This week—uh, last week—I was supposed to let the characters answer questions posed to them by readers. So below, the two sims I’ve had the most practice drawing got to answer questions from me, the null reader. What’s fun about these comics is that you can easily tell what order I drew them in.
It’s hard to have these two in a room together and have zero theater/musical theater/classical music references come up, so they—the references—are explained in the captions. I promise Haunted will not have this much theater. Pinky swear.
(EXPLAINING THE JOKE 1: In La La Land, which is a modern-day homage to Hollywood musicals, Ryan Gosling’s character keeps talking about jazz being a dying art and wanting to revive it. Ryan Gosling’s character is the only white jazz musician in the movie, IIRC. Esperanza Spalding is an actual jazz musician who won Best New Artist at the Grammys against Justin Bieber. ‘Morning rolls around and it’s another day of sun’ is a lyric from La La Land.)(EXPLAINING THE JOKE 2: Shi Pei Pu was a male opera singer and spy for the Chinese government who seduced Bernard Boursicot, a French diplomat, by pretending to be a woman. M. Butterfly is a play by David Henry Hwang that draws inspiration from this story. The title references Madame Butterfly, a 1904 opera by Puccini that, despite attempting to portray the American as a jerk, is nevertheless notorious for exemplifying the garbage narrative in which a white man develops a romantic relationship with a childlike, submissive Asian woman—in this case, Butterfly is Japanese, but we’ll learn in the next caption that some people don’t make that distinction, possibly because this BS extends to other cultures—before leaving her for a “real” relationship with a white woman. God, I need a shower after typing that. Also, Butterfly is FIFTEEN, YIKES)(EXPLAINING THE JOKE 3: “Are you my Butterfly?” is a line from M. Butterfly that is intentionally supposed to make the audience uncomfortable because of how cringey and racist it is. How it happens in the movie is, the two leads meet when John Lone’s character performs excerpts from Madame Butterfly. Lone’s character complains about having to play a Japanese woman because Chinese and Japanese culture aren’t interchangeable. Jeremy Irons’s character, for whatever reason, then decides asking “Are you my Butterfly?” is an acceptable way of flirting with Lone’s character. Lone is hilarious pretty much the entire time; he gives Irons a look that says “boy, did you leave your brain in the key bowl before you left for work,” before responding “Yes, I am your Butterfly.” Anyway you know you killed a role when the photo-still captions say, “oh yeah, Jeremy Irons was also in this”)
