Yang Xiao Long

Yang Xiao Long (ヤン・シャオロン, Yan Shaoron), is both a fictional character and protagonist from the Tales of RWBY series created by Monty Oum and Kōsuke Fujishima. She is a Huntress, having been trained at the now-defunct Beacon Academy.

She made her first appearance in the "Yellow" Trailer, searching for clues regarding the whereabouts of her mother, Raven Branwen, who left her when she was a child.

"I'm a thrill-seeker. I want to travel around the world and get wrapped up in as many crazy adventures as I can. And if I help people along the way, then that's even better. It's a win-win, y'know?"
 * —Yang Xiao Long, to Dr. Oobleck on why she wants to become a Huntress.

Appearance & Biography

 * Voice Actor: Barbara Dunkelman (English), Ami Koshimizu (Japanese), Not Known (Albanian), Not Known (Arabic), Not Known (Basque), Not Known (Brazilian), Not Known (Cantonese), Not Known (Catalan), Not Known (Chinese), Not Known (Dutch), Not Known (Finnish), Not Known (French), Not Known (Galician), Not Known (German), Not Known (Greek), Not Known (Hebrew), Not Known (Hong Kong), Not Known (Hungarian), Not Known (Indonesian), Not Known (Isralian), Not Known (Italian), Not Known (Korean), Not Known (Mandarin), Not Known (Norwegian), Not Known (Polish), Not Known (Portuguese), Not Known (Romanian), Not Known (Russian), Not Known (Serbian), Not Known (Spanish), Not Known (Swedish), Not Known (Tagalog), Not Known (Thai), Not Known (Valencian), Not Known (Brazilian Portuguese), Not Known (European Spanish), Not Known (European Portuguese), Not Known (Latin American Spanish), Not Known (Latin Spanish)

Appearance
Yang is a fair-skinned young woman with lilac eyes and bright golden hair worn loose that fades to pale gold at the tips with a cowlick sticking out at the top. When enraged or with her Semblance active, her eyes turn red.

Original (Volumes 1–3)
She wears a tan jacket that bares her midriff, with golden brown piping and short, puffy sleeves with black cuffs that feature two gold buttons. Underneath this, she wears a low cut yellow crop top with her emblem on the left breast in black.

She also wears a brown belt covered by a pleated brown piece of material reaching from hip to hip around the back of her waist, with her emblem emblazoned on the right-most pleat in gold. Underneath this is a long, white, asymmetrical piece of material reaching to her knee on the right side, as well as a pair of black mini-shorts. She wears a pair of brown, knee-high boots and orange over-the-knee socks, with the right sock pushed down just below the knee. A purplish-gray bandanna is tied around her left knee. An orange infinity scarf and black fingerless gloves complete her outfit.

While riding her motorcycle, Bumblebee, she wears yellow goggles and a matching helmet that bears her emblem in black on either side. While outdoors, she sometimes wears a pair of yellow-rimmed aviator sunglasses.

Pajamas
Yang's pajamas consist of an orange tank top with her emblem on the front in red, and black boy shorts.

At her home in Patch, Yang wears another set of pajamas, consisting of a dark-yellow short-sleeved shirt with black shorts.

Alternate Outfit (Hunter)
During the events of "A Minor Hiccup" and "Painting the Town...", Yang wears an alternate outfit codenamed "Hunter".

This outfit consists of a deep-collared cream vest worn over a low cut black shirt; both are covered by a dark gray shrug with a raised collar, three-quarter sleeves adorned with a single black stripe down the outside of each sleeve, and gold cuffs. A black miniskirt is worn under the cream vest.

A pair of crooked black belts with gold accents are slung around her hip, with a purple piece of fabric attached to the left-rear section of the lower belt. She wears thigh high stockings attached to her miniskirt by garter-belts on the front and back of each thigh, decorated with four golden studs above her knee and her emblem on the outside of each thigh in gold. She also wears black ankle boots with multiple buckles and white ribbons on the back tied in a bow. Around her neck is a purple pendant set in silver.

