AMAIM Warrior at the Borderline

Episode 11

One of the most frustrating things about AMAIM is it has a lot of interesting ideas that it just can never seem to capitalize on. It'd be one thing if the show just didn't have anything going for it, but there's a lot of promise in the initial setup for a materially complex story to be told. For as questionable as Japan being occupied by four competing international powers is, you could use that premise to tell an engaging, complicated war story of all those forces pushing and pulling against eachother along with our heroes' resistance movement. How does each nation differ in handling occupation? Are they all at eachother's throats, or are their unspoken alliances of convenience? Real life military empires have quite infamously used insurgent and rebel parties to disrupt enemy nations they didn't want to actively go to war with, could something similar happen here with the Resistance? These are all possible avenues the show could take to make its world feel more concrete and just have a more compelling narrative.

So, theoretically, I like what episode 11 is doing here. It's a lot of place setting, building up to next week's rematch with Ghost, but it makes a lot of necessary movements that are at least more involved than “Good Robot Fight Bad Robot”. For one, German makes his obvious and inevitable betrayal by leaking information to Captain Brad's side about Ghost's location, further building whatever mysterious agenda he's progressing. We also get a lengthy sequence explaining that the NAC (which stands for Not!America Country, obviously) is likely to expand their borders within Japan in the coming year. This is apparently predicted by an advanced AI, and everyone just accepts its predictions are accurate despite not knowing its methodology. Considering how Gai and the others have operated, I assume everyone in AMAIM world believes computer programs are magic. They may be right.

Anyway, those two piece of information spur Captain Brad to do something pretty ballsy after, luck, he runs into Amou in the streets and recognizes his voice from that big televised speech he gave a while back. Because I guess the Resistance is too strapped for man power to NOT send their only agent with any publicity on shopping errands. But instead of arresting them, Brad decides to not-so-covertly tell the team when and where he's planning to fight Ghost, presumably to enlist their help for taking the big spooky cryptid mech out. That's a pretty neat idea, seeing two sides that should be enemies put aside their differences to take down an even bigger, more unpredictable threat. Granted, these two sides haven't actually met eachother before now, and have virtually no connection, but it's something.

The problem, then, comes from how all this is delivered. I wouldn't say AMAIM has ever had terrible dialogue, but it's rarely risen above the level of functional. For me, good dialogue not only advances the story through conversation, but allows characters to express themselves by how they speak. What elements they emphasize, the rhythm of their conversations, and the staging of any given scene are key to making “talky” episodes engaging rather than just homework. And they're all missing from “Encirclement.” Characters speak with the same authorial voice, deliver a lot of clunky As-You-Know lines with no personality, and it all makes for a very dull experience even as theoretically interesting things are happening in the story. There's also just some weird editing choices, like the final sequence with Brad “lightly” hinting at knowing who our heroes are, intercut with his female subordinate silently watching Shion in the hot springs before just...walking away. Presumably she was sharing the same info with them as Brad, but the editing makes it a lot goofier, and combined with the frankly bizarre delivery it puts an odd cap on an otherwise unremarkable episode.

To be fair, there are a couple attempts at humor that are OK. Gashin being super competitive with Shion over board games is fun, and it's nice to see Shion show a modicum of personality, even if it's just that she's good at Go. The scene of Amou cheerily cleaning his AMAIM is cute, like a kid washing their parents' car or something. Their incognito looks when they go shopping are fun, I guess? Shion looks cute with the scarf, and Gashin is absolutely auditioning to be the lead singer in a J-Rock band. But these are just scraps I'm picking at that weren't quite as devoid of personality as the rest of this episode.

These various problems always been a present issue with this series, but as we've transitioned from action-heavy episodes to things that don't involve large metal automatons beating eachother senseless, it's a weakness that's been magnified to the point where it's overtaken everything else. So here's hoping things go better once we get back to some fighting, as that's still the show's only true strength.

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AMAIM Warrior at the Borderline is currently streaming on Funimation.