Always has been.

I have similar rants for Moulin Rouge and Rent with La Boheme. But for now…

…feels like Boublil and Schoenberg (who also wrote Les Mis) wanted the tragedy of Butterfly and anti-imperialist themes, but Butterfly’s plot is so tied to historical context, it doesn’t translate.

But that kind of marriage wasn’t a thing with the Vietnam War, which certainly had its own issues with what young soldiers are wont to do, but transplanting a plot deeply tied to a historical practice that the opera was criticizing as its anti-imperialist messaging…

And a lot of these Japanese brides would wait the rest of their lives for husbands who would never return.

Puccini and his librettists were very blunt about the practice and their stance on imperialism.

Butterfly is criticizing this exact practice, the male lead’s name is Benjamin Franklin PINKERTON. The US had outlawed government contracts with the Pinkertons before the opera premiered and this would have been known information to audiences.

It’s not subtle.

Butterfly’s entire plot is rooted in a very real historical thing that young English and American sailors would do in Japan at the time. Marry “geishas (really teenagers)” so they could do what lonely sailors do. Then abandon them and go home and get a “real marriage”.

I was on track to do opera and oratorio professionally as a tenor, until mental health and seeing the debt to salary ratio…

I found a YouTube channel that’s also great for opera, “Scores Unstitched”. It’s a trained soprano demystifying opera for the layperson, while speaking with enough depth for someone like me; with more experience in the medium.

For me:

The Met Opera’s streaming service is reconnecting me to opera, one of my favorite art forms that I don’t get to interact with as often as I’d like because of my location.

La Boheme made me bawl a week ago.

I mean. It's so fitting for who he was as a person and how inconsequential Dilbert was as a comic.

It's like Office Space without Mike Judge's wit and understanding of the software field.

This is how I found out he died.

When I was 13?

That was Half-Life 2, KOTOR on PC, Halo 2, Original WOW, Battle for Middle-Earth, Rome Total War...

It was a banger year. Wouldn't necessarily say any are my favorites, but they are all incredibly important games to the history of the medium.