Orb: On the Movements of the Earth

Episode 10

While Orb may take place in the 15th century, it was written in the 21st. Badeni may not be invoking the specter of social media when he talks about the propagation of unreliable information. But Uoto, the author, sure is. We already know Badeni is a pompous asshole, so we're not supposed to blindly agree with him. I mean, just look at Oczy. He's so happy to be literate. How could you say no to those big puppy-dog eyes? On the other hand, there's a wealth of evidence that misinformation, disinformation, and junk information have done incredible harm to society. People don't trust vaccines. Truth matters even less than is normal for politics. Machine-generated slop is rapidly drowning the corpus of art and words that mankind has slowly amassed over the centuries. In other words: shit's bad.

Nevertheless, Orb isn't telling us that the world would be better off if literacy were sequestered to an elite class. It's showing us such a world, and it's no paradise either. The Church wages a holy war on intellectuals and non-Christians. Scientists spin their wheels proving and disproving the same things over and over because they can't openly compare their results with each other. Commoners live lives surrounded by violence and poverty. Women can't even live their own lives. Every time Orb has had an opportunity to extol the democratization of knowledge, it's taken it. Rafal, Gras, Oczy, and Jolenta each seized the fruit of knowledge when it called out to them. There was no logical reason for them to do so, and half of them have already perished as a consequence. They just knew it was the right thing to do.

Perhaps this is naive of me, but I have to believe there is some fundamental drive for self-improvement that propels us forward, both as individuals and as a species. While this often gets filtered and sublimated through lots of orthogonal avenues, the core of it is progressive. I think that's what we have to keep in mind when we heed Badeni's words because he is right: literacy is a privilege and a responsibility. If it's misused and malnourished, then we arrive at America's current sociopolitical landscape, where falsehoods and fear-mongering spread like wildfire. If we cherish the written word and approach it critically, then maybe we forge a different path forward. That's the nugget at the center of Orb's message for our present day.

Even if we ignore that prompt for introspection, Orb also reminds us of literacy's potency through the bloody spectacle of the Inquisition, which again rears its head at the end of the episode. Every hokey “I freaking love science” meme you can dream of withers in the presence of its violence. Strip out the modern commodification of nerdery, and you have a power that institutions across history have attacked and attempted to control. If this didn't matter, then the people in charge wouldn't have spent centuries of blood and bile attempting to grind it into the dirt. The bishop's speech could have been delivered by any number of contemporary conservative leaders, touting extreme oppression and violence as the only means of staving off chaos. These figures and rhetoric keep coming back.

That's why Badeni, for all of his faults, is still one of the heroes of this story. He believes that truth, not force, can change the world*. But his faults are definitely on full display this week. Badeni is a great thinker, and he's a lousy communicator. His fellow monk, Grabowski, acts as a good foil. While Badeni rattles off the best technical explanation of atmospheric refraction they had at the time (which is pretty darn robust), Grabowski is more concerned about how to explain it to a child. I like that, while Grabowski starts with the biblical explanation for rainbows, he doesn't shut down the boy's further curiosity. He, too, joined the monastery with academic aspirations in mind, and like many of us, life got in the way. Every new cast member of Orb approaches knowledge differently, and I'm eager to see where Grabowski's pursuit will take him.

Badeni's backstory also helps explain why he's so miserly with his studies. I wouldn't say it excuses his attitude, but at least I now understand where he's coming from. And, if Orb aspires to be consistent with real history, it may explain why Badeni won't be credited with figuring out elliptical orbits. Assuming this is still the 15th century, Badeni's big eureka would have predated Kepler's laws of planetary motion by at least a hundred years. However, if Badeni never told anyone and never published it, then it's as if it never happened. This may be the ultimate point of Badeni's arc. Perhaps cruddy information is simply the price we must pay to get good information, and it's our duty as people, readers, and scholars to distinguish the two. In any case, it's a better alternative than living under a boot, in the dark, on a still planet.

Rating:

*Note: Orb engages in some punny wordplay here that unfortunately doesn't translate into English. The series' Japanese title is チ, pronounced “chi,” which is how you say the kanji for Earth, 地. However, lots of kanji have the same pronunciation, and one of them is 知, meaning knowing, wisdom, or (when Badeni uses it with Grabowski just before the eye-catch) truth. That's why the localized title isn't simply Earth. “Orb” can't precisely capture all the nuances, but it communicates that this story is about more than just planetary bodies.

Orb: On the Movements of the Earth is currently streaming on Netflix.

Steve is on Bluesky now, and he's okay with that. He is busy pondering the orb. You can also catch him chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.