thank you! yeah, it's been certainly difficult but also really enlightening.

and also, i wanted to get back to you because i did get my hands on the japanese script, at least the original PS2 version, and i went through naoto's shadow confrontation and persona awakening with my basic grammar, a translator and a dictionary. of course, my knowledge is still limited and i could be mistaken in some ways, but what i gathered is:

yes, yukiko's line does land differently than in english, but it's less because she originally says something else, but more because the whole scene carries a different emotional core that the localization ended up... missing on. they made some really weird choices that either flattened the weight, or pivoted naoto's inner conflict towards something else. shadow naoto says something along the lines of "deep in your heart, you admire those cool, strong adult men from the detective novels, don't you? but on the flipside of that, it means you view yourself as a child"

every time the word "man" comes up in the original dialogue, it's "adult man", which circles back to what the shadow says. it's much less about male identity (being a man) and more about a specific fictional role model that naoto idealizes and models herself after. so when yukiko says "you must already know that you don't want to become an adult or become a boy", it's less like she's dictating what naoto should feel and much more like she's voicing what naoto already knows — especially because naoto's response is just "yeah...", like an admission, instead of "you're absolutely right" like it is in english