The video had been up two days and had 32,000 views when Samantha Bryant found her face on it.
Henry Cavill on the left of the thumbnail, in a suit. Her on the right. The title read “Why Handsome Men Date Ugly Women (NO FILTER).” It ran fourteen and a half minutes and came from a channel called Ramboh, whose avatar is a masked cartoon face.
She hasn’t watched it. “I refuse to give them a view,” she wrote when she posted her response to TikTok on July 31. In the clip she says she has no idea why they would target her, and her account makes that a fair question.
What she’d been posting
“All I have done is shared my journey of losing 174 pounds and work on regaining my mobility,” her caption reads.
That’s the whole feed. A woman filming herself getting her body back, loose skin included, under tags like #bodytransformation. In March she told People she’d never had a boyfriend and wanted to go on a first date this year. Somebody went through those videos, stopped on a frame, and decided it was the face that would make “ugly” land on sight.
Her caption also says she’d rather it was her than another woman. “I’d rather me take that than someone else.”
@sammiebry All I have done is shared my journey of losing 174 pounds and work on regaining my mobility. I’d honestly rather them use my face than disrespect another woman and use their face labeled as ugly. I’d rather me take that than someone else. It definitely shocked me to see this but I refuse to give them a view and watch it. Besides, I know my value is far beyond what I look like. #fitnessjourney #looseskin #fitnessinspiration #gymmotivation #bodytransformation ♬ original sound – Samantha’s Journey
The man who isn’t in the thumbnail
Ramboh’s channel page calls itself a self-improvement channel, then adds a warning to its own subscribers: “don’t let the random thumbnails and titles fool you.”
The video’s description opens with a disclaimer about parody, satire and public interest value, then links a paid community on Skool and a Patreon.
The one face missing from that thumbnail was his. Ramboh graded a stranger’s looks in front of more than 140,000 people from behind a cartoon. Samantha posted hers, loose skin and all, under her own name.
A year ago
“If this was a year ago, I would just be like bawling my eyes out,” she says. “Because I’m publicly being called an ugly woman online.”
Then: “I used to really think that I was ugly.”
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She doesn’t say what changed. No turning point, no name, no date. Only the woman who would have cried and the woman on camera, hand flat against her chest, eyes shut, 174 pounds between them.
“I don’t think that I’m ugly. I just think a lot more of myself now.”
A month later, the comments haven’t stopped
Her response has 1.1 million likes and more than 29,000 comments, and new ones were still landing this week. They are fighting each other.
The most liked, at 395,000, is four words: “You can sue btw.” Four hundred and fifty-one replies argue over whether she can. Probably not. Commentary on a public image is a wide lane in American law, which is why the parody disclaimer sits at the top of his description.
On August 22, Ms Rachel, the children’s educator with millions of parents watching, left a comment. “You have the most beautiful eyes and you’re gorgeous.” Seventy-four thousand likes.
Below it, 26,000 people liked this: “Fake compliments are worse than real insults.”
Half the thread wants to tell her she’s beautiful. The other half thinks that’s the thumbnail running in reverse. She’d already answered both near the end of her video, when she stopped explaining herself and started rating.
“Honestly, I think we look great next to each other,” she says of Cavill.
Then, to Superman directly: “I’m available for a photo shoot. I think we would look great posing next to each other.”
Ramboh’s video is still up, same title, same disclaimer, same Patreon link. At some point after she posted, the thumbnail changed. Her face is gone. In its place is Princess Fiona from Shrek, whose whole story is that the ugly version is the real one and gets loved anyway. He hasn’t said a word about it.
Samantha answered him a month ago, in a caption most of the thread never read to the end. “I know my value is far beyond what I look like.”
