be the incredible delays to content that happened at the back end of the series. But I'm going to take a moment right now to recognize how extraordinary this accomplishment was. The fact that it was making maybe tens of thousands of dollars for other people is just the worst outcome for amount of work and effort being put into something like this. The final video of 2017 was a music video using In the Pines by Danny Farrant and Paul Rossin. And a lot of people are very familiar with this. And it was more well received than any previous works, 16 million views. And at this point, it seemed the only way to go was up. That's usually how this kind of goes. In fact, despite the video's huge successes bringing in basically no money, the Patreon that Bung had set up long before this was actually doing pretty decently. The earliest data shows that the Patreon was originally set up in February of 2017, so almost about a half a year before the first confinement release. At the time, it only had about $150 in pledges because Bung did other animation work that was generating this support. But by the end of the year, that was up to $600 a month. And by the time Patreon's dollar total was privated by Bung in early 2019, that had peaked at almost $2,000 a month. I believe it was 1800 and something. It's almost certainly gone up over that number by the time Episode 7 came out later that year because the number of patrons went up by about 30%. Episode 7 coming out in late 2019 betrays a rising problem for Lord Bung. See, despite producing four episodes in the latter half of 2017, only two episodes came out in all of 2018 and only one in 2019 near the very end of the year. Now, this was supplemented by more music video content, but the progression of the content release was getting more and more spaced out. And there were some rumblings in the community over this, but the perceived quality of the work was so high it was just accepted as a reality that, you know, if it's going to take the time, it's going to take. By the end of 2019, the last full episode of confinement had been released, and viewers were left with a ton of anticipation for Episode 8. And though the dollar number was no longer visible, as I mentioned, the pledges went up by about 30% during this time. And promises to come out with content eventually were being made. Outside of a literally seconds-long April Fools video, where the series' protagonist is almost immediately killed by SAP 682, those promises went unfulfilled. Episode 8 was never finished, and the community became more and more furious as time went on. Let's fast forward to 2023. Almost four years had passed with barely any progress. Updates had been made, but nothing concrete was coming out. And I personally poked at Lord Bunga a few times myself to get updates, since I'd been offered an expanded role in Episode 8. I was curious how much progress was being made, and also, let's be fair, I was excited to be involved. I only learned that personal matters were preventing the production from being finished. I won't repeat the comments that were made, but I can tell you with certainty that those comments were unrelated mostly to the public drama that we're about to talk about. Now, at the time, I hadn't really considered the Patreon issue of any of this, because I don't think about Lord Bung's Patreon. I think about my own Patreon. And updates had been made, but nothing concrete was coming out. As a creator, I don't really think anyone has owed content naturally. I have no personal responsibility, even if I make a promise that I'm going to put out content. I don't have a natural responsibility to do so. Unless there's money involved. The inclusion of money pledges doesn't just muddy the waters on the nobody is owed content thing. It completely reverses that assumption. If I tell you I'm going to put out content, please pay me. And you pay me. I owe you content. Period. And that's what has happened here. So at the time, I really just thought of this as Lord Bunga as a creator being overwhelmed with, you know, creator burnout. And this is slow and nobody owes us anything. My tune has definitely changed once I learned about the Patreon situation. We're going to talk now about stuff that can be triggering to certain folk. So if you find discussions of sexual assault to be triggering, I would highly suggest you navigate away from the video now. I'll give you about five seconds and then I'll continue. So Lord Bung was friends with slash in a relationship with a person going by the name of Orion for how long I don't know. But it was at least off and on for a couple of years between 2021 and now based on the tweets. What I do know is that Orion was claiming to be a co-writer of confinement and Lord Bung backed this claim up in a tweet at one point. This is only important as much as when on February 22nd of this year, 2023, Orion posted a tweet longer, which is a link to a longer version of a tweet you use on Twitter, that accused another YouTuber named quite of a number of things, including sexual assault. I am not going to go into deep detail on these accusations here because this video is focused on Lord Bung and the confinement series. But it would be remiss if I did not mention that these accusations were eventually categorically denied by quite and a lot of proof that they were false was presented. I'm not going to make a personal judgment on true or false here because I would have to be significantly more invested and knowledgeable on the subject. But I've looked casually at