Yunior's Development from Drown to Oscar Wao

The character of Yunior appears both in Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. However, Yunior has greatly changed at some point in between the novels and looking at how Yunior interacts with Oscar could explain what happened and provide insight into Yunior's true character.
In Drown, Yunior resembles a younger version of Oscar, minus the deep rooted allusions and science fiction stemmed behaviors of his over weight, stereotypical nerd of a college roommate. He acts more sympathetically towards women, not only using them as sex slaves, and he does not fit the form of masculinity dictated by his society's norms. However, by Oscar Wao, Yunior has lost all respect he may have had traces of in Drown and acts in a manner much more masculine than portrayed originally. In Oscar Wao, it is revealed that unfortunately, Yunior's entire family died in between novels, including his brother Rafa, a super masculine representation of how Dominican males were supposed to behave, as sex crazed, vulgar, selfish men. Once Rafa died, it could be implied that Yunior mourned, but also took to replicating the actions of his brother in order to keep his legacy living on, or simply because he had nobody left to look out for him and had to adjust to Dominican life accordingly and thus molded himself into the masculine shape of his society.
However, as Oscar Wao progresses, it becomes evident that Yunior isn't the totally masculine young adult he appears to be. At one point, for example he takes on Oscar's writing habits and instead of writing about violence, sex, and rock and roll in a sense, he wrote a story that earned an "I'm impressed. not a single shooting or stabbing in the whole story" (196). And even by the end of the novel, Yunior has abandoned him womanizing ways, finding a "wife I adore and who adores me, a negrita from Salcedo whom i do not deserve" (326), contradicting everything everything about Yunior up to Oscar's death. In addition to his obvious leaks in masculinity, he also seems to enjoy Oscar's science fiction novels and comic books and is even quite supportive of his writings later in life, fighting the gendered norms of masculinity in their Dominican society and forming a more homo erotic bond between the two males than society would desire.
Thus, by looking at Yunior's situations in his life, a reader could see why the character acts the way he does, but can also still see the faint hints of the character that he really is.