Yashy

From Candypedia
Yashy
GenderFemale
Age8
BirthdaySeptember 1, 2000 (Virgo)
SpeciesLizard
FamilyLucy (Owner)
DebutSimple Pleasures, page 1
November 2, 2009 (2009-11-02)

Loud, crude and small enough to carry, Yashy is Lucy’s pet lizard, hatched from an egg that a lonely young Lucy found near a bush and raised as her daughter ever since. She sits in on Lucy’s classes, has nicknamed Mike after a parasite and Daisy after a profession, and has appointed herself the loudest supporter of a Mike-and-Lucy romance that neither of them asked her to manage. She is also a mother in her own right, having adopted the bird Chirpy, and she will tell you it is harder than it looks. Yashy is the very first character to open her mouth in the comic, and she hasn’t been seen on panel since a hospital waiting room in Breaking Up.

Personality

Yashy will talk over anyone despite being the size of a handbag. She is one of the more outspoken and confident characters in the series, never shy about speaking her mind and much happier leading than following, and there is no filter of any kind between a thought and her mouth. That makes her the household’s comic relief and its occasional wrecking ball. She treats Lucy’s love life as her personal project, treats any girl who wanders near Mike as a rival, and treats herself as a persecuted minority whenever anybody tells her no. Under all of it she is a small child who still wants to be sung to sleep, and she only turns serious a handful of times in the whole comic.

Barred from preschool in Unfit for Education, Yashy accuses Lucy of racism.

More than anything, she wants Mike and her Mom together, whether they like it or not. She tells them to go make out somewhere else as soon as they start bickering,[1] and informs Mike that he doesn’t need pity wins to marry Lucy and should just propose.[2] On the island she describes the pair as a “work in progress.”[3] Her reason, when Sue asks why she karate-chops anyone who wants to dance with Mike, is that there’s only one person Lucy would ever want to dance with, and that Lucy is going to say yes one day.[4] Veronica’s commentary goes further, saying Lucy has to hide Sandy from her because Yashy is too strong a Mike-and-Lucy shipper to be trusted with the truth.[5] Every other girl in the vicinity gets called a whore, usually at volume, and sometimes in front of a teacher.[6]

That word is only the most famous entry in a very crude vocabulary. In sex ed she wants to know whether Mike has been making her Mom abort every day,[7] and at field day she asks Lucy whether she’ll be accepting Mike’s seed.[8] When the two of them patch things up, she tells them to skip to the make-up sex.[9] She also drops letters off her words wherever she can, announcing from behind a bag of popcorn that a screaming match is gettin’ good.[10] Lucy’s mother eventually blames the household for all of it, pointing at Jordan’s swearing over dinner, and Yashy offers a rather sheepish apology.[11]

She also loves a good grievance, whether or not she has actually got one. Denied a place in preschool, she demands to know whether Lucy is racist and whether she is not entitled to an education. Then she announces she will go sit with her own kind, by which she means the class hamster.[12][13] Told she is a hairless lizard, she insists she is a “Golden Retriever.”[14] When the household is too busy with back-to-school to remember her fifth birthday on September 1, she works up a full soliloquy about being “Ignored, forgotten, cast aside..” roughly ten minutes before the surprise cake arrives.[15] The persecution is a bit hard to square with the fact that she has always been allowed to sit in on Lucy’s classes.[12]

She is a natural performer with a head full of other people’s lines. The comic opens on her playing a goggled pilot, launching herself off Lucy’s bed with plank wings and a desk fan and crashing straight into the framed photo of Mike and Lucy.[16] She does a Knuckles impression that nobody asked for, and Lucy explains that one movie can keep Yashy quoting for months. The family has lived through both the lamp-loving and the precious phases.[17]

Underneath the bravado she is a very little kid, and Lucy says as much when Yashy unveils a jet-propelled bodyboard on the island.[18] She has nightmares that Lucy has to sit up calming,[19] she considers tooth-brushing something for sissies,[20] and she runs crying to her Mom the minute a card game with Blur goes wrong.[21] She has a child’s bloodthirst to go with it. She volunteers to kill whichever girl has upset Lucy before she knows who it is,[22] and begs to help Paulo summon a shark.[23] On the island she presses a molten marshmallow into Zachary’s cheek, genuinely puzzled as to why anyone would want to be nice to him.[24]

