Actually, It's understandable that Yoshino's case is confusing a lot of people. Because the reasons she wants to be a boy are not really clear. Saori points out that she's just like any other girl, getting excited over a confession from a boy. She does not have the mind of a boy. She just wants to look like one. Up til highschool, she's aromantic and asexual. She says she wants a dick, but for what purpose? It's not because she wants to fuck a girl. To be more like a boy, so she doesn't feel like betraying Shuu? She's really indecisive. If anything, I'd say she's practically intersexual in her mind, somewhere in the middle of the road. In the end, Yoshino's choices may all revolve around Shuu. When she gives up on Shuu and so on her desire to be a boy, she "settles" for her genetic gender and cries, because it's the only thing that connected her to Shuu. She's not cured, she just grows up.
Well I'll give it one more shot then leave the offtopic behind I guess, considering the tension above...
Why would you take what Saori says at face value? I honestly don't dislike Saori as a character but she can be a real bitch. You know she does, throughout the whole story, hold some degree of antipathy and jealousy towards Takatsuki. Not only that, she also espouses a bunch of rather transphobic things (pressing Shuu with questions like "so what are you gonna do, get surgery?").
A lot of her interactions with Takatsuki can be read as her trying to undermine and deny her male identity, the thing which "connects" Takatsuki to Shuu and which Saori lacks. Grow your hair out, you're just excited because a boy confessed to you (which is obviously not what went down), generally attacking her masculinity (like condescending "I guess there are guys like that"), jumping at the chance to feminise her etc. All of this just reads as passive-aggressive teenage girl antics to me not as Saori being the oracle who can read all her friends' emotions and intentions perfectly.
Next, your assertion that Takatsuki's choices revolve around her connection with Shuu is just flat out wrong. In fact Shuu is the one who is inspired by her in the very beginning of the manga. She dresses like a boy. People call her Takatsuki-kun. She's the one who started the trips while crossdressing, all on her own to boot. She's elated when a woman hits on her thinking she's a middle school boy. All of this happens before Shuu is truly in the picture. The betrayal angle only comes into play at the very end of the story.
I also don't think there's any need to reach for terms like "asexual or aromantic" when you're talking about a elementary/middle school kid, that's just being a late bloomer. Nez already addressed it so I'll let the heterosexist angle slide but generally when a trans person says they want x feature of their identified sex it's not because they want to fuck someone, it's because not having it makes them dysphoric. There's a lot more to having a dick than "fucking girls", anyway.
On the topic of BnH, that omake was a bit unfortunate, with the stock "dude in a dress" joke approach...
So, the dream - I think it represents a few things. Ryou spent his whole life following in his sister's footsteps and emulating her, but suddenly they split onto separate paths and she entered... the world of a girl? Probably not quite that, but something along those lines. Up until that point he had no need to form an identity of his own, he could just go along with the sister he admired, since the two of them were similar and often confused for each other anyway. Then that changed, and he felt lonely and abandoned. You're going that way. In the first place, things like going out with Hachiya were his way of trying to assert that he was on his own path, even though he didn't know what his path was.
Interesting, I actually read that bit of the dream as a river of Styx-like metaphor; Yui is dead and has to take the right path, Ryou can't follow her any longer. She tells him to go left as a protective older sibling. Your interpretation makes sense too, though.
last edited at Aug 7, 2015 10:41PM