Anyway, guess who finally got to this episode of Urusei Yatsura?

If I had to give a reason why this needed to be a Cohost thing and not just the Twitter thread I originally planned it to be, it's because for as much as the show lampoons cisheteronormativity as stupid and self-defeating, it still assumes cisheteronormativity as the norm, and Ryuunosuke and this episode in particular are the perfect demonstration of that. When she's first introduced, the show's representation of her as a trans youth the show so consistently portrays Ryuunosuke's struggles to act out her gender sympathetically and is so eerily specific in places (one of her teachers being the one to go to bat for her), you'd think the writers* were intentionally going out of their way to write about the challenges a trans teen might face. But cracks start to show as the goes on: bit characters who begin and end with cheap "guy in a dress" jokes; Ryuunosuke deflecting accusations that she's bisexual or just a boy who wants to dress as a girl as, "I'm not some pervert/freak. I'm one of the normal ones, damn it!" It's around here one starts to suspect that the only reason Urusei Yatsura comes as close as it does to sympathetically portraying a trans teenager is because the writers were imagining her as cis from the start, and that her story probably wouldn't have gotten off the ground had they started from her being trans.

Right, back to the episode I'm complaining about. That Twitter thread should give you a good idea what the issue is - especially since the anime doesn't adapt much beyond that point - but to add to it, it's important to keep in mind how Japanese heteronormativity constructs romantic/sexual attraction between women: as something girls ideally grow out of as they become adults. So on the one hand, the show wants to depict Ryuunosuke's integration into gender norms as abusive and violent, but on the other hand it still sees something desirable for her in those gender norms if it's portraying her lack of attraction to men as evidence of that abuse stunting her emotional development.

*I'm saying "the writers" here because while the anime and the manga differ in places, this point is consistent across both of them.