Appearance

Yashy is a small green bipedal lizard with blue eyes, hairless by Lucy’s account and by her own indignant denial.[25][14] She rides in Lucy’s arms most of the time, and can fit inside Lucy’s school bag or a snowman when the plot calls for it.[26][27][28]

Her original design was based on Nintendo’s Yoshi well before the comic began serialisation. Veronica has said she created Yashy at about seven years old, after seeing the baby Yoshis in Super Mario World and deciding she wanted one. She also wanted Lucy to have a cute little animal to hold, the way Misty carried Togepi in Pokémon.[29][30] Lucy admits in the comic that she named Yashy after Yoshi at the age of nine, and Mike’s preferred insult for her is a “Yoshi-lookin’ blob.”[12] Veronica describes her as a vague lizard-creature that merely looks like a certain copyrighted character, and notes that Yashy originally acted like one as well. Some of those traits have survived as gags, but the biggest one did not. In the original version of Chirpy’s introduction Yashy saved the egg by shooting out her tongue, and that story was cut from Volume One partly for that reason. Its redraw as Flying Lessons removed the tongue, and she has never used it since.[31]

Yashy has dressed up plenty of times over the years. She debuts in aviator goggles and plank wings,[16] sings at Mike’s birthday dressed as a lobster,[32] and spends Lucy’s Christmas party in a scarf and Santa hat.[33] For Halloween in Mischief Night she wears a vampire cape and a single fang, announcing to a Cthulhu-costumed Mike that she is Lucy’s spawn.[34] She also had a dinosaur costume picked out for Lucy at one point, and was pretty disappointed not to see her destroy the city.[35]

Significant events

Yashy is on the very first page of the comic, crashing a homemade plane into the framed photo of Mike and Lucy in Simple Pleasures.[16] Through Lucy’s eighth-grade year she mostly rides along to school. She demands a place in preschool and is told she’s just a pet,[13] sits through sex ed with the rest of the class,[7] and gets tied to Blur for the three-legged race on field day.[36] Flying Lessons explains how she came to be Chirpy’s mother, and Mike’s cane sends her flying in Field Day. On the last day of middle school she floats down a river of David’s chocolate ice cream and declares it the life.[37] That summer Mike brings home an injured bird who becomes Blur, and Yashy’s fifth birthday nearly gets lost in the back-to-school rush.[15]

In freshman year she has some real reasons to worry about her Mom. When Paulo mentions Mike having a ball-and-chain and Lucy goes cold, Yashy’s offer to kill whoever is responsible gets a denial severe enough to frighten her.[22] At the lake in Troubled Waters she is the one who spots Mike face-down in the water, and she screams for her Mommy from David’s arms as Lucy sinks.[38][39] Most of her troubles after that are of her own making. She misreads one of David’s stories as a comment on Lucy’s private parts, and Mike gets slapped for it.[40] A little later she grabs a printout Lucy was very much trying to hide.[41] She is pretty relieved when the year is finally over.[42]

The island trip that summer is her biggest stretch of panel time. She dances to Paulo and David’s singing on the plane,[43] shows off her jet-propelled bodyboard, and is nearly swallowed by a wave before Lucy gets in front of it.[18] When Mike falls from the cliff she is the one shrieking “JESUS CHRIST WE KILLED HIM!!”[44] and she spends the evening finding out how well marshmallows work as a weapon. She eats popcorn through Paulo and Tess’s screaming match,[10] and on the way home she has a parting word for Zachary and the usual one for Daisy.[45][46]

Sophomore year is where it goes wrong, though Halloween in Mischief Night is a good night right up until she overhears Mike say Sandy’s name.[47] She still has fun forcing Lucy into a pink dress for the play,[48] but Lucy starts locking the pets out of her room,[49] and in the winter of Just Beautiful Lucy finally tells her about Mike’s girlfriend. Yashy’s last appearance is the hospital waiting room after Lucy’s suicide attempt in Breaking Up.[50] She doesn’t come back to Roseville with Lucy, and Witch Hunt explains that she is living with Lucy’s aunt.[51]

Major relationships

Lucy

A remark about Lucy’s ribbon earns Yashy a spot in the ceiling in Gaming Rivalry.

