Yuri is over here getting ready to fight for her very existence after a single hug.
"I Face Myself" plays intensely
To go along with the various
Persona comments, when a person in that video game series confronts their Shadow (usually in some sort of pocket dimension or altered space), rejects it (angering it), and loses to it in a fight, that person is normally found dead in the real world soon after.
Shadows can be suppressed (as in 3), come to terms with (as in 4), or embraced (as in 5), but they all represent some facet of the original individual, be it the dirty truths they're too polite to utter, or that person's fears of what they might become if they lose themself. All of which sounds hauntingly familiar to poor Yuri-chan here.
So you're incredibly correct, and I wouldn't be surprised if the author hadn't at least some knowledge of the
Persona games. The clock has struck 25 and Yuri has entered the Lovey-Dovey Hour.
Also of note is the concept of Cognition in Persona (a.k.a. Consensus Reality in the
World of Darkness Mage tabletop games): when enough humans collectively perceive or believe something, reality shifts subtly to accommodate this "truth". Considering how shared some of the female delusions/auras are in
1:39 Ratio, it's interesting to see whether the nonsense going on is entirely mundane gags, borderline-supernatural/Fortean, or subtly supernatural. (The gauge seems to change a bit depending on the chapter.)