YMMV / Fyre

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• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The documentary itself plays with this, debating on whether or not Billy himself knew what he was doing out of desperation or if he was, as some of the workers described, a pathological sociopath who lied repeatedly to get a quick buck. By the end, Andy King, who has been friends with McFarland for a long time, seems to hold on, perhaps desperately, to the hope that McFarland was in way over his head. Almost all of the other interviewees believe, firmly, that McFarland is a sociopath (and at least one person states it openly). The film seems to agree, especially since most of McFarland's actions are near-textbook examples of sociopathy. Not a Hollywood Sociopath, mind you, but a "Sociopath" in the strict medical sense: utterly impulsive, self-aggrandizing to the point of delusion, and habitually lying as an instinctive reflex (even in ridiculous situations where he should have blatantly known he would get caught).
  • The documentary sets up Ja Rule's role in boosting Billy's career, and his role setting up the initial promo of the festival. But afterwards he's not really mentioned until after the failure of the festival where his attempts to manage Fyre employee questions go poorly. The documentary leaves it entirely unknown if Ja Rule was someone blindsided by Billy the way all the Fyre employees not working on the festival organization were. It's left entirely up to the view to figure out how much Ja Rule knew of the shitshow that the festival organization was and how much of an accomplice he was.
  • There's a bit of this to the documentary as a whole. The documentary was made by Jerry Media (who promoted the festival) and MATTE Projects, which produced the original Fyre Festival promotional video, and employees from both organizations feature in the film, which leads some to wonder how genuine their testimonies are. Mick Purzycki, in particular, who gives much of the testimony for Jerry Media, is a producer on the documentary itself. This leads people to question how much his line about how the marketing people didn't know how things were developing (or rather, not developing) on site as honest evidence of McFarland's manipulation, or them covering for themselves and trying to shift the entirety of the blame. The rival documentary Fyre Fraud even openly points this out.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Andy King became incredibly popular after the film's release due to his extremely frank discussions about the event's issues even beyond anyone else, including that he was fully prepared to give someone in the Bahamas government a blowjob to get some badly-needed water to the site. He even received some offers for his own reality show and appeared in a commercial for Ryan Reynolds' Aviation Gin.
• Friendly Fandoms: Ironically enough, Fyre shares this with Hulu's own documentary about the incident Fyre Fraud, due to how the latter has Billy himself in the documentary. There is a Fandom Rivalry, but it seems to be mostly from the filmmakers' side since Fyre Fraud attacked Fyre due to the involvement of Jerry Media, who were criticized in the aforementioned Fyre Fraud. This appears to stem from how both docs cover different aspects: Fyre Fraud focuses on the life of Billy, from the creation of Magnises to him ultimately landing in prison, as well as the question of why those rich kids were drawn to scams like his in the first place; while Fyre focuses more on the event itself, how the various people involved could see from the get-go that things would go catastrophically wrong but were powerless to stop it, and also contains footage shot during both the production of the promo video and of the various meetings leading up to the date of the festival. It should be noted that Jerry Media is portrayed in a much more sympathetic light, saying they were misled just as much as everyone else.
• Memetic Mutation: Andy King's story about being willing to suck a man's dick to get water to the festival is the most well-known joke to come out of this documentary.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • None of the Fyre Festival guests deserved to get involved in the mess, but one commentator, who claimed to have sabotaged other tents and beds around the one in which he and his friends were staying to keep people away, didn't exactly help his case.
  • While most people were simply misinformed about what truly happened at Fyre and those who attended, almost nobody has sympathy with comedian Ron Funches, who said during an interview on Late Night with Conan O'Brien that it was "Darwinism" when asked if he felt sympathy for those who went to Fyre. Made worse in that years later he was asked about it again on Late Night due to the Netflix documentary, and he gave an indifferent answer and was more concerned about not getting any money for his appearance due to Fair Use.
• The Woobie:
  • Everyone who was involved with Fyre sans Billy and Ja Rule, especially the restaurant owner who had to shill her savings to accommodate all the local workers who didn't get paid.
  • J.R., one of Billy's contacts on Great Exuma, was left hanging after Billy fled and was getting increasingly violent threats from all the local people whom Fyre owed money to, while Billy constantly promised payment that never came. J.R. eventually had to flee to another island to escape the threats.
  • All of the guests who went to Fyre, expecting fun and adventure, only to get the worst experiences of their lives, and then later being turned into targets of Internet mockery. This is made especially apparent when after the news of Fyre came out, the entire world did nothing but mock and berate the attendees, seeing them (thanks to misinformation that the ticket prices started in the five-digit range) as nothing as "privileged rich people" who "got their just desserts" when such was definitely not the case.

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