Lucy has acted as Yashy’s mother through most of the series, and Yashy is the family Lucy built for herself when she had nobody else. Mike tells the story in Left Behind. After Sandy arrived and Lucy was cut out of their games, she stumbled across Yashy’s egg, and that is where all of her trust and affection went.[52] The mothering that followed is slapstick and tender in about equal measure. Lucy kicks Yashy into the ceiling for a remark about her ribbon,[53] but she also loses sleep calming Yashy’s nightmares[19] and sings her to sleep with one of her favourite lullabies.[54] In Arrival, Lucy, who is terrified of water, throws herself in front of a wave about to engulf Yashy, and Veronica’s commentary simply calls her a good mother.[55]

In return Yashy is Lucy’s mouthpiece, saying the things Lucy can’t. She screams that her Mom is not for sale when a mob gets ideas,[56] tries to reassure her after Mike’s fall on the island,[57] and needles her about Mike constantly, even slapping her for getting jealous over Paulo.[58] Veronica has said Yashy represented Lucy’s mean intrusive thoughts, but that when push came to shove her obnoxious self would advocate for Lucy when Lucy couldn’t.[59] Lucy knows what that loyalty would do with the truth, so she keeps Sandy a secret. She begs Mike never to say the name in front of Yashy,[5] gags him on the beach when he nearly does,[60] and gets a flat “You don’t scare me, Ma” when Yashy overhears it on Halloween and starts asking questions.[47]

The secret comes out in the winter of Just Beautiful. When Lily sends Mike away from the door, Yashy rages that the two of them always fight and he always comes back, and Lucy finally tells her the truth: Mike has a girlfriend, and she is nothing to him. Yashy breaks down sobbing, and Lucy, shattered herself, walks away.[61][62][63] Veronica’s commentary compares the scene to a child learning about a divorce.[62] After Lucy’s suicide attempt that spring, Yashy could not face coming back to Roseville, so she went to live with Lucy’s aunt instead. Lucy says she only pretended to be angry and is really just still upset, and that she misses the pets every day but understands.[64][51] Veronica does not expect them to return, describing them as permanent children who tonally no longer have a place in the comic.[65]

Mike

Mike sends Yashy skyward with his cane, shouting “FORE!”, in Field Day.

Yashy sees Mike as Lucy’s true boyfriend and her own father, and she treats him with all the affection that role implies, which is to say she calls him “Flea” and hits him. The nickname is in place from Gaming Rivalry onward.[1] The violence runs both ways. Mike golfs her across the field with his cane when she tells him to propose,[2] and she jumps on his cast and laughs about it the next chapter.[66] She polices his moods too, ordering him to quit being introspective in the middle of a sulk.[67]

Yet the family framing is sincere beneath all the usual hitting and insults. Dressed as Lucy’s vampire spawn on Halloween, she apologises to “Daddy” for his carelessness and bites him,[34] and when she counts her family for Lily, Mike makes the list as a grudging afterthought.[68] Lucy explains it to Mike plainly: Yashy is protective of him because he is like a father to her.[5] She stops playing the game once she learns about Sandy. Her last snowball at him comes with the complaint that he is way behind on the child support, minutes before the truth comes out.[69] At the hospital in Breaking Up, exhausted and tearful, she fixes him with a guarded stare and says only “G’bye, Mike.” It is her last appearance in the comic, and she has dropped “Flea” for his actual name.[50] Years later Lucy confirms that Yashy never wants to see Mike again, though she allows that Yashy might change her mind one day.[51]

Chirpy

Yashy admits to Chirpy that she is not a bird either in Flying Lessons.

