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fireballn · 7 months

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Yang's Design

This is just an appreciation post of our Golden Girl's design that stems from this longer meta I wrote on her. As a result, some concepts and ideas are taken and repeated from there.

GOLDILOCKS AND THE 3 BEARS IN 1 CHARACTER

Yang's design manages to take a lot of symbolism from her fairy tale and to represent it through clever aesthetic choices.

The simpler one to notice is the dychotomy between Goldilocks and the Bears:

Yang's most recognizable feature is her long blond hair (Goldilocks)

Yang usually wears brown outfits (The Bears and especially the Baby Bear)

She is both Goldilocks and the Baby Bear, so her looks reference both characters. At the same time, though, there are other elements of her story that find their way into Yang's appearance. I am talking about the too hot, too cold and just right. Let's consider these concept arts:

As you can see, they are not that much different from the final product. However, they are fun to read as explorations of the concept of hot/cold/just right. How? Through the use of colors, of course:

red > hot

blue > cold

purple > (red + blue) > just right

You notice how in these drafts there is a blue/green, which is absent from Yang's final design? I think it was inspired by the idea of too cold.

After all, Yang is meant to be unbalanced and asymmetrical:

Scathing eyes ask that we be symmetrical, one sided and easily processed. Yet every misshapen spark's unseen beauty is greater than its would be judgement.

Which means she is not a perfect mix of hot and cold. She is more on the hot side, rather than the cold. So, her color scheme is full of warm colors (yellow and orange mostly). Still, a little bit of ice blue/green is either in her bandana or her scarf to show there is some cold in her.

Another interesting detail in these concept arts is that she wears white and black, aka Weiss and Blake's colors. To be specific, she has a lot of white in the initial drafts and her bandana is black. It is probably something done to show that the girls are all intertwined, in a way. However, the white is toned down in the final design and the bandana becomes purple. Similarly, the cold/green is gone. Why so?

They probably (or at least it is fun to think so) chose to focus on the just right aka the purple (red + blue). In this way they have managed to convey all the previous ideas in a more concise way:

Yang is unbalanced, so she wears a lot of warm colors and a single cold color aka purple, which symbolizes her pursue of the just right

Purple replaces black as Blake's color, which adds to the idea Blake is Yang's just right

At the same time, isn't it interesting Yang's eyes are purple/violet in all the preparatory drafts? As people noticed, they are a mix of Raven and Tai's eyes, which makes Yang the just right of their hot and cold relationship.

Still, when Yang uses Burn her eyes become red...

HOT, HOTTER, THE HOTTEST

You're standing too close to a flame that's burning Hotter than the sun in the middle of July Sending out your army, but you still can't win Listen up, silly boy, 'cause I'm gonna tell you why I burn! Can't hold me now And you're not stopping me I burn! Swing all you want Like a fever I will take you down

Burn is nothing, but a metaphorical representation of the too hot of Yang's fairy tale. The moment she uses it, she fires up and her eyes go from the just right (purple) to the red (hot).

This reading makes sense in the context of Yang being built on the idea of "hot" and all its different meanings: she is hot in the sense of beautiful, she is hot in the sense of hot-blooded and she is the too hot in the sense of asymmetrical.

These concepts emerge also from Ember Celica:

They look like jewels, so hot

They turn into gauntlets, so even hotter

Yang loses one when she loses her arm, so they become asymmetrical > the hottest aka too hot

In general, Yang's hot design also plays homage to her name of Sunny Little Dragon and makes her look like a burning candle:

Burning the candle at both ends.

Which leads us to the next point of this analysis. Puns, sayings and words in general are fucking important for Yang's character.

PUNS PUNS PUNS!

Ren: It's okay to be afraid, you know. You don't always have to hide it with a joke.

Yang is the pun-girl par excellence, so it is not really a surprise that jokes and wordplay are so important in her story. This is true for her design, as well. Some examples:

She loses a hand because she is in need of a hand > she must learn to accept her own vulnerability and fragility

Her emblem is a burning heart she wears on her chest because she wears her heart on her sleeve. This means superficially she openly shows her anger and on a deeper level that she must make herself vulnerable

She is linked to the sun, so she is the only one of her teammates to wear sunglasses

Her hair catches fire because she is hot-headed

She is triggered by people touching her hair because she has a hair-trigger temper

Her eyes turn red when angry because she literally sees red

So, there are really a lot of ideas and jokes intertwined in Yang. Still, there is still another one, which is a fave:

Reign supreme? In your dreams You'll never make me bow Kick my ass? I'm world-class And Super Saiyan now

YANG, THE SHONEN PROTAGONIST

Yang's looks and powers make her similar to a Dragonball's Super Sayan, like she herself sings to us. This is so for 2 reasons:

sayans grow stronger when angry, just like Yang's semblance is partly activated by her fury

sayans grow stronger when they get hurt and then cured, which is the idea behind Burn in a nutshell

Ruby: Don't worry! With each hit she gets stronger, and she uses that energy to fight back! That's what makes her special.

Moreover, Yang looks very similar to a super sayan whenever she uses Burn with the only difference that Super Sayans' eyes turn blue, while hers become red.

The reason of these similarities is that Yang is meant to deconstruct and reconstruct the idea behind these kinds of characters. After all, an important part of her development is this:

Taiyang: But you gotta keep your emotions in check. Keep a level head, and think before you act. Your Semblance is a great fallback, but you can't let yourself rely on it. It won't always save you.

She must learn to cool down and to control her anger. In this way she can fight more effectively and with more precise strikes. Maybe this is why in Mistral she seems to leave her shonen/comic book inspiration behind and gains some westerns undertones:

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In Vale, she is introduced as a powerful shonen/comic fighter, a mix among Goku, Human Torch and Ghost Rider:

Human Torch can't mess with me Johnny Blaze: Suspect B

In Mistral Bumblebee turns into her loyal horse and she becomes a cow-girl who fighs bandits in inns. Classic western imagery.

In a sense, you can see it like this:

Vale > body - Yang affirms herself as an incredible powerful fighter, but she has to go through a journey of self-discovery to grow even stronger

Mistral > mind - Yang has to become smarter, so that she can see others and herself better

I guess that Vacuo will be heart > the result of cooling down is that she will be able to unlock and solve those feelings she usually represses behind her temper, her anger and her funny facade.

Once this happens, I am sure these new found emotions will power her up once again. She may even reconstruct her Super-Sayan persona: she will grow stronger because of all her feelings and not just anger. By keeping her anger under control she will learn to truly see her own heart and to really find strength in it.

Who knows? Maybe by that point Burn will evolve and gain some new effect and a new aesthetic representation. What happens to a flame when it burns hotter and hotter? It goes from red to blue, which is also the color symbolic of the too cold in Yang's allusion. A Yang who burns incredibly hot and brilliant and looks at the world with clear eyes at the same time... A true Super Sayan with blue eyes this time...A Goldilocks who is both hot and cold.

CONCLUSION

These are some random thoughts on Yang's design. It is probable much of this may be me over-analyzing, but tbh? It is fun to go at character designs this way and what's sure is that the authors created such a rich and coherent character that you can easily link many details together in one single narrative. That in itself is already amazing.

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fireballn · 7 months

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