"Oh screw beautiful. I'm brilliant. If you want to appease me, compliment my brain."
--Christina Yang, Grey's Anatomy
BASICS
NAME: Y'ang, formerly Yistang
GENDER: Cis woman
PRONOUNS: she/her/hers
ORIENTATION: Bi
BIRTHDATE: Summer of 2723
AGE: 52 as of 2775
LOCATION: High Reaches Weyr
OCCUPATION: Journeyman Healer, Brownrider
WING: Healer's Wing
APPEARANCE
EYES: Brown
HAIR: Long, black and curly
HEIGHT AND BUILD: 5'11", plump
PLAY-BY: Sandra Oh
EXPY SOURCE: Christina Yang (Grey's Anatomy)
FULL APPEARANCE:
Y'ang has long, curly hair that she ties back into a ponytail when she's working. Despite her age, she has a relatively wrinkle-free face, and is attractive enough she doesn't feel the need for much makeup. She has dark brown eyes, a flatter nose bridge, and full lips. She used to be thinner, but has started to gain some weight several turns ago as her metabolism started naturally slowing down.
Y'ang is proud of her occupation and prefers to wear her leathers to really emphasize that she is a rider and healer, and because they're practical for nearly any situation. However, she does believe in wearing the appropriate clothing for occasions, and will wear dresses for gathers and feasts. She still looks very good and she knows it, and is not at all shy about showing that off when it's appropriate to do so.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY:
Y'ang is a very intense person, having a lot of passion and drive and being unafraid of who knows it. She loves being a healer, loves the challenge of it, and loves being the difference between life and death for dragonkin and humans alike, and she is very good at it. Gore doesn't bother her, and she is fascinated with how resilient the human body is. Despite her love of medicine, though, she doesn't always have a great bedside manner. Her fascination with injuries can come across as ghoulish to patients and their loved ones, and she frequently gets visibly annoyed at having to simplify her explanations to patients or when they try to argue with her about their treatment options. Y'ang is ambitious, wanting to be the best of the best, and while she is willing to acknowledge superior skills to hers, she will not hide her lack of respect for any superior who isn't a better healer than she is.
While Y'ang is extraordinarily good in a crisis where she has no personal investment, she will freeze up if someone she cares about is hurt. Part of her issue with her bedside manner comes from the fact that she can't afford to get too emotionally invested or she won't be able to do her job. While she definitely likes being in a relationship, she will never let it get in the way of her own career and advancement opportunities. Her romantic relationships will also always take second fiddle to her platonic relationships, and any romantic partners need to be okay with that if they want to be anything more to her than a fling. Y'ang is a big proponent of tough love and isn't great at sugar coating things. On the plus side, a compliment from her is one you know is genuine. Whenever she's stressed, having a bad day, or has a problem she can't seem to solve, she'll start dancing. She could tell you all the reasons physiologically it helps, but really it was a tradition she started with her queerplatonic partner when she was learning her craft and it reminds her of her person.
While she does have a good heart somewhere underneath it all, she's not as idealistic as others, and certainly not willing to suffer or die because of her ideals. She's definitely happier under the current leadership at High Reaches than under Golre, but even if it changed back to traditionalism overnight, it is unlikely that she'd leave. This is her home, close to where her people are, and they mean more to her than the social politics of the place she lives in.
HISTORY
FAMILY:
Mother - Holder at High Reaches
Father - Holder at High Reaches (deceased)
Step Father - Holder at High Reaches
Queerplatonic partner - Masterhealer at High Reaches Hold
The children of her QPP
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: No current romantic partner
BIRTHPLACE: High Reaches Hold
HISTORY:
TW: Death, injury
Yistang was born to two Holders in High Reaches. Her father died when she was only three in an accident, and she doesn't remember him. Her mother has told her that Yistang was with him when it happened, and that she ascribes Yistang's fascination with injuries and desire to be a healer with that early moment, although Yistang has no clear memory of it having been so young. Her stepfather was the only father she ever knew, and a decent one. Both he and her mother had high expectations for Yistang, but she always managed to rise to them. As an only child, she got all the love and support she could need from them, even if she found it overbearing at times.
When Yistang was eight, she went to the Healer's hall to begin training; with the war there was plenty of call for them, and she'd always made it clear that was what she wanted to do with her life. Her parents gave her a flit egg as a present before sending her off, a good-luck present and hopefully a helper, whom she named Bokhee when it hatched. Her education was going swimmingly, and she'd met the girl who would over the turns become family to her, and then when she was visiting home on turn in her late teens, a searchdragon arrived and she was told she'd be an acceptable candidate. Yistang had a choice to make: Put her training on hold to potentially attain the prestigious role of dragonrider healer, or stick with eventually becoming a masterhealer. She decided the allure of a draconic partner was too good to pass up, and agreed to stand. She was lucky, impressing to brown Kullilth after only two hatchings becoming Y'ang, and so was able to return to her healer training after only a few turns off at the age of twenty two. This was helped by the fact that thread had not yet returned, but she quickly found the lull annoying, as it gave her few opportunities to show off how brilliant she was.
Something else she hadn't foreseen about becoming a dragonrider was how much politics were involved in it. She just wanted to heal people, not worry about the color hierarchy and Golre's extreme edicts. She'd hoped she wouldn't have to deal with such things as a healer, but she had been naïve. When thread returned, Y'ang was ecstatic, thrilled to finally put her skills to the test on threadburn and to give her something to do to reasonably excuse keeping her head down and staying out of it. She wasn't totally free from such things, of course, and that galled her, but she could admit she had it better than many. As a brownrider, she was a chromatic, and thus wasn't automatically expected to be domineering towards blues and greens, but as a rider of a larger color, she wasn't subjected to the same abuses as the smaller chromatics. And as a healer, she was valuable enough that she was not asked to join in any actual fighting, for which she was grateful. In the summer of '61, however, when two full wings were lost, she began to worry that the healers might be called on to fight. Luckily, though, Golre's madness didn't survive the turn, and Y'ang could breathe again and get back to the business of healing, helping as Fort worked to rebuild the shattered Weyr.
The next decade of turns had tumultuous moments to be sure, but none so extreme as under Golre, for which Y'ang is grateful. High Reaches is where her people are, and while it's easy to get places on dragonback, it's easier still when her people live in the Hold beholden to her Weyr.
