Far from “repressed desires,” Takuya’s lust for Ayumi—prominent enough that he huffs the cushions on which she has sat and is aroused at the sight of her hips and cleavage, calling her “deliciously well-endowed”—and his complete hatred for his father, whom he calls “the old bastard,” vows to defeat, and misses no opportunity to belittle as a selfish pervert, overwhelm in the openness of their expression.
To reach the ending, the player must “romance” Ayumi. Like sex with Yu-no, this is not optional material. Over a series of stressful, melodramatic days of uncovering intrigue and corruption at her employer Geo Technics, Takuya competes against Ayumi’s abusive subordinate Toyotomi for her affection. But Ayumi, in the end, admits she too has had feelings for Takuya all along. By having sex with Ayumi, Takuya might seem to resolve the Oedipus complex, assuming his father’s role in some literal way. After sex, a happy and newly confident Ayumi remarks on Takuya’s resemblance to Koudai, as though the boy is becoming his father, becoming more mature as Kanno understands it. In the Oedipal pattern, such dialogue continues to link the love between parents and children to sexual desire. Koudai’s teasing guidance and Takuya’s love for Kaytia, embodied in the Reflector that enables the deed, guide the player to bedding their stepmother.
The Ayumi–Takuya relationship is not “real” incest. In a vacuum, given the genre, the scenario is not especially objectionable. Both stepmother and stepson are sexual young people who have known each other only a few years. However, Kanno plays up the incest angle of the fantasy, emphasizing their familial relationship. Almost immediately before Ayumi brings Takuya to her bedroom, for example, she challenges him to “hug [her], as a son would his mother,” a challenge that his sexual feelings cause him to decline. Despite the brief period that has passed since her marriage to Koudai, Ayumi and Takuya also persist in identifying each other as mother and son up until the very end. By seeming not especially objectionable, however, and given the relative ethical groundedness of how strenuously and how long Takuya objects to the possibility of the relationship, especially in a characteristically meandering scene after Takuya intervenes to stop Ayumi’s suicide, this part of the Oedipal pattern introduces the notion of deliberate incest that is not true incest, of simulated incest, on the pipeline to deliberate true incest.
The second major instance of the Oedipal pattern may seem even less objectionable: Takuya’s relationship with Hatano Kanna. Nothing about the relationship is obviously incestuous. Kanna may be Takuya’s unofficial stepsister, given that Koudai is her “second father.” However, prior to the events of YU-NO, Takuya never meets or hears of Kanna, and Kanna never meets him. Interpreting their relationship as sibling incest, then, would overreach, in addition to not being Oedipal. But other incestuous suggestions appear in Kanna’s route, and the Epilogue establishes that, through interdimensional travel, Takuya is Kanna’s biological father.
Like Ayumi, Sayless, and Yu-no, Kanna parallels Kaytia in several ways. The most obvious of these is that Kanna and Kaytia both rely upon Hypersense Stone to survive. When Kanna asks Takuya where he recalls seeing her blue Hypersense Stone necklace, he answers, “in a peaceful place, I guess?” Takuya speculates that his father showed him such stones somewhere. Because this dialogue follows the player stripping and exploring Kanna’s body to find the Hypersense Stone lying above her breasts, establishing Kanna for the first time as a target for the player’s (and Takuya’s) sexual desire, a likely reading is that this “peaceful place” is the same sexualized spot to which Kaytia holds Takuya in his dream: his mother’s chest.
Later, while sleeping with Kanna, Takuya dreams of Koudai mocking him as “Mr. Mother Complex.” The sound of Kanna chopping vegetables awakens Takuya before his father can explain something about Kaytia. This scene also repeatedly links Kanna to Kaytia. After YU-NO compels the player to inspect Kanna’s nape and panties for erotic pleasure, Takuya tells Kanna that watching her cook breakfast makes him miss Kaytia: “I was suddenly overcome with a feeling of nostalgia. […] I thought it was really nice to watch a girl prepare food from behind. Would it bother you if I said that I felt like I was watching my mother?”
