Autumn 2021 First Impressions – AMAIM Warrior at the Borderline

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 25

Source: Original

Episode Summary: It’s the year 2061. For years, Japan struggled under a declining birthrate and economy, which made it a ripe environment for outside countries to take advantage of beneath the guise of offering aid. Now, the different factions battle one-another using unmanned battle units called AMAIMs. Amou Shiiba is an orphaned Japanese citizen – a member of the underclass – who works as a scrapper, collecting remnants of broken AMAIM units. His friends use the spare parts to upgrade their personal electronics and vehicles, but Amou has a much larger project in the pipeline – a full suit of AMAIM battle armor he happened to find sitting in an abandoned warehouse.

When the authorities catch wind of Amou’s scrapper group, his comrades are captured and used to try to lure Amou out of hiding. But what these colonizers fail to realize is that Amou has a trump card. After finding an abandoned AI unit named Gai in the woods with the know-how to bring Amou’s AMAIM online, he now owns one of the only manned units around. And human thoughts and reflexes, coupled with AI information, seem to be a powerful force that might turn the tables against the factions that have taken over Japan.

Impressions: We all like to imagine ourselves as heroes. In the US, where I live, we’re very fond of our police and military, to the point that those organizations are often lionized in our fiction and being critical of them is often interpreted as being anti-American. They’re the forces that help us come together and lead the world against much greater threats, or at least that’s the story they would like us to cling to. Japan has its own propaganda, and even a cursory look at Japanese history can explain why it manifests the way it does, at least to some extent. It’s a country that was closed-off until it was forced open at by the hands of Westerners. It rapidly industrialized, got into the colonialism game on the later end of the game, and then was brutally scarred in what were the closing moments of World War II. They were occupied by America, saw their economy expand and contract, and now are struggling with the consequences of various conflicting cultural and modern forces that have brought us to the modern day.

There are a lot of jokes out there that revolve around the declining birth rate in Japan; former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in meme-able form, served as kind of a joking reminder of the political push for people to have more children, while policies that would facilitate that – better child care, eliminating discrimination toward pregnant people in the work force, among other things – were and still are ignored. It’s much the same as in the United States – there are those who would like to grow their families, but their situations, including shaky access to expensive healthcare and the need for both adult members of the family to work (or in other situations, single parents), make it untenable. People want to have choice in how they live their lives, and if the choice be made is one between financial freedom and being confined to the home as a stay-at-home parent against one’s wishes and inclinations, it’s pretty obvious what many people are going to do.

That’s kind of the framework within which I approached this episode. The premise of AMAIM relies on many of Japan’s personal anxieties coming to fruition – the declining birthrate making the country vulnerable to takeover by hostile outsiders who want to, among other things, oppress the Japanese people and take advantage of their resources. It’s almost cartoonish in a way, and it’s easy to be a little grossed-out by the obvious nationalistic bent. At the same time, I’m also reminded of the skewed manner in which we portray our own supposed heroism; every episode of Law and Order and every round of Call of Duty similarly relies on our shared impression of ourselves and our authority figures as generally helpful or heroic in response to various outsider threats.

I suppose what I’m trying to say isn’t that everyone makes propaganda so it’s okay to ignore the extreme political implications of certain pieces of fiction, because I think it’s important to go into any story with some amount of healthy skepticism and critical thinking. But I think it’s a good opportunity to both look in the mirror at our own culture’s storytelling practices and to acknowledge the very obvious, potentially harmful aspects of pieces of fiction before deciding whether to engage or not. Neither answer is right or wrong, but to ignore the issue entirely is disingenuous.

Pros: Taking away the politics for the moment, I enjoy that this seems to be turning into a conflict between pure AI and AI-enhanced human control of the technology in the series. We already rely on AI and other modern tech quite a bit and it’s often convenient but definitely imperfect. There’s been a low-grade debate raging on Twitter for a while regarding machine translations (automatic language translations using algorithms) and human translations when it comes to dialog, and we’re far from a point where AI and software are able to detect the sort of linguistic nuance that’s to be found in human speech. Human intervention is required to end up with the best end product; apparently that carries over to piloting AMAIM units.

This episode looks nice, with solid hand-drawn mecha action and good looking characters.

Cons: While I’m not a “plot hole” complainer and not in the business of picking apart fiction based solely on its ability to explain every little detail, I will say that there are some aspects of this episode that ask the viewer to hand-wave a few things. Somehow Amou discovers an abandoned development lab with an extra AMAIM frame and the electricity and resources to tinker with his own personal mecha unit, and the hostile authorities somehow either don’t know about it or can’t be bothered to monitor or guard it. It’s very convenient that it all works out that way so nicely.

Content Warnings: General propaganda/nationalistic story elements. Mecha violence, including gun and blunt-force violence. Depiction of an occupying force violently oppressing a minority population.

Would I Watch More? – I’m unsure whether I’d watch more, but overall I enjoyed this episode and think it has the potential to be entertaining. I think it’s good to remember that the mecha genre has often featured very political stories (I mean… Mobile Suit Gundam anyone?) so it’s not really that strange that we’ve got some very distinct politics at the front-and-center. I just personally kind of wish that those politics weren’t so specifically alarmist and almost comically beholden to obvious cultural anxieties.