Yeah, the most charitable readings of his decisions I’ve seen were that Anno was fully jokerfied by weeb/otaku culture latching on to Eva when it was this deconstructive, depths-of-depressive-period work, and he decided to make what was essentially self parody and turn up the otaku to max.

Seems like cope to me but I honestly don’t know why he decided to dumpster every positive aspect of Eva. Maybe it was for big money and he’s just a hack-fraud. Maybe the stuff surrounding the minor characters in the originals were actually just Anno being a creep the whole time 🤷