Reject Society, Embrace Incest: YU-NO, Virtual Sex with Your Own Daughter (NSFW)

In mise-en-scène, color, and framing, this scene also directly mirrors the earlier scene of the child Yu-no in bed with Takuya and Sayless. The daughter has fully replaced the mother, who is there to vie with her for Takuya’s attention no longer. This aspect of the presentation also emphasizes that the character the player should be attracted to specifically is their daughter. Essential to YU-NO, the incest and semi-pedophilia are not to be downplayed.

While heavily sexualizing her, Kanno still repeatedly acknowledges that Yu-no remains a child. Her age is unclear, but the adult Yu-no seemingly cannot be older than the equivalent of her mid-teens. In the above-described bed scene, Takuya says, “Your body might’ve matured, but you’re still a child on the inside.” Earlier, shortly before his abortive assassination of the God Emperor, Takuya also says of his daughter,

“She might’ve gotten a gorgeous body, but she’s clearly still a child at heart.”

This “gorgeous” child is heavily sexualized but remains a child. Because her freedom from the God Emperor’s brainwashing machine means returning to her previous personality and also voluntarily fulfilling the same role and leading the same lifestyle the theocracy earlier forced upon her, the story continues to present the refusal of personal change as a virtue (despite Ayumi’s laughable claim that Takuya has grown a lot as a person).

A few scenes later, Yu-no and Takuya have sex in the same bed. Any claim that Takuya has developed since the Prologue is undercut. Takuya and Yu-no’s dialogue before breaking the longstanding sexual tension between them amounts to a discussion of the ethics of the situation, unconvincing not least because Takuya is a simpleton and Yu-no, as the dialogue continues to emphasize despite the lovey-dovey framing, is still a child. “You sound like a kid!” says Takuya. Yu-no replies, “But I am your kid.” Takuya begins to argue that parent–child incest is illegal, which he then rejects as a reason not to have sex with Yu-no on the bizarre if technically valid basis that Japan’s laws do not apply to Dela Grante.

“Right… there’s no point in explaining to her the laws of my world.”

Kanno predictably allows Takuya to accede to Yu-no’s request. This strange logic of assuming laws correlate to what is ethically acceptable I will return to below. Aside from their identities and the incessant use of “Papa,” the Yu-no–Takuya sex scene is unremarkable save being the only in which the presentation denies the player the full act, fading to black shortly after Takuya penetrates his daughter, who screams “Papaaaaa!!!”

In the finale, Yu-no consents to the “rite.” The ancient creator scientist, Grantia, whom even Kanna reveres as “God,” uses the Grandmother computer system that runs Dela Grante to possess Yu-no’s body to undertake a vague action that will prevent an “event collision” of Dela Grante’s and Takuya’s dimensions, a process that recurs in an eight-thousand-year time loop. Before she vanishes as Grantia completes the rite, Yu-no tells Takuya that her only wish is to be with him. Grandmother warps Takuya back to Sakaimachi, where Takuya finds Yu-no at Sword Cape as in the Prologue but now discerns that she calls him “Papa” before they make out, completing the incestuous loop. Abandoning Sakaimachi and all possibility for growth and responsibility with the cast of characters the player is expected to have spent tens of hours learning about and falling in love with, Takuya refuses to let go of Yu-no as she warps into another universe. Takuya finds himself together with Yu-no at the beginning of causality, in other words, of all universes. Naked, the two cling together, the sexuality overwhelming.