Dr. Nick: It’s easy to ask, how could have Anno been happy with an end result as rushed and messy as this? Here we once again must step outside of the in-universe narrative and look at what Anno was hoping to achieve with Evangelion. Going back to Krystian Woznicki's interview with Hiroki Azuma, the director's socially conscious motives are laid out as such:
In other interviews [mit einschlaegigen Animemagazinen] he says that in the beginning of making >>Evangelion<< he wanted to enlarge the number of otaku. It was some kind of master plan for "otakuzation" in order to break the closedness. But towards the end [of the production process] he had to break that pattern and to diffuse it.
This otakuzation plan will immediately ring familiar to anyone who has watched Otaku on Video, but the 180 messaging swerve was something new and radical. And certainly, Eva's TV ending was a jolt to the system and definitely broke some of patterns in the anime industry at least. The controversy over it was still hot and fresh in 1996 when Anno did his "Too bad" mic drop. The End of Evangelion wasn't out yet, so as far as the confused audiences were concerned, these two episodes were it. From our vantage point a quarter century later these otaku-reforming pretensions look like a massive dud, and Anno of course went on to pick up his mic to do a fancier mic drop with EoE, only to later pick it up again and so on. But in its original context, "Too bad" makes sense - Anno got his thesis statement out and managed to say what he wanted to say, let the reaction be whatever.
