YMMV / Yellowface

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • While Athena was clearly not murdered, with June's years-long resentment of her and desperation to have her life, and how unstable she is, you have to wonder if maybe she didn't deliberately let Athena die. Even she briefly has her doubts about her own intentions, but she brushes them away. If she did let Athena die, that also raises the question of how consciously June did this, whether she's lying to the reader deliberately or deluding herself.
  • Did Athena actually like or care for June? Despite June not being as successful as her, Athena continually invited her to hang out, and June was both the first person to read The Last Front and the first person Athena told when she sold her first book, even before she told her mother. Geoff claims Athena called June a "loser," but Geoff isn't exactly a fountain of veracity. She comforted June after she was sexually assaulted... but then she used said assault as fodder for her writing. It's eventually revealed she did that kind of thing to basically everyone, which could hint that, while extremely messed up and awful, Athena's actions were Nothing Personal and don't reflect how she feels about June as a person. Even June isn't sure whether Athena actually considered her a friend or not.
  • The old man at one of June's readings whose uncle was in the Chinese labor corps seems to genuinely love The Last Front and tells June he's glad she's telling the story that so many people discarded when he was growing up. Did he think June was Asian (possibly thinking she may be biracial) and she was telling a part of her history, too? Or did he realize June was white, but thought she was acting in good faith and that she handled the subject matter well?
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Despite being a thoroughly unsympathetic character, June manages to have pitiable moments, such as when she describes how Athena betrayed her in college by writing about her sexual assault without her permission, or when she deals with her mother who clearly doesn't support her writing aspirations. While these moments don't make June any less despicable, they do remind us that she's still human.
  • Athena becomes one in death. It's true she was an Insufferable Genius who was self-centered and prone to Muse Abuse, but it's hard to hate her, largely because the narrative follows her last work being stolen, heavily rewritten and profited off of by someone else, who then goes out of her way to stain Athena's literary legacy and keep anyone from discovering the truth, up to and including manipulating Athena's grieving mother. Regardless of what Athena did in life, she didn't deserve to have her legacy and accomplishments tarnished like that.
  • Candice Lee exposes June for less than noble reasons; she hated Athena and doesn't care about salvaging her legacy, only about getting revenge on June for her part in getting Candice fired and in the hopes of obtaining a massive book deal. However, she's had to struggle for years in the publishing industry with very few opportunities, and also had to see it champion certain authors as 'the' writer of their respective ethnicity, without doing anything to properly promote diversity in the workforce. It's easy to understand why she's thoroughly disenchanted with the whole business and wants success and wealth any possible way she can.
• Love to Hate: June Hayward is an unambiguously terrible person, but is well-written enough to be incredibly engaging, in a "watch through your fingers, wait for the other shoe to drop, and hope this is the time she finally gets caught" kind of way.
• Moral Event Horizon: June is awful throughout, but she officially crosses the line when she decides she's willing to murder Candice if that's what it'll take to keep her secret from getting out. The cherry on top is the ending, where she still continues to paint herself as the victim and decides to put out a memoir to rival Candice's, just so she won't lose her spotlight.
• Paranoia Fuel: For any artist, the idea that someone could steal your work and twist it for their own ends, dragging your name through the mud, wrecking the thing you worked so hard to make special, and overall spitting in the face of everything that you set out to do is bad enough. The idea of this all happening when you're dead and unable to do anything stop it is borderline nightmarish.
• The Woobie: When caught reading about the controversy surrounding June, Skylar (a seventeen-year-old) is humiliated to the point of tears by her teacher.