some of the accusations and some of the evidence and it seems pretty, the accusations are very light on proof. The denial is extremely heavy on proof. That's what I can say for sure. This is important because Lord Bung was fairly intricately involved in the details of the situation. First, between the accusations and the eventual debunking. I'm going to put quotes around it, but you can draw your own conclusions of those accusations. Lord Bung came out in support of Orion as both a friend and a collaborator. This is not wholly unexpected. You tend to want to believe and protect your friends. But secondly, during the lead up Lord Bung had actually acted as a mediator between the two to hammer out their differences because Lord Bung was somebody that knew both parties. Obviously acting as a neutral mediator when one of the parties is someone you were in a relationship with is already a bad look. Regardless, it was bad and it was extremely, extremely one sided. Quite categorically denied the accusations of both of them and then backed it up with receipts. At that time Lord Bung withdrew from sort of public posting for just a little bit. But the damage to the reputation was already done. Now we can stop talking about that mostly. Earlier this year, that's where we stood. We shouldn't discount the effects of creator burnout on somebody's ability to produce work. I feel that from time to time. Lord Bung also had an incredible standard to live up to and sometimes the most intimidating person in your life is yourself from the past. And that's its own kind of daunting, but not too long after this Lord Bung announced that production on confinement was coming to an end. How much this had to do with say a co-writer on the project being publicly embroidered in a scandal as anyone's guess? Not to mention the effect of having Bung pulled into the whole thing as well. Drama can drain you of creative energy just as much as actually creating can. And that's where we ended. In early June, Bung announced that the Lord Bung YouTube channel would be gone. Deleted. If you wanted to grab the videos, that would be the time. A couple days after that, the threat was followed through on. And that's that. I mean, sometimes even the most popular content sort of just wanes and fades into obscurity. The story of thousands of channels before Bung, it'll be a story of many, many more afterwards. And I wish I could tell you that there was something embarrassing or explosive to end this story. Well, not really, but the clicks would be nice. I'm sorry. Sorry, what's that? There was a leak? So there was like content from episode eight that leaked? What's it? Oh. Oh. Oh, kidding aside. We should briefly talk about the episode eight leak. This wasn't a leak in the traditional sense of the word. Lord Bung actually released it to the public. I can't show you basically any of it here. First of all, it's not a complete episode. It's basically a music video. If I had money to bet, that's not because it was going to be part of an episode, but rather that the animation had been finished and the voice acting hadn't been finished at the end of the project. And since it wasn't going to be completed, there need to be some sort of audio, put a music on top of it, release it, right? But the content of the leaked scenes is, honestly, there's no other word but bizarre to you. You can use to describe it. In it, Connor is highly sexualized and inadvertently, with the biggest possible quotes I can muster, sexually assaults like a dozen people. It's a strange end to a series that had astonishing promise in its early days, but I guess sometimes that's how it goes, I guess. By the way, if you were one of the literally hundreds of people who pledged, like I think it was close to a thousand people in the end, literally hundreds of people who pledged the series on Patreon, I want to apologize personally. I don't think I have a lot of responsibility for that, but I think all of us who lint our voices, either literally as voicing a character or figuratively by talking about it positively, truly expected this project to continue, but we passed the point of reasonable delays three years ago. I know I only have three lines in the series, but if you're a fan of mine who went over to check it out on my account and ended up losing money to a basically scam Patreon, I'm truly, truly sorry. There's nothing I can do about it, but I guess I can apologize. And that's it. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, hit the subscribe button, hit the notification bell, so you're notified when I upload new videos. And then, and I know this is a weird thing to include, but it's something I include on every video, because it's important you can't create content on this platform without Patreon. I'm, gosh, this, you know, let me just show you the people. You know what? We're not going to do the call to action. I'm going to leave all this in. I'm going to do exactly this thing. We're not doing the call to action. Just here are my Patreon backers currently. I very much appreciate them. It would be super weird for me to be requesting your Patreon monies right now, based on the content of this episode. So just here's the people who have already supported me. I very much appreciate them, including Cingeriki, who's pledged at $100. It's nice to know that I'm not alone out here. And I will see you all again on Thursday with a very late Dank Memes from Site-19 video since the subreddit has finally no longer gone dark. We'll talk about that then a little bit.