Chirpy is Yashy’s child, and Chirpy treats her as a real mother. Yashy came by the egg honestly. Two years before Flying Lessons, she lost Lucy in the park, warned a mother bird about a snake, and found herself holding an abandoned egg and promising to take care of it.[31] When it hatched she named the chick Chirpy and became, in her own words, the closest thing to a mom the bird had.[70] She takes the job seriously and is never quite sure she is doing it right. She cannot teach Chirpy to fly, since as she puts it, “I’m not a bird, Chirps,”[71] and Blur has to step in.[72] She does try to protect Chirpy’s innocence, gently correcting her vocabulary and telling her to be on her best behaviour around company.[25][73]

Yashy is barely older than her own daughter, as Lucy points out, and it shows. In the Blurry Memories flashback she is furious to catch Lucy playing mother to baby Chirpy, yet when invited to join the baby games she finds them boring and wanders off.[74] Chirpy looks up to her Mommy and calls out her behaviour when it needs calling out, most memorably when Yashy jumps on Mike’s cast and laughs about it.[66] At the hospital in Breaking Up it is Chirpy clinging to a tearful Yashy rather than the other way round.[50] Yashy had said at the hatching that maybe one day her daughter would fly back to her own kind, and that is more or less what happened. Chirpy eventually found her real mother and a twin brother, and Yashy let her go.[70][64]

Blur

Yashy names the recovering bird “Blur” for his speed and his terrible memory in Blurry Memories.

Yashy’s relationship with Blur is a mostly friendly one, the two of them playing cards and video games together on most occasions, with the odd insult thrown in the heat of the moment. She was the one who woke him after Mike brought the injured bird to Lucy’s house, and she was the one who named him, on the grounds that he was as quick as a blur and his memory was awful. Blur objected loudly and the name stuck anyway.[75][72] Yashy does not lose gracefully, and one bad game in Hot Pursuit ends with her flipping him off and running to Lucy to complain that Blur is being mean again.[21] All the same, she is quick to defend him when anyone else calls him ignorant, explaining that he is merely “mentally damaged.”[9]

There have been some small romantic jabs between the two, but Yashy wants nothing to do with them. When Chirpy starts calling Blur “Daddy” on Mike’s prompting, Yashy insists the two of them are nothing like that and takes it out on Mike.[76] The one time Blur calls her “greenie” is in a daydream of Yashy’s own, in Unfulfilled Fantasy, which tells you something about whose head the idea lives in.[66] The BCI gag strips of Ships Ahoy tease the pairing for laughs, with Yashy told there is no shame in having a boyfriend.[77][78] The strongest sign of the friendship comes years later. When Yashy refused to return to Roseville, Blur did not want to leave her behind, and stayed out of town with her.[51]

Lily

Yashy, in scarf and Santa hat, reckons Lily is “like fifty” in Feline Festivities.

Lily is the household’s grown-up, and Yashy treats her the way any small child treats an elderly relative, right up until something goes wrong. Most of the time the relationship is Yashy heckling. Lily is the same boring hedgehog she always was,[79] she is about fifty years old by Yashy’s reckoning,[33] and she gets a snowball right after Paulo does one winter.[80] Lily is also the one who asks Yashy the hard questions. In Unfulfilled Fantasy, Lily wonders aloud about Yashy’s birth mother and the life she might have had. Yashy answers without a trace of her usual bluster. Lucy is her Mom, the household is her family, and she isn’t going to waste time crying over something that could have happened.[68]

Whenever Lucy falls apart, it is Lily that Yashy runs to. On the island, with Lucy dangling from a cliff and then shutting down entirely, Yashy turns to Lily to demand what on earth is wrong with her Mom.[81] In Just Beautiful it is Lily who sends Mike away from the door, and Yashy screams at her for it, only to end the scene sobbing into her.[61][63] Lily is comforting her again in the hospital waiting room,[50] and when the pets move to Lucy’s aunt’s, Lily goes along to keep watching over them.[51]

Minor relationships

Daisy

Daisy is detested by Yashy, who believes that her main goal is to break up the relationship between Lucy and Mike, and calls her “whore” at every possible occasion. It starts on the snow day, where Yashy accuses her of trying to steal Lucy’s man,[28] and carries on through sex ed, the last day of middle school and the trip home from the island.[6][82][46] The charge is always the same one, “homewrecker,” and Yashy volunteers as executioner the moment killing Daisy comes up.[83][84] Daisy, to her credit, gives some of it back. She tosses Yashy into the snow, calls her a weird green thing, and points out that she would fit quite nicely inside a locker.[28][83][67] Lucy’s diagnosis is that Yashy thinks anyone with a thing for Mike is a whore.[67]

