#anyway.. i rlly liked this book and would be intersted in hearing thoughts from anyone else who read it!

[villainanders]

i think part of what's so interesting is how june and athena are both positioned as fundamentally unable to write without "stealing." and this is a huge spectrum obviously, from the question of athena's right to write books about her family's trauma to june stealing athena's entire first draft to edit and publish under her own name. but there are also pretty egregious examples on both sides (athena using the details of june's rape for a short story immediately comes to mind) and june relies pretty heavily on that to make her case to the reader that what she did Wasn't So Bad, or at least that athena wasn't really a victim. and also the way it's so important to june that the reader understands that the last front never could have been the book it became without june's intervention, that it was transformative that that makes it at very least the same as what athena was doing.

but of course what june did wasn't the same, basically any reader is going to agree that despite her justifications june absolutely crossed the line, but where does the line fall? i think some people might say that athena had crossed the line too - even in her books that pulled from her own family's history (and we hear about in-universe twitter discourse to that effect). yellowface is pretty clearly pulled from some other recent book community dramas like kidneygate and that cat person story where a good deal of people felt that the authors involved had no write to write stories based on other people's lives at all. but then we have june's debut, which was hers and hers alone, pulled from her own childhood, and it just.. wasn’t that good*

of course, june comes to racist conclusions about no one wanting to hear white women's stories, but there is something interesting about june's inability to create good art when she pulls from her own life, and her success when she works with other people's. i saw someone joke that june would be happier writing fanfic which like. lmao yeah honestly, but also i think the book does address this in a way when june's agent suggests she writes ip work (basically, legally profitable fanfic). i feel like this gets positioned as essentially the same as june searching athena's notebooks for ideas, and with athena interviewing victims of wars to use their trauma for her books. none of these ideas belong to them, the stories they create are not theirs but they ARE theirs because if they hadn't written them down, maybe no one else would have

i'm obsessed with the scene where an old man tells june he's glad the book was written and published because it's the first time he's seen his family's story told, and even reassures her when she admits she's not sure she was the right person to tells the story. of course he doesn't know the full context behind june's actions and it doesn't make what june did okay at all regardless, but it is a testament to the complicated effects even really heinous actions can have. the last front probably would never have been published if june didn't steal it - maybe there's a chance another author could have gotten permission to finish it and have it published under both their names - but it's more likely it would have been a go set a watchman, a messy first draft that just tarnishes the author's legacy. it doesn't make what she did okay, and in this conversation about the lines around theft I'm definitely not trying to say that june and athena had equal rights to the last front. aside from the Stealing The Whole First Draft of it all, there's obviously something to be said about parts like june erasing some of the most horrific parts of the actual historical racism in the last front for being "too heavy handed." june may have done research - but she doesn't have athena's lived experience as an asian woman and she arrogantly refused to have a sensitivity reader even look at her manuscript. it's not that june is right at all in her argument - but the spectrum she evokes when arguing that she is is so interesting and I feel like the book did a great job exploring it

*i'm running with the idea that june's debut wasn't very good for the sake of this train of thought but it's probably worth taking that idea with several grains of salt. one critique i do have of the book is the way her debut is used to show how the lack of support mid-list authors receives sets them up for failure vs a lucky few authors that publishing decides will be successes and therefore turns them into successes. the fact that one of these authors is able to then produce a smash hit as her sophomore novel (even if it was stolen from a more successful author) muddies this a bit imo. like so ARE we supposed to believe that june's debut was just straight up bad? idk

thinking about yellowface.. aside from being an extremely good satire of the publishing industry (and a really biting condemnation of the racism within it) it also had such interesting ideas about the lines between theft and inspiration that goes into art without really coming to any firm conclusions itself. it’s been a few weeks since I read it but I keep thinking about it and chewing on some of the ideas that came up in different scenes