Dance
During the Beacon Dance, Yang wears a short, white, halter neck dress with a pale gray hem and white pumps.

Uniform
Yang wears the same brown shoes, red tartan skirt, white blouse with maroon trim and thin red bow, a brown vest with gold buttons, and maroon blazer with gold trim as every other girl attending Beacon, alongside with a pair of thigh high black stockings. She retains her fingerless black gloves as seen in "Best Day Ever".

"DGAS" Outfit (Volume 4 - Current)
After the time skip following the

Battle Outfit (Volume 4 - 7)
In "No Safe Haven", Yang is shown wearing a tan jacket with orange lining and gold edging, unzipped halfway to show an orange crop top. The coat has darker brown short sleeves, a thick collar that completely encircles her neck, and two long gold-trimmed rectangular tails which are shown to be detachable in "Lighting the Fire". She also wears fitted black pants, and her hair has been let down again like her original outfit.

Around her hips and over the tails of her coat is a brown belt, which has two pieces of dark brown material trimmed in gold attached to it. The first covers from her left hip to the back of the belt and is folded over the belt, and the second is attached from the right hip and almost around to the other piece of material. She wears knee high brown boots with gold caps on the heel and toe, with the heel cap attaching to a gold strap across the front of her ankle, and a gold zipper on the upper half of the front of the boots. A single small buckled strap is on the upper outside of her boots, and a purple bandana tied around her left knee. A pair of black fingerless gloves with long brown cuffs reaching to mid forearm complete the outfit.

While riding Bumblebee, Yang no longer wears her helmet or goggles, instead donning a pair of yellow-rimmed aviator sunglasses.

In the promotional material for Volume 4, Yang is shown wearing the same coat and pants shown in the series. A gold metal plate covers her missing right arm, which matches the accessories on the heels and toes of her boots.

In promotional material for Volume 5, her outfit includes her new robotic arm.


 * Hair Color: Blonde
 * Skin Color: Pale White
 * Eye Color: Lilac, Red (When Angry)
 * Age: 17 (at series start)
 * Birthday: Not Known
 * Height: 5'8" (1.73 meters)
 * Weight: Not Known

Personality
Yang's voice actress, Barbara Dunkelman, has said that when Yang's character was described to her, she was described as "the kind of person who would teach someone how to swim by pushing them in the water". This speaks volumes about how Yang approaches most things in life. She is very straightforward and confident.

Yang is also described as being a cheerful, energetic, and bright young lady. She is arguably the most flippant, carefree and adventurous member of her team, frequently making sarcastic comments and jokes even in the heat of battle and often taking combat and hostile situations lightly. Yang is very sociable and extroverted, even in unfamiliar situations. Yang's love of adventure is the main reason she decided to become a Huntress. Blake considers Yang the personification of the word "strength".

However, Yang's "brawler" fighting style is evocative of her personality. Her anger, one of her main assets in battle, can lead her to act predictably. When her hair is cut during battle, her resulting anger leads her to attack with straight, blunt force. Additionally, a grudge against Neopolitan led to frustration on Yang's part, which quickly cost her the battle and almost her life had it not been for the arrival of Raven, her mother. Her thoughtless anger led to the quick loss of her right arm in a short encounter with Adam Taurus.

Despite these things, Yang is deceptively mature. She is extremely nurturing, particularly toward her younger sister, Ruby. Yang pushes her into being outgoing and also worries a great deal about her sister across the many battles they fight in. This protective and encouraging nature extends to Blake and Weiss as well. Yang is worried about Blake on several occasions, such as when she runs from her team and when she suffers from sleep and appetite problems, opening Yang to discussing her stubborn past. What Yang does not reveal is that she suffers from abandonment issues, blaming herself for her mother not sticking around.

