English Dub Review: In/Spectre “Dueling Fictions”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

As Rikka-san continues trying to get the ghost of Steel Lady Nanase to grow stronger in its existence, Kotoko and crew keep on trying to weaken its hold on reality. But just as it looked like the site readers have accepted Kotoko’s solution, it ends up getting shot down. Of course, she has more solutions ready to go. In order to defeat Steel Lady Nanase, she unleashes a second and third solution, but Sakuragawa Rikka and Steel Lady Nanase continue to get in her way. Will they be able to vanquish the ghost before Kuro gets killed yet again?

Our Take:

The tenth episode of In/Spectre does not improve on the last episode, I’m sad to say. This series showed a lot of promise early on, but it is starting to drag more and more with every continual episode in this Steel Lady Nanase arc. Dueling Fictions does nothing extra that last week’s story didn’t do. We just get more of Kotoko and her online trolling of the Wiki message board chat rooms. Sure, the stories she concocts are somewhat interesting to learn, but they just feel like overlong walls of text brought to life through limited animation.

After we got a full dose of Kotoko’s mind working overtime last episode, I was hoping we’d move along from she and Saki sitting in a car on their phones, but nope. This entire episode takes place there, with Kotoko typing out comments that range from insane theorizing to slightly more reasonable theorzing. Saki sits there reading the comments and occasionally offering Kotoko a shocked response or sarcastic remark. Kotoko’s first theory is that Nanase’s father was the one who killed himself, and then framed her in order to destroy her life that he had always been jealous of. This is probably the best theory she has, because her next ones involve cross-dressing face painters and hyperventilating older sisters. It’s kind of interesting how she tries reverse psychology to make people think the spectre isn’t real by arguing that it is, but even with these tactics, Rikka’s fiction can’t be overcome.

At least the dub is still going strong. Lead actress Lizzie Freeman does great work trying to bring Kotoko’s theories to life with only her voice, and she succeeds a surprising amount of the time. The translation into English is solid, and especially for such a monologue-laden episode such as this one, I’m glad it pulls its weight.

Dueling Fictions might be a fine episode of In/Spectre when viewed on its own, but unfortunately, it’s just a letdown when taken as part of the longer season as a whole. There’s just been almost no forward progress for the past several episodes, and even when Kotoko seems to be getting through to the Internet anons at the end of this episode, Steel Lady Nanase’s ghost still doesn’t let up on Kuro – there seems to be as much progress inside the episode as there was when watching it from the outside.