Paulo

Yashy noticed Paulo’s looks early on in Lucy’s eighth-grade year. Veronica’s commentary on Show and Tell notes that she gawks at him along with everyone else and tries her best not to let it show,[14] and she is the first volunteer when he proposes summoning a shark.[23] She goes on to look up to him, dancing along to his singing on the plane to the island[43] and calling him awesome after he pulls off a trick while the group is walking along a cliff in Search and Rescue.[85] She even sticks up for him when he comes up at Lucy’s family dinner.[86] The admiration has limits, though. She is thoroughly disgusted to have seen him and Tess making out on the island,[20] and she reviews his sparkly vampire costume in a single word.[87] When he turns up at Lucy’s door one winter, she greets him with a snowball to the head.[80]

Quotes

Why not?! Are you RACIST? Am I not entitled to an education?! Yashy, on being told she can’t go to preschool in Unfit for Education

For your information, I’m a Golden Retriever! Yashy, after Lucy calls her a hairless lizard in Show and Tell

I got Mom, and Chirps, and Blur, and you, and.. Flea, I guess. Yashy, listing her family for Lily in Unfulfilled Fantasy

Flea and Mom are what’s known as a “work in progress.” Yashy, summing up Lucy’s love life on the island in Arrival

You always fight and he always comes back! He loves you! Yashy, to Lucy, after Lily sends Mike away in Just Beautiful

G’bye, Mike. Yashy, her last words in the comic, in the hospital waiting room in Breaking Up

Trivia

  • Her September 1 birthday was picked because it is the traditional back-to-school date. Veronica’s commentary also has her at four years old during Lucy’s eighth-grade year, so she turns five right at the start of freshman year.[15][12]
  • The household’s names run in a chain. Lucy named Yashy, and Yashy in turn named both Chirpy and Blur.[12][70][72]
  • Chirpy’s reunion with her real mother comes from the comics Veronica drew when she was eleven or twelve.[64]
  • Veronica hears Yashy’s lines in Tails’ voice.[88]
  • Veronica has said that planned scenes of Yashy speaking up for Lucy were lost to story changes, and that Paulo ended up filling the loudmouth-advocate role instead.[59]