However, after the deaths of Pyrrha Nikos and Penny Polendina, the losses of her right arm and her partner, Blake, Yang sinks into a reclusive depression. The mention of her missing partner agitates her; she gives Ruby the cold shoulder and outright ignores her sister when she says, "I love you". Over months, Yang rebounds from this reclusive nature. Though she suffers from PTSD, she tries to keep moving forward, partially for her father's sake when feeling she holds him back. After overhearing her father and Doctor Oobleck talking about Ruby outside her window, she accepts the wisdom of her father, Oobleck and Professor Port and dons her new robotic arm.

When training with her new limb, she learns how to balance her driven and positive nature without overconfidence or agitation. She paints her arm to match her style, changes to a new outfit and heads to Mistral, though Taiyang believes she has not overcome the personality flaws that cost her arm. While traveling Mistral to reunite with Ruby, she continues to struggle with her PTSD, which manifests in her left arm shaking when she encounters stress.

Friends/Allies

 * Beacon Academy
 * Team RWBY
 * Weiss Schnee
 * Blake Belladonna
 * Team JNPR
 * Jaune Arc
 * Nora Valkyrie
 * Pyrrha Nikos
 * Penny Polendina
 * Team SSSN
 * Neptune Vasilias
 * Ozpin's Group
 * Ozpin
 * Oscar Pine
 * James Ironwood
 * Maria Calavera

Family

 * Raven Branwen (Mother)
 * Taiyang Xiao Long (Father)
 * Summer Rose (Adoptive Mother; Deceased)
 * Ruby Rose (Adoptive Younger Sister)
 * Qrow Branwen (Maternal Uncle)

Neutral

 * Team FNKI
 * Neon Katt

Enemies

 * Junior's Club
 * Junior Xiong
 * Miltia Malachite
 * Melanie Malachite
 * Cinder's Faction
 * Roman Torchwick
 * Emerald Sustrai
 * Mercury Black
 * Neopolitan
 * White Fang
 * Adam Taurus

Powers and Abilities
Yang's fighting style is much more aggressive than that of her teammates. She uses a barehanded fist-fighting style and her Ember Celica. She is quite agile, able to dodge an onslaught of Ursai, and gunfire with ease. Since gaining her prosthetic arm, Yang has taken to using its armored surface defensively, shielding herself from firearms, and staving off attacks to gain greater ground on her opponents, incorporating its advantages into her improved fighting style following further instruction from her father, Taiyang Xiao Long.

She is also the physically strongest of the group. Her strength is displayed on numerous occasions, such as when her punch sent a fully grown man several feet into the air and through a glass pillar without the enhancement of her weapon, and in "Players and Pieces", where she was able to keep the mouth of a Nevermore open with one arm long enough to deliver multiple shots down its throat.

Like all Huntsmen and Huntresses, Yang has had her Aura unlocked, coating her body with a shield powered by her soul, which helps protect her, especially when her aggressiveness gets her into bad situations. Even with her Aura unlocked her durability is also noticeably high, as showcased in her doubles match with Weiss against Flynt Coal and Neon Katt during the Vytal Tournament, where she withstood numerous hits from Neon during the bout's opening stages, and powered through the effects of Flynt's weapon, knocking him out and securing victory for her side shortly after.

Since the end of Volume 3 and her mental recovery at the end of Volume 4, Yang's fighting skills had improved immensely. She has became a far more effective and thoughtful fighter, able to fight almost evenly with Adam Taurus in their rematch, landing more hits on him than he had on her.

Semblance
As

Past
Yang is the daughter of Raven Branwen and Taiyang Xiao Long and was born approximately two years before her adoptive younger Ruby Rose. Ruby mentions that Yang used to read bedtime stories to her when they were young.

Yang was raised alongside Ruby on the island of Patch, off the west coast of Vale. Their father, Taiyang Xiao Long, was a Huntsman who taught at Signal Academy and a former member of a team consisting of Summer Rose, Qrow Branwen and Raven Branwen - the last of whom disappeared shortly after her birth. Following this, Yang's father promised an old friend to take care of his wife Summer, who took the role of Yang's surrogate mother and gave her a sister two years later in Ruby.

