So, obviously the whole thing is one big surreal allegory for the queer experience and homophobia, but it's deliberately ambiguous what any given thing literally means. With that in mind, I'm taking a drunken stab at it:
The first thing: literal, explicit romantic love is used as an allegory for platonic friendships or one-sided unrequited crushes on friends. It's the socially acceptable relationships and a subversion of the trope where queer relationships have to be dealt with euphemistically. A clear example is the relationship between Kureha's mother and Yurika, which is portrayed with unambiguous romantic terms and symbolism but is narratively clearly not an actual romantic relationship despite Yurika wanting it to be, with Reia clearly seeing her as a friend and having an (unseen) straight relationship which is a driving factor in the story's overall conflict.
Second: the bears are an allegory for openly queer people.
Third: literal death is an allegory for the fear of ostracization or for that ostracization itself. When the bears eat someone, that's fear. When the hunters kill a bear, that's ostracization.
Fourth: all the "exclusion" and social acceptability stuff is 100% literal and not allegorical at all, it's the story textually and explicitly portraying homophobia and the pressure to conform, just in a slightly stylized and more honest form.
Fifth: the ending is Kureha coming out and being ostracized for it, but her open act of resistance emboldened others to follow suit.
There's a lot more to unpack but that's all I've got. I'm not qualified to pick it apart in any greater detail than that though I have the strong suspicion that there's a lot of references or wordplay that I'm just not getting.
i think you've got the right idea about things. the one thing i'll say is that it's also a commentary about class-s, a genre that's mostly dedicated to girls having very close relationships in private schools that aren't allowed to be actually gay. maybe some kissing is allowed, but it can't be actually romantic or sexual. that's very much something the school is riffing on, and so it's also a commentary about how that sort of thing is completely acceptable in mainstream japanese culture while more explicit queerness is villainized and leaves people ostracized
there's a bunch of other stuff going on but i think that's the big thing you missed
One thing i thought of was the usage of fanservice in reference to patriarchy. Its been a while but if i remember right the majority of the explicit fanservice comes directly after the court (patriarchy) grants yuri approval, and to me seems to be pointing very explicitly at what kind of lesbian relationships are allowed to be visible by patriarchy. You are only allowed to pursue love if it is sexy to the male gaze.
Also, im not so sure about your analysis of kurehas mom and yuriika. The manga has yuriika very clearly in love, but taking a backseat and allowing ginkos mother to pursue her. Ginkos mother doesnt appear in the anime, but she bears a striking resemblance to the person who put yuriika in a box, and in the manga that kinda characterizes their relationship (until the end). Also i think she is mistaken for a beautiful man in the manga, and in the anime the person who put yuriika in a box is refered to as he/him.
Overall the manga is a lot less ambiguous, but tells a bit of a different story.
the court (patriarchy)
The court is so weird that I'm not even sure what to make of it. I'd hesitate to say that it's patriarchy or male gaze outright, because it seems to be more an internal conflict: the prosecutor is popularity/social acceptance, the defense attorney is some ideal of liberation or hedonism, and the judge is... something, I'm not sure there, while what it's asking of the defendants is a matter of repression and what they'll sacrifice to be themselves. There's also the aspect that what Kureha is charged with in it is wanting her friend/crush to conform instead of being out, and the court itself evaporates away when the internal conflict is resolved and she decides to come out. The weirdly horny sequences that follow seem more like a red herring than anything, since they're such a nonsequitur to the whole "will you live in the closet, or will you be yourself?" question that it always hinges on. If some of it is about male gaze then that's just one facet of an obnoxiously tangled bit of allegory.
Fuck I just realized it's dialectic, isn't it? You've got the thesis: Life Cool, arguing for social acceptability and propriety; the anti-thesis: Life Beauty, arguing for unbridled liberation and hedonism; and the synthesis: Life Sexy, trying to create some kind of middle ground where maybe if you sacrifice this or that you can get enough to be happy while still being accepted. And then the real answer in the end is "fuck this, actually, I'm going to be open about everything no matter the consequences," which destroys the court and its balance.
Also, im not so sure about your analysis of kurehas mom and yuriika.
With the anime I was laughing at the flashback scene at the lily bed because it was such an on the nose "vehement declarations of love in a scene steeped in queer symbolism, ending with an affirmation of friendship" kind of scene and then it seamlessly transitioned into Yurika being bitter and hurt because Reia had a kid, and she's clearly so pained in that scene while Reia is completely oblivious to it that the only way I can interpret it is we're seeing Yurika's perspective and how she'd interpreted the earlier scene and how that conflicts with what actually happened, how her feelings weren't returned.
What I read about the manga while trying to look up what the characters' names actually were since the version of the anime I found had multi-audio but no subtitles makes it sound like a radically different story overall from the anime.
