Well, it's a flaw in the sense that it was not really ever part of the design, at least not entirely. Mari was always supposed to be part of Rebuild as Anno wanted to add a character to the narrative if only so he avoided repeating himself for the length of the project, but her appearance in the trailer for Rebuild 2 was such a hit with fans during the initial screenings that he decided to expand her part. Problem with that? He didn't really know how to do that without running the risk of making her a Mary Sue, which (arguably) he ended up doing in the end anyway.

>As far as Anno flipping off the fanbase, yup, Rebuild 4 does
>that in fairly obvious ways in its back half, while also making it
>clear that Anno has always seen and approached this franchise from a
>different perspective than the fans. He's been making an edgelordy
>Star Wars* where everything in the world exists to be cool set
>dressing for the emotional drama he's trying (with admittedly clumsy
>articulation a lot of the time) to tell, while the fans have been
>treating it like it's Babylon 5 if that series had 5 times the
>world building effort put into it before scene 1 had ever been
>story-boarded.
>
>The man has gotten some death threats in the past about this series,
>so him having a somewhat adversarial dynamic with the section of the
>fanbase not familiar with the MST3K theme and/or Bellisario's Maxim
>doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. And giant biomechanical golem
>robots having their brawl in the TV set versions of the various
>locations seen previously in the series amused me greatly. IMHO, YMMV,
>etc.

Anno's relationship with the fans and that influence on the work is basically a love/hate one. He absolutely loves the work, even though working on it (both times) has ended up driving him into a deep funk that his friends had to drag him out of to complete the work without killing himself in the process. Apparently that was part of the delay for Rebuild 4, that the process of working on 3 drove him deep enough that not even Old Man Miyazaki could drag him out (granted, word is Hiyao isn't exactly the most unlifting of people on a personal basis).

At the same time, his opinion of the fanbase varies between "Accepts their praise with barely disguised loathing" and "Hates them with a fiery passion hotter than a hypernova." It was really a large part of what ended up fueling End, his disgust and anger with the response among the otaku culture for all the work he'd put into NGE only to be met with a general response of "WTF was that?!" It's sort of a testament of the man and his dedication to his own work that, instead of just burning the whole thing down and walking away forever, he decided not even a full decade after the last project to stand up and declare "I'm gonna do it again, but this time I'm gonna do it right."

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CdrMike, Overwatch Reject