However, Summer would frequently embark on Huntress missions all over the kingdoms, and early in Yang's childhood, she was killed during one. Yang's father, distraught at failing to hold his side of a promise, suffered an emotional breakdown. It was then that Yang found out Summer Rose was not her biological mother, and that the woman who gave birth to her, Raven Branwen, had also abandoned her shortly thereafter. Motivated to find out why her mother left her, one day Yang attempted to follow up on what she thought was a clue to her whereabouts and waited until her father left the house and traveled to the location herself, wheeling Ruby in a wagon and walking until she was bruised and tired.

Upon arriving at the building, Yang and Ruby were attacked and almost killed by three Beowolves; their uncle, Qrow, thankfully appeared just in time to save them. Yang was ashamed of her stubborn, brash actions, aware that she had almost gotten her younger sister killed, and resolved to continue searching for her mother while helping raise Ruby, but also to not allow that search to consume her.

Volume 5 Yang Character Short
Yang eventually overpowers her sister Ruby during on a training session with her, and Ruby flies into the bushes using her Semblance. When Ruby does not respond, an Ursa emerges from the bushes. Yang fights the Ursa but is tossed out of sight when Ruby wakes. The Ursa attempts to attack Ruby, but Yang puts herself between both of them. She is struck by the Ursa and activates her Semblance to clash with the Ursa one last time in order to obliterate it. Yang informs her concerned sister that she always has her back.

"Yellow" Trailer
Years later, a 17-year-old Yang heads to a nightclub searching for clues about her mother and confronts the proprietor, a man named Junior Xiong, who has a reputation for "knowing everything". She shows him a picture and attempts to coerce the information out of him, but he says he doesn't know. Yang is then surrounded by henchmen from the club and backs off.

As she walks away from the bar with Junior she begins flirting with him and offers to give him a kiss but punches him in the face instead.

Junior's henchmen then descend upon her and she attacks and incapacitates all of them. She then comes under attack from the DJ above who is firing at her with a machine gun. After knocking him down to the club floor, two girls, Melanie and Miltia Malachite, jump in to fight her. Despite some difficulty, she manages to defeat both of the girls.

By then, Junior recovers from Yang's punch and returns with his bazooka before firing several rockets at her. Yang manages to stop the rounds, but Junior then changes the bazooka into a bat and begins attacking her with it.

She finally uses Ember Celica to destroy much of the club and knock Junior out a window. Outside she runs into Ruby, who is surprised to see her there.

Canon

 * Yang Xiao Long vs. Ursa (Won)
 * Yang Xiao Long vs. Henchmen (Won)
 * Yang Xiao Long vs. Melanie Malachite and Miltia Malachite (Won)
 * Yang Xiao Long vs. Junior Xiong (Won)
 * Yang Xiao Long and Blake Belladonna vs. Ursai (Won)
 * Team RWBY vs. Nevermore (Won)
 * Team RWBY vs. Team JNPR (Won)
 * Team RWBY, Sun Wukong, and Neptune Vasilias vs. Roman Torchwick (Won)
 * Team RWBY vs. Grimm (Won)
 * Team RWBY and Dr. Oobleck vs. White Fang (Won)
 * Yang Xiao Long vs. Neopolitan (Lost)
 * Huntsmen vs. Grimm (Won)
 * Team RWBY vs. Team ABRN (Won)
 * Yang Xiao Long and Weiss Schnee vs. Flynt Coal and Neon Katt (Won)
 * Yang Xiao Long vs. Mercury Black (Won; Round 1)
 * Huntsmen vs. Grimm, White Fang and AK-200s (Withdrew)
 * Yang Xiao Long and Blake Belladonna vs. Adam Taurus (Lost; Round 1)
 * Yang Xiao Long vs. Bandits (Won)
 * Yang Xiao Long vs. Mercury Black (Interrupted; Round 2)
 * Yang Xiao Long vs. Mercury Black and Emerald Sustrai (Interrupted)
 * Yang Xiao Long and Ruby vs.. Mercury Black and Emerald Sustrai (Withdrew)
 * Argus Limited vs. Manticores and Sphinx (Won)
 * Yang Xiao Long and Blake Belladonna vs. Adam (Won; Round 2)

