History Literature / Yellowface

* AbortedArc: Mrs Liu seems afraid of whatever Athena might have written in her diaries and notes and fears it getting out, implying that Athena or Mrs Liu may have a DarkAndTroubled past (or both). If she does, nothing comes of it.

** June identifies as straight, but admits she was infatuated with [[Literature/TheTwilightSaga Alice Cullen]] as a teenager. Her obsession with Athena is mostly fueled by professional jealousy, but she also briefly wonders if Athena's about to kiss her and seems willing to go with it, and [[spoiler:when planning to write a fictionalized version of her theft of Athena's work, consciously decides to play up any sapphic undertones in their relationship for the shock value]].

* BlackAndGrayMorality: There are no good people in this story, save for some minor characters who are only briefly in June's orbit. Most people are selfish, the publishers are greedy and impersonal and the writers are all jealous vultures. June probably comes off the worst, since we're in her head, but she ''does'' have moments of humanity and even sympathy... up to a point. [[spoiler:By the end, she's clearly learned nothing and become an even worse person than before, now barely going through the motions of hiding her bigotry anymore.]]

* ContrivedCoincidence: A ''lot'' of factors have to play into June's hands to make her theft of Athena's manuscript possible. Despite being a celebrity author, Athena is private about her creative process to the extent that even her editor has no idea what she's working on until she's handed over the draft, and she totally eschews any computer programs that might leave a trail of evidence, preferring to work on a manual typewriter. Despite not being a particularly intimate friend of Athena's ([[WeUsedToBeFriends lately]]), June, due to being in the right place at the right time, ends up [[spoiler:being one of only two people who were aware of the project. The other is Athena's ex-boyfriend, whose only interest is in blackmailing June, something he's unable to do successfully as he has no hard evidence either. Finally, Athena's mother can't bring herself to read her daughter's private notebooks and has them in her possession for months before June finds out about them when she decides to donate them to a library; at this point, nobody has read them and all June has to do is convince her to reconsider her donation and pass them on to her instead.]]

* FatalFlaw: June cannot leave well enough alone. Against all advice, she keeps pursuing the controversy. She cannot stop reading what people say about her and feeding the beast when the smarter thing to do would be just to ignore it and let it go away on its own. She notes many times throughout the book that she made enough of the plagiarized book to pay for law school and would never need to worry about anything again. Her obsession with this even years after the fact is what gets her exposed for good.

* IgnorantOfTheirOwnIgnorance: June calls the names Athena gave her characters "confusing", and despite claiming to do lots of research, is seemingly unaware of such basic concepts as nicknames or different families having the same common surname (no, June, that's not an incestuous couple, that family name is just really popular). So she renames most of the characters, and then is offended when reviewers make fun of the book for stealing names from famous [=CDramas=].

* NoSuchThingAsBadPublicity: InUniverse, all the controversy regarding ''The Last Front'' and its portrayal of Chinese people, and later questions of its authorship, keep the book in the spotlight and sell a lot of copies. [[spoiler:By the end, June is leaning into this mindsight, embracing her status as a literary pariah and known thief to sell a memoir, fueled by controversy and RefugeInAudacity.]]
* NotInThisForYourRevolution: [[spoiler:Candice Lee is the one who exposes June in the end, but she fully admits she isn't in it to save Athena Liu's work and legacy from a thief--actually, she hated Athena just as much as June did. But given how awful June was to her, getting her fired, and how few opportunities she's been given in the publishing world, Candice fully intends to expose June in order to ruin her life, and get a major book deal out of it, too.]]

* StealingTheCredit: June steals ''The Last Front'', though it's a lot more work than it initially sounds like, since Athena only had a first draft done--June actually does write, edit, and rewrite large chunks of the novel. This eases her shrunken conscience a bit, since she ''did'' work on the manuscript a lot. [[spoiler:When she's exposed, everyone assumes she stole the ''whole'' thing from Athena, which infuriates her, but there's no way to prove who wrote what, not that she's willing to confess, anyway.]]

* HomoeroticSubtext: InUniverse: when she contemplates writing a novel lightly fictionalizing the real story of her plagiarism in order to invoke RefugeInAudacity, June decides to deliberately play this up between the characters representing her and Athena, hoping it will appeal to the "[=BookTok=]" crowd.