important_week | Entries tagged with ooc

A quick list of bulletpoint headcanon things to fill in the ambiguity of the film.

Yinsen is Afghani, specifically Pashtun and Uzbek on his mother's side, hence having a middle name.
Yinsen speaks English, Pashto, Uzbek, Dari, Persian, and Tajiki and can get by in Azeri, Punjabi, Egyptian Standard Arabic and Pashayi.
His family was an accidental casualty of the Ten Rings after he was captured. They attempted to keep him unaware of their deaths, but had severely underestimated his fascination with minority languages, resulting in him overhearing a conversation between two Pashayi guards and figuring it out.
His wife was a linguist and was actually their first choice for abduction due to knowing more languages than he did. The same way they almost killed Tony through sheer incompetence, they managed to kill their actual target and had to settle on Yinsen instead.
Just like with Tony, Yinsen tried to operate on his wife to keep her alive in the caves. Having failed to save her, he got overly invested in Tony as a way to try to do something right.

Handwaving Yinsen surviving involves the following:

Yinsen and Tony were not the only people there against their will and Yinsen was not the sole medic on-site. One of the other people forced to be there stabilized Yinsen and, in the chaos of Tony's escape, mounted one of their own.
Not entirely sure what to do with his life in light of everything that had happened, Yinsen went with Umid, the man who had rescued him, to Iran where Umid's family had fled to escape the chaos in Afghanistan.
In Tehran, Yinsen managed to find some peace of mind and purpose working as an interpreter, but regaining his medical credentials when he barely had the paperwork to prove his identity took years. It also took him years to regain full mobility given the severity of his injuries and his near-death experience.
Yinsen now suffers from chronic pain, fatigue and some of the symptoms of PTSD as a result of all of the loss and trauma he's gone through.
Eventually he came to the realization that everything in the Arab world just reminded him too much of his wife and children and used his connections as an interpreter, limited though they were, to begin the process of immigrating to the United States. It took two years for the paperwork to go through, hence the massive delay between the first Iron Man movie and him actually reconnecting with Tony.

Truth Is Known In Adversity