Canon

 * Beacon Academy Initiation
 * Beacon Dance
 * 40th Vytal Festival
 * Battle of Beacon
 * Battle of Haven

Theme songs

 * "Yellow" Trailer: "I Burn" - Casey Lee Williams.

Etymology

 * Yang alludes to Goldilocks from Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
 * In the Volume 1 directors' commentary, Monty mentions that, when he chose Yang's voice actress, he said "Barbara should play Goldilocks." According to J.J. Castillo, Monty had a habit of referring to characters by the names of who they are inspired by, rather than their actual names in the show.
 * In the "Yellow" Trailer, Yang fights a DJ wearing a bear mask and Junior, whose real name, Hei Xiong, is Chinese for Black Bear.
 * The first enemies Yang fights in the series are a pair of Ursai, which are bear-type Grimm.
 * The pants of her first timeskip outfit have a patch with imagery of three Ursa masks on them.
 * The younger Yang's pigtails, seen in the flashback sequence of "Burning the Candle", were inspired by Barbara, who also had pigtails when she was younger.
 * Yang's name in Chinese is Yáng Xiǎo Lóng (Simplified: 阳小龙; Traditional: 陽小龍), which can be roughly translated to "Little Light Dragon" or "Small Dragon of the Sunshine".
 * In "Family", Taiyang calls Yang his "sunny little dragon".
 * Yang's name may be a reference to Bruce Lee, whose given name is also Xiaolong (小龙).
 * Despite having a Chinese name, Yang's given name and surname are inverted. "Yang" would be the surname and her given name would be "Xiao Long". Furthermore, Chinese surnames are usually only one character. This can be explained by Remnant not following real-world customs.
 * Despite Yang's name being Chinese, it is not pronounced in typical Chinese. This is due to the fact that since there is no China in Remnant, the proper Chinese pronunciation does not apply.
 * The characters 阳小龙 appear on an official T-shirt released by Rooster Teeth Productions parodying Akira.

Notes & Trivia

 * According to Lindsay JonesLindsay Jones, Yang's power comes from her hair, similar to the story of Samson and Delilah.
 * In her trailer, the photo that Yang shows to Junior is the "Transient Princess", an artwork by Monty Oum based on Final Fantasy VIII's Rinoa Heartilly. The artwork is used as a placeholder for her mother Raven, as revealed in the episode "Burning the Candle".
 * Yang was a contender in the 54th episode of ScrewAttack's web series, Death Battle, and she fought against Tifa Lockhart from Final Fantasy VII. Her Aura granted the ability to endure Tifa's strongest attacks long enough for her to activate her Semblance, granting her the victory.
 * After the fight ends, Yang dons a pair of custom, pixel-shades from the "Deal With It" Meme. Barbara Dunkleman, Yang's VA, owns the same pair of glasses in real life.
 * The opening of the fight is similar to the "Yellow" Trailer in RWBY. Yang enters a bar looking for someone and orders a strawberry sunrise with no ice.
 * At the RTX Australia 2016 RWBY Panel, Yang's Skype username was Fireballin17.
 * Yang has so far appeared in two Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures episodes. First in "Racial Super Texas" where she can be seen in a bar, with her missing right arm and again in "Spooky Scary Ghost Stories", where a doll of her and her missing arm can be seen on the bedroom floor.
 * Although for somewhat goofy reasons, Yang gets her purple eyes from Tai’s being blue and Raven’s being red.
 * Yang Xiao Long is a free playable DLC character in BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle.
 * Yang is the only member of the team whose timeskip outfit does not include her Emblem.