The Setup

I have divided my blog into 3 categories with their respective slugs. There are 3 pages corresponding to these 3 categories with their respective custom page templates. On each page, I want to loop through just the posts that correspond to that category.

So let's say I have a page for the videos category:

$videoPosts = new WP_Query( array(
       'posts_per_page' = get_option( 'posts_per_page' ),
       'category_name' = 'videos'));

Then I stuck that into the loop just below:

if ( $videoPosts-have_posts() ) : 
  while ( $videoPosts-have_posts() ) : $videoPosts-the_post(); ? 
    h2?php the_title(); ?/h2
  ?php endwhile;
endif;

wp_reset_postdata();

This does output all the posts by order of date, however, as Pieter Goosen has shown, is_home is set to false because I'm querying a specific category.

The Problem? Sticky Posts!

In the videos category for instance, I have 2 sticky posts, and, as previously described, they won't stick because I'm querying a specific category.

I tried creating two loops:

query1 sticky posts in video category
query2 non-sticky posts in video categry

Loop 1 query1-posts
Loop 2 query2-posts

This set up works, except it messes up pagination becase (from my understanding) the two loops are conflicting. When I put:

next_posts_link( 'Older Entries', $the_query-max_num_pages );
previous_posts_link( 'Newer Entries' );

...nothing happens.

As you may be able to tell, I'm a complete beginner with wordpress. With my limited knowledge, I can't get Pieter Goosen's solution to work. Wyck suggested using WP_list_pluck but I can't understand how to work it.

So...

Is there some way to merge the two queries so that Sticky Posts come up first followed by non-sticky posts by date with most recent, while also limiting number of posts per page all in one query and loop (therefore allowing pagination)?

Could one use merge array?

At the very least, if there is no simpler alternative, would you please be willing to expand on how wp_list_pluck would be implemented in this situation for idiots like myself?

Thank you so much!