JSHK is the definition of this, or I suppose I would say all of AidaIro-sensei's works as a whole. Complete shock & awe as the Red House arc came to pass... everything in the far shore between Akane & Aoi also completely floored me, and THEN Sumire/Hakubo ... it's incredible for ME personally, for a work to contain THIS MUCH thorough exploration of... characters who don't understand their own emotional capacity, who have a self-belief in being emotionless or unable to experience things (and aren't maudlin about it or really sad about it?) (whether that is from a sense of mistrust and misrepresentation of self, like Aoi, or having never been invited to imagine otherwise, with Hakubo... or from a sense of being past/over the ability to inhabit interactions fully, like Amane). I really didn't expect it at all!!! I love how forceful love is upon the bodies of people like this, forcing them to behave unexpectedly to themselves, or able to be cornered with it. I love how right it is to force it upon them, be relentless with it ...

And then Narisokonai Snow White was just an absolute gutpunch, what a piece of art.

LN2 also really did this eh .... I really didn't expect there to be significance to the world itself I guess (horror doesn't often need a whole lot justifying its environment?)... or just how precious and passive Six would be. Since LN1 doesn't need to justify the Maw, I didn't think the Pale City would be composed of a poor kid's psyche. Very endeared by the endless loop of a boy deleteriously committed to saving a girl.

You would think me insane but Ed Edd n Eddy is a very early example of being really pleasantly amazed by something that didn't have to be so comprehensible. And not just the movie for bluntly exposing abuse in Eddy's life ... the school season is so er, good at giving a context to Eddy's neurosis, he's so fucking miserable and tortured at school! He'll do anything to not go back. You even understand why double dee is more confident then him in ways, if he spends most of the year way more in his element .... able to feel ah, successful. It's not just Eddy though, I think EEnE does an impressive job giving you a solid answer to why all the mains are the way they are, if you pay attention. Ed isn't just dumb, he's criminally neglected haha, you know? That kind of thing. I... honestly think a lot of cartoons now are, way too cowardly to couch a kid's psyche in as variable poorly home lifes, lol, despite pretending they care about trauma as a concept. (Well, I think they're also afraid of approaching it without offering some kind of reconciliation of it... it's less permissible to just be ambiently, unfixably bad)

errr what ELSE... GOD the Moomin novels, they start out very kiddy and simplistic of course, as you'd expect, but the final couple of books really really knocked me downnnn me, at a time when I really needed it or didn't need it LOL (I remember being inconsolable for weeks). Everything Snufkin went through was so painfully real for me, and a , kind of lesson I, needed, to observe. I feel kind of at a loss with broad fandom's romanticization of his lack of attachment; I really love how the later novels explore it as a fear response for him (he's AFRAID of attachment, he CHILDISHLY rejects GOOD things at times, he is FUSSY and UNNECESSARILY COLD), and also, of the consequences of his lack of (openly) appreciating how he is accommodated, loved, which results in him being left alone, trapped with people who DON'T accommodate or understand him, in Moominvalley in November. I really loved his desperate search for Moomin's letters, the belief that "Moomin would NEVER leave without giving me a letter", his own ATTACHMENT to MOOMIN'S ATTACHMENT!!! which he took for granted, because Moomin loved him so consistently, even if Snufkin failed to reciprocate, or was lazy in writing him back.... He could feel so devastatingly let down by a lack of love on the other end, though his own attitude made him constantly show a lack of love, and therefor propagated an eventual abandonment ... why would Snufkin care about being abandoned? He's 'not that type of person'. He'll 'be fine'. Of course he won't be ...

Of all scenes in an earlier novel too, Moominvalley in Midwinter, I really love when Moomin longs to climb the mountain, reach the other side, get to Snufkin... but fails in his attempt, and remarks... that he could do it, if only he knew Snufkin was on the other side, waiting for him. But he can't, because, he isn't. I like how pining for Snufkin works ... loving someone this ah, obfuscative, this avoidant of love itself. When I read about Atos, the decade-long lover of Tove's who Snufkin was based on, I felt a very rare human connection, to someone who had so casually hurt someone else despite being present, for so many years. Again it was unexpected but a kind of lesson I needed. Consequences of my personality disorder lol.

Though honestly there are also works where I just simply have so much interest in the creator behind it, that I can't exactly be 100% disappointed by it, because I'm interested even in that voice's foibles or its feeble attempt at making an ending, or telling a story. Sometimes even when a work is disappointing in what it can achieve, it conveys the helplessness or limits of a real human mind; a world presenting itself as hopeful or maybe even funny, but with a real human hopelessness behind it, an inability to imagine better. A lot of the time I would call this sort of thing a good playground, 'suitable for my needs' for sure ... a lot to try to resolve, to use the pieces present in a new way, to show this world what can happen to it, with the right touch. But I don't necessarily want to say names of work that does this for me, wwwwwwww.... it's a little out of pocket to be too direct about it I think.....