Yen Naganohara

Yen Naganohara is a teenage Japanese transfer student living on the West Coast of the United States, created by Nahte Yamasztuka. She typically pre-occupies herself with skating and baseball outside of her studies, and appears in a teal puffy jacket and pants, a large baseball cap, and large round glasses, with silver long hair and peach coloured eyes. Yen is mostly seen through the context of her friend group, which consists of Penny, Nickel, and Dime,characters created by Jenuki. Although she can skate and cycle, she chooses to travel with her friends in wheeled shoes because she thinks that they're cool. She regularly uses a first generation iPod attached to her waistband along with a pair of broken earbuds, and she has never gotten around to buying a new pair. Yen is a fan of the Seattle Mariners, and although she denies it, has a crush on the famous outfielder and batter Ichiro Suzuki. Yen has planned appearances in Project Flow, and after her admittance to the Public Domain, is planned to appear in Jenuki's Unnamed Penny Brawler.

Creation
The concept that would become Yen stemmed from Jenuki's project involving her cast of characters surrounding Penny. The characters of Penny and Nickel would be created by Jenuki in October of 2019, and the character Dime would created by Cruise Elroy in September of 2021. Since the group wouldn't be complete without a Quarter, Nahte created what is now Yen with the intention of her being the fourth member of Penny's friend group on December 16th, 2021. This explains her unusual tall height as compared to the rest of the cast, which all appear as the same shorter height. Despite the planned name for this character being Quarter, the name did not quite fit her appearance. At Jenuki's suggestion of making the character Japanese, her name was officially pinned down as Yen, derived from the Japanese currency.

Yen's design was primarily inspired from early 2000's streetwear, particularly from that of MP3 player advertisements at that time. Her baggy neon jacket and pants seek to evoke the style of the time period and the demographic many of the new MP3 players were marketed toward. Other early 2000's trends were incorporated into the design, such as her backpack charms and wheeled shoes. Penny and her friends have a set colour palette, consisting of a maximum of four colours for predetermined portions of the character. Early drawings of Yen would see her colour palette with a lavender primary colour, a gray blue secondary colour, a silver tertiary colour, and a red quaternary colour.

On April 11th, 2022, Jenuki and Nahte would change Yen's colour palette to be more distinct from the rest of the Penny cast, switching her primary colour to a striking teal, and her quaternary colour to a peach pink. These colours would be inspired from a popular teal and pink paper cup design from the 1990's.

Project Flow
Yen is planned to appear in Project Flow as a playable minigame character.

Public Domain Entrance and Appearances
On May 1st, 2022, Yen entered the public domain following the publishing of several of her artworks onto the Internet Archive. The work was published with the Creative Commons license CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, which although does not effect the ownership of the trademark by Yamasztuka, does effectively waive all of their rights to the work worldwide under copyright law.

Although the character has entered the public domain, only her appearances in the Yen Archive.org page are licensed under CC0. Her appearances in Project Flow, Jenuki's media, and adaptations by other authors may have different licenses.

Yen entered the public domain in 2022 along with Forgotten Dreams several months earlier.

SKATIN'
Yen is planned to appear in Jenuki's Unnamed Penny Brawler as the fourth member of Penny's friend group, and as the fourth player character. She has appeared multiple times in Jenuki's artwork involving Penny as of the time of writing.