See also

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 Chapter 2: Gaming Rivalry, page 1
  2. 2.0 2.1 Chapter 16: Field Day, page 12
  3. Chapter 42: Arrival, page 28
  4. Chapter 7: Prom Preparation, page 3
  5. 5.0 5.1 5.2 Chapter 32: Follow Me, page 2
  6. 6.0 6.1 Chapter 5: The Burden of Parenthood, page 2
  7. 7.0 7.1 Chapter 5: The Burden of Parenthood, page 1
  8. Chapter 16: Field Day, page 1
  9. 9.0 9.1 Chapter 19: Blurry Memories, page 1
  10. 10.0 10.1 Chapter 44: Intervention, page 8
  11. Chapter 65: Dinner Time, page 7
  12. 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 Chapter 4: Unfit for Education, page 1
  13. 13.0 13.1 Chapter 4: Unfit for Education, page 2
  14. 14.0 14.1 14.2 Chapter 9: Show and Tell, page 4
  15. 15.0 15.1 15.2 Yashy’s Birthday, page 1
  16. 16.0 16.1 16.2 Chapter 1: Simple Pleasures, page 1
  17. Chapter 12: Off to the Movies, page 1
  18. 18.0 18.1 Chapter 42: Arrival, page 18
  19. 19.0 19.1 Chapter 15: Aftermath, page 2
  20. 20.0 20.1 Chapter 45: Return, page 10
  21. 21.0 21.1 Chapter 20: Hot Pursuit, page 13
  22. 22.0 22.1 Chapter 22: A Difficult Choice, page 2
  23. 23.0 23.1 Chapter 10: Gone Fishing, page 2
  24. Chapter 43: Search and Rescue, page 27
  25. 25.0 25.1 Chapter 9: Show and Tell, page 2
  26. Chapter 7: Prom Preparation, page 1
  27. Catty Remarks, page 1
  28. 28.0 28.1 28.2 Chapter 3: Merry Snow Day, page 3
  29. “Ask response on Yashy’s Yoshi and Togepi origins”. 2021-02-21.
  30. “Ask response on creating Yashy and Blur as a child”. 2025-11-13.
  31. 31.0 31.1 Chapter 6: Flying Lessons, page 2
  32. Mike’s Birthday, page 1
  33. 33.0 33.1 Chapter 28: Feline Festivities, page 4
  34. 34.0 34.1 Chapter 57: Mischief Night, page 3
  35. Chapter 59: Rehearsal, page 4
  36. Chapter 16: Field Day, page 3
  37. Chapter 18: Farewell, Middle School, page 3
  38. Chapter 30: Troubled Waters, page 7
  39. Chapter 30: Troubled Waters, page 8
  40. Chapter 35: Under Pressure, page 1
  41. Chapter 36: Crash and Burn, page 4
  42. Chapter 40: Moving On, page 2
  43. 43.0 43.1 Chapter 42: Arrival, page 1
  44. Chapter 43: Search and Rescue, page 11
  45. Chapter 45: Return, page 13
  46. 46.0 46.1 Chapter 45: Return, page 17
  47. 47.0 47.1 Chapter 57: Mischief Night, page 15
  48. Chapter 59: Rehearsal, page 2
  49. Chapter 65: Dinner Time, page 3
  50. 50.0 50.1 50.2 50.3 Chapter 75: Breaking Up, page 21
  51. 51.0 51.1 51.2 51.3 51.4 Chapter 105: Witch Hunt, page 8
  52. Chapter 26: Left Behind, page 5
  53. Chapter 2: Gaming Rivalry, page 3
  54. Chapter 28: Feline Festivities, page 15
  55. Chapter 42: Arrival, page 21
  56. Out of the Frame, page 4
  57. Chapter 43: Search and Rescue, page 15
  58. Chapter 57: Mischief Night, page 5
  59. 59.0 59.1 “Ask response on Yashy as Lucy’s inner voice”. 2026-06-17.
  60. Chapter 42: Arrival, page 29
  61. 61.0 61.1 Chapter 71: Just Beautiful, page 31
  62. 62.0 62.1 Chapter 71: Just Beautiful, page 32
  63. 63.0 63.1 Chapter 71: Just Beautiful, page 33
  64. 64.0 64.1 64.2 Chapter 105: Witch Hunt, page 7
  65. “Ask response on whether the pets will return”. 2026-03-07.
  66. 66.0 66.1 66.2 Chapter 17: Unfulfilled Fantasy, page 1
  67. 67.0 67.1 67.2 Chapter 18: Farewell, Middle School, page 2
  68. 68.0 68.1 Chapter 17: Unfulfilled Fantasy, page 11
  69. Chapter 71: Just Beautiful, page 29
  70. 70.0 70.1 70.2 Chapter 6: Flying Lessons, page 3
  71. Chapter 6: Flying Lessons, page 1
  72. 72.0 72.1 72.2 Chapter 19: Blurry Memories, page 7
  73. Chapter 19: Blurry Memories, page 4
  74. Chapter 19: Blurry Memories, page 2
  75. Chapter 19: Blurry Memories, page 5
  76. Chapter 6: Flying Lessons, page 4
  77. Ships Ahoy, Season One, page 9 🔒 (members only)
  78. Ships Ahoy, Season Five, page 3 🔒 (members only)
  79. Chapter 19: Blurry Memories, page 8
  80. 80.0 80.1 Chapter 70: Piece of Cake, page 5
  81. Chapter 43: Search and Rescue, page 16
  82. Chapter 18: Farewell, Middle School, page 1
  83. 83.0 83.1 Chapter 7: Prom Preparation, page 2
  84. Chapter 21: Enter High School, page 2
  85. Chapter 43: Search and Rescue, page 5
  86. Chapter 65: Dinner Time, page 10
  87. Chapter 57: Mischief Night, page 7
  88. Chapter 42: Arrival, page 20