Headscratchers / Yona of the Dawn

• Why do people notice Yona's hair colour but not Jaeha, Shinah or Kija's? By all accounts, green, blue and white are even stranger hair colours than red. Even if the assumption is supposed to be that they dye their hair (which already doesn't fit in with the ancient Korea-esque setting), then why wouldn't people assume the same for Yona?
  • It's possible to get white hair prematurely (and a bunch of people from his village has white hair too), Shinah keeps his entire head covered most of the time anyways, and Jeaha dresses like a foreigner.
• Why wasn't Jaeha's green hair a telltale sign to Hak that he was the green dragon? Especially since he'd already met Kija and Shinah, and saw that they have corresponding hair colours to which dragon they were.
  • Hak could possibly be red-green colour-blind. Hence, he's never really commented about Yona's hair colour either, because he also sees nothing special about it.
  • It's also possible he just didn't make the connection. They had only found two dragons at that point, Kija and Shin-Ah. While Kija does have light hair, so does basically everybody else in his village, which makes it stand out a lot less as a specific trait of Hakuryuu. As for Shin-Ah, he hardly ever takes off his fluff to show his real hair, so Hak probably never got a good look at it until after they met up with Jaeha. It could also be that their hair color isn't as uncommon as we think. In manga color pages, Lili's hair could either be black or a dark shade of blue. Maybe unnatural hair colors are rare, but still accepted thing in their world. It could also explain why no one reacts to the other dragons' hair colors, like the first poster on this page asked about.
• If Zeno has been following Yona ever since she and Hak fled the castle, why didn't he do anything when the two of them were surrounded by Tae-jun's soldiers? Had they been more unlucky than they were, that fall would have killed them both.
  • First of all, he was testing her, so he might not have wanted to intervene. Second, there's no evidence that he didn't either. Hak and Yona were unconscious, and there were only two other people in the valley. he could have helped them get to the shore of the river or put them where Yoon would find them while they were knocked out.
• What happened to Hiyou after Hak punched him? Was he arrested by Su-Won? Did he escape? Did the punch kill him? He seems to simply disappear after the punch.
• How did Zeno manage to follow the group without Kija and Shin-ah sensing him? He would have to be following very far behind in order to avoid their connection, in which case, how would he have been able to observe Yona as he claims he'd always been doing?
  • For that matter, Shin-ah can see through solid objects and across great distances. He should have seen the strange hobo following them at some point.
    • Shin-ah can't see through solid objects. That's why Yona and Yoon had to go undercover to find out which ship was holding the kidnapped women.
  • He was hiding in plain sight, so to speak. When he does show up, Kija says that he sensed his presence to be nearby, but that it was so nearby that he thought he was mistaken. Jaeha immediately backs this up and agrees with him. Pay attention to the manga when Kija says that the Blue Dragon is "probably" the nearest. The implication upon rereading is that he actually senses Zeno nearby, but that Zeno is too close by to be plausible, when Kija knows (or thinks he knows) that the Dragons are all living in separate villages far away from each other. Also, Zeno all-but says outright that he's been watching over the other three dragons as they grew up, too. Kija has probably felt Zeno's presence to be fairly close at different points all his life, but is simply accustomed to it and doesn't notice.
• Why do the people in Kouka seem to have a Weirdness Censor when it comes to Yona's very rare hair colour, but at the same time the King of Xing found it so remarkable that 1) he told his daughter about it and 2) said daughter remembers it years later?
  • Cause they're royalty who had direct contact with her dad. A large kingdom without internet access would leave the common folks mostly ignorant, especially with how Yona was never allowed to leave the palace.
• Why hadn't Lili and Yona met each other prior to the Water Tribe Arc?
  • Both Il and to a lesser degree, Joon-ji, are shown to be somewhat overprotective. We know Yona wasn't allowed to leave the castle, so perhaps Lili also wasn't allowed to leave her father's villa throughout childhood?
• Regardless of their relation to Yona, the Dragons and Yun are Kouka citizens. As King, shouldn't Soowon bear some responsibility in rescuing them from imprisonment the way he did for Lili?
  • Completely different situations.
  • That's not a proper answer; how so? They're not nobles so it doesn't matter? A negotiation should have at least been requested when he realized Xing had Koukan prisoners. If the problem was that he believed Kouren would kill them the moment he showed an interest in their release, then there's no reason not to make that clear to Yona in his letter.
    • That's exactly it. They're not the daughter of the General of the Water Tribe, so there is no one whose support he needs pressuring him to act. Su-won needs Jun-gi's political support to rule— the king has to be supported by all five tribes. Having Koukan prisoners actually works in Su-won's favor here, because it conceivably gives him a pretext to attack Xing without anyone saying he's being needlessly aggressive like his father, rather than waiting for Kouren to attack preemptively.
• How did Yona not know about Tae-yeon until she came to the Wind Tribe in person? Yona is one of Hak's two closest friends, did Hak really never announce that he had a new brother when Tae-yeon was first adopted? Did he seriously never come up in conversation in the years that he's been a part of the family?
  • Yep. From what we can tell Hak just never talked about home to Yona. Hak generally seems to keep things to himself.
  • What about Mundeok then? He loves kids, hence he adopted two, and Yona claims to have seen him as a grandfather. Did he really never bring up at any point the existence of another grandson beside Hak in over 10 years? That seems unlikely, given how he's shown to dote on Tae-yeon like crazy.
  • It's an early indication of how ignorant Yona is of life outside her own little bubble. She is, in fact, so ignorant that even the people who care about her don't think she'll be all that interested in things outside of her bubble. Or, alternatively, Hak didn't talk much about home to her because he didn't want her to think he was sacrificing anything by being with her instead of there. If she knew he had an adorable baby brother, she might feel guilty about his duties to her always taking up time he could be spending at home with his family, and Hak, who cherishes her and wants to protect her, wouldn't want her to feel any kind of guilt like that.
• Considering the fact that Hiryuu's reincarnation is female, how come all of the dragon warriors (at least the ones seen thus far) are male?
  • According to Word of God, there have been female dragon warriors, it's just that none were out of the 3 generations we meet personally.
• Murdering the king was the best solution, Su-Won? When you have no proof that he killed your father? Wouldn't it have made more sense for Su-won to try to make up for the war crimes his father committed, so that Kouren wouldn't have a pretext for war, let Yona browbeat her father into giving his blessing for the match, marry her and become king? The way things stand, he's made enemies of Yona and Hak, even if Yona has no desire to reclaim her throne, and ruined their happy lives together due to his selfish ambition.
  • To be fair, he's never said he believed it to be the best solution. It's probable that there's a lot about Il and Yuhon we still don't know. After all, Suwon has literally not once mentioned his father since the night he killed Il, so there very well might be more to his decision that we just don't know about yet. I get the feeling this is a deliberate headscratcher for now.
• How much time has passed since the coup? Suwon's been described as "almost 19" since then, yet his birthday hasn't seemed to have passed even now.
• So what exactly was Gobi's plan in the Tully arc and why on earth did he bother getting Kuelbo involved if he planned on taking Yona and the dragons for himself? It's not as though he needed Kuelbo's man-power; it was his own men who kidnapped Yona, Jaeha, Yun and Zeno in the first place. So why involve himself with another powerful person and then betray him? Why paint yet another target on his back?