The thing is, sometimes you need to be on the nose so your point will get through to people. Being subtle is fine and all, but not only it can go over some people's head, but others will make a point to ignore the subtlety if the message carried goes against what they want/value.
Just take yuri. When writing such a story in a subtle way, a lot of people will ignore all the hints to assure you that "nope, they're obviously just friends". While an actual kiss will makes it harder to argue against (and yet, some might still find ways to rationalize it to fit their conceptions).
Yes, this is a caricature, overly exagerated, but the underlying point is valid. Women, especially in japan, are still often considered as just there to get married, have kids, then take care of them while the husband go earn money to provide for the whole family. Carrierist women in Japan are too often frowned upon. It's slightly better in western countries, but frankly, there are still ways to go. And the more women tries to fend for themselves, the more they tend to be pushed back.
In all time, satire has been a way to bring to light painful truth that a lot of people would rather see kept to the shadow. To me, it feels that this manga is kinda the same. You have to take it with a grain of salt, as it's exagerated, which is what caricature is, but that doesn't mean the underlying point is moot.
This is a very good post. Plenty of satire is about as subtle as a brick to the head because the point isn't to be subtle the point is to point at a shitty aspect of society and yell "This fucking sucks!" And yeah I'm sure that's annoying if the thing they're yelling about doesn't hurt you personally and you were perfectly happy ignoring it but it's also cathartic for a lot of the people that it does to have that problem recognized and denounced and maybe even get some escapist fiction where someone fights against it and wins that isn't cloaked in plausible deniability to make it more marketable.
