Sayless is so childish and naïve that her independent survival strains credulity. According to Takuya, when he meets her, Sayless does not know how to sew, cook, or clean, so he must teach her how to live as a functional adult. Sayelss is a lost puppy, but a lost puppy who is identical to Takuya’s mother, has sex with him, and prepares him meals while acting as eye candy for the player, all while never talking back. A twist reveals that Sayless is not, in fact, incapable of speech—Sayless voluntarily submits herself to a life as a mute pet-servant. Her only importance to the plot is as a womb.
Takuya can never have sex with his biological mother. However, continuing the Oedipal pattern, “the best partner [Takuya] could have ever wished for,” Sayless, the woman whom he marries and with whom he has a child, is, both physically and in her unconditional love, identical to the biological mother of Takuya’s wet dreams. In YU-NO, falling in love with one’s mother is sweet, sexy, and presumed to be relatable to the player. Yet, although an amplification of the Oedipal pattern more extreme than Ayumi–Takuya, the Sayless–Takuya pairing cannot plunge into true incest.
The culmination of the Oedipal narrative pattern is, of course, Takuya’s relationship with his and Sayless’s daughter, Yu-no. After her birth, the player experiences the first four years of Yu-no’s life in montage. Although YU-NO asks the player to understand Yu-no as their own daughter, as early on as when she is a baby held to her mother’s chest, Kanno wastes no time having Takuya sexualize an infant:
For reasons Ayumi later spends some forty minutes expositing, the people of Dela Grante grow to adulthood rapidly. According to Takuya, “the growth rate in this world is about four times that of mine.” Based on this number, Yu-no is twelve in Earth years when, over an image of her full-frontal child nudity, Takuya narrates:
While twelve mentally and physically, Yu-no consistently wears a sexualized revealing outfit through which, in its first appearance, her nipples poke. As a development of the childish dependency Sayless displays, Kanno intensifies the Oedipal pattern by having sexual attraction focused on an actual child, inverting the relationship so that the player–father is (meant to be) sexually attracted to their motherlike child rather than to their mother.
Both Yu-no and her father repeatedly express sexual attraction to each other. The night before her mother’s death, Yu-no joins Takuya and Sayless in bed. Yu-no tells Takuya that she loves him as much as Sayless—innocent enough in another context—and apologizes that her presence means Takuya can’t “make love to Mama.” Takuya, heart racing in the same manner as in many earlier comedy scenes of sexual arousal, asks what his daughter means.
When he realizes the child believes that “making love” means hugging in bed, Takuya narrates, “What am I being dejected about… I guess I’m half-glad, half-disappointed…” (Emphasis mine.) Takuya is sexually interested in his barely pubescent daughter, who claims to “love” him as much as his wife and, as it later turns out, in the same physical way:
