He was my pick too so I'll just bring up H.R. Giger or maybe Masahiro Ito instead

I think this kind of thing happens because a lot of creatives are more interested in the /aesthetics/ of mystery than they are in the underlying structures

Don't even think that's a fundamentally wrong approach or anything but you gotta be good at improvising and know when to stop

Also [major spoiler?] carefully puts cheating on the table in a way that doesn't make the main character seem like a complete scumbag, which is quite a feat of narrative engineering imo

Also one of those romances [mild spoiler] where the couple gets together relatively early and the thrust of the storytelling is in them anxiously muddling through the uncertain early stages of a relationship

Do your ganbarest

Someone save him

Oh, cool, any standouts?

What gets me about this is that its the most blatantly meaningless tribalist chestbeating of all time. Even localization discourse is at least about the content of art. Here you're arguing about which fucking contextual label has the mandate of heaven. Get real.