I’ve made a few small opinions on this route before, but I feel like some of it has changed in the past few months, especially with this new reading of Kanon.
I’ve stated before that Nayuki and Yuuichi share this lovely brother-sister complex that’s fun to experience, but the biggest problem with this route is that it tries a bit too hard to develop that into an explicit romance. Don’t get me wrong, it’s far from the worst romance I’ve ever seen. However, the direction the route takes makes Nayuki’s intentions look a little more sinister than they seem.
In common, Nayuki makes very subtle, deliberate suggestions to get closer to Yuuichi from asking if he remembers her name to guilting him into buying bowls of sugar for her to asking if he wants a lunch made by her. It makes sense considering her mother raised her in a similar manner, but it gets worrisome around the point when she verbally dissolves the boundaries of the platonic brother-sister relationship on the 18th. This invites Yuuichi into taking her out on a ‘date’ the very next day, and not even a week passes before she willingly gives up her virginity.
This, in my mind, damages Nayuki’s character, and it’s very hard to dismiss despite the application of the all-ages patch. Despite Hisaya’s attempts to salvage the rest of the story, it comes off as a mixture of inconsistencies and meaningful moments that only serve to confuse (and eventually bore) me further. However, flaws aside, this route sets itself apart from and sets the tone for the rest of the routes by posing a very real dilemma: when you’re patiently waiting for a greater happiness, how long is too late? Is it possible to love or be happy with something, or someone, again after growing to hate them?
The parallel between Yuuichi and Nayuki is perhaps the route’s biggest strength, complimenting the gradual reveal of Nayuki’s true colors. With her mother truly being her biggest role model, the sudden loss of that model strips her of any masks she has on, revealing her as a selfish coward whose expectations of life have been raised far too high. The sudden crashing of reality upon her head goes to show that not only is her mother not a very good model for her, but that she’s been thrown into a situation she can’t run away from, and she tries to hide it away like Yuuichi did all those years ago. Only when Yuuichi makes an effort to amend the broken promises he made all those years ago do they come to realize how similar they are. Their understanding of each other gives them an unbreakable connection, along with the responsibility to support one another should one of them falter.
I like redemptive stories like this, where the grave mistakes made by the protagonist require a great deal of personal amendment. It’s a generally safe start to something far more grand in scale, as a lot of stories sometimes have. (looks at The Force Awakens) 
Now, I want to make a few mentions to the usage of background music and symbolism in Kanon that I mentioned in the common route discussion earlier. Taken directly from my notes:
Afterglow is my favorite song in the entire OST, because like many of Maeda’s pieces, it evokes more than one specific emotion. It represents, to me, the general tone of Kanon; an uneasiness in waking up to an unfamiliar, cruel world, but somewhere out there is a kernel of hope that motivates us, carries us out of bed every day to face the cruelty of reality. As a significant part of Nayuki’s route focuses on this theme, it is used to great effect, in my opinion, in the mornings Yuuichi wakes to begin the next painful day.
A specific image I found in Nayuki’s route is that of the snow bunny. Snow bunnies are simple little sculptures made by children, which ordinarily don’t take very long to fashion. Nayuki mentions a few times in both common and this route that she’s not particularly good at anything, much less making a snow bunny, so I can imagine the effort she put into was nothing to sneeze at. Unfortunately she had to make a parting/proposal gift out of something temporal and fragile, which child Yuuichi found no worth in. The repairing of a crushed snow bunny by both Yuuichi and Nayuki represented an investment Yuuichi did not possess as a child, too young and self-centered to understand Nayuki’s love.
By the same token, the image of a smashed strawberry shortcake represents a crushing loss for Nayuki. So for my Key Point for this route, How does the parallel between the strawberry shortcake and the snow bunny illustrate the dilemmas Nayuki’s character faces?
In closing, Nayuki’s route is nothing special at face value, but with a limited knowledge of the entire story and its themes at heart, it paves the way for its sister routes in the handling of its themes and symbolism. 
…I forgot which route was next. Makoto, I think? 
