Just finished this anime. It was awesome enough to land a spot in my overall top ten.

spoiler

Based on the discussions, the majority opinion is that the setting of Episodes 1-23 and 24-25 are separate timelines or parallel universes.

Let me metaphorically connect the constellation of Sagittarius here. I prefer something… more simple.

Episodes 1-23 portrays an in-universe book in the Episodes 24-25 universe, titled “On the Movements of the Earth”. The latter is alternate history Earth. The closest RL equivalent to this narrative conceit is the framing of LOTR as Tolkien’s translation of the “Red Book of Westmarch”, a purportedly-real book of long-lost Earth history.

  • The book is published sometime after 1517 (when the “Ninety-five Theses” was published and the Reformation started). Brudzewski was most likely dead by then, so someone carried on the story. If I may speculate, the pseudo- or anonymous author (“Jolenta”) is one of the Roma who self-inserted herself as Draka, who learned of Albert via the priest (inspiration for Badeni).
  • “Kingdom of P” is simply a Poland placeholder. The conversation about “profits to Potocki” that Albert overheard was likely unrelated to astronomy. The unrealistic reaction to heliocentrism was written for dramatic effect.
  • Rafał is IRL a POS, so he died early in the story to keep his innocence
  • Other circumstantial evidence informing my view is Nowak’s self-awareness as the villain and Jolenta’s name-drop of “On the Movements of the Earth”

Now, I prepare to be burned as a heretic. As a wise man once said, death is nothing, next to vindication.

  • wjs018@ani.socialMEnglish
    1·
    7 days ago

    I have a lot of thoughts on Orb. I had some initial impressions in last week’s general thread, but this is one of those shows where there is a lot to say, and even more when you think about it some more. Obviously…spoilers ahead…

    The author, Uoto, went to school for philosophy, and it shows in this work. I think we are meant to take all of the events in “The Kingdom of P” as some kind of alternate history more or less just constructed to make us think. It’s what philosophers do best. If you actually try to map the events of the narrative onto our real world, the timelines and people just don’t match up quite right. As an example, you mentioned the Reformation in the 16th century…but at the end of the show, we are still in the 15th century (1468).

    When I was watching this show week to week and making posts about it, I tried to map the different scientists onto their real life inspirations (I made it through episode 8 at the time), there were very clear real-life astronomers a lot of the characters were based on. However, the timelines here don’t really match up either. A lot of these scientists were actually contemporaries of one another, but in the show’s timeline, they would be gone long before Copernicus comes along.

    I think more than anything, the show is really meant to convey the power of the written word, or more abstractly, the power of an idea. At the end of everything we see Brudzewski have a simple thought: what if the Earth moves? Throughout the story, we see the repeated transmission of this idea beyond the scope of their own life through writing:

    • The stone chest that was passed onto Rafal, who died protecting its secrets
    • The writings of Oczy, as preserved in tatoos, passed on past his death
    • The book attributed to Jolenta surviving her
    • The 10% royalty given to Potocky that ends up being the one thing that lasts through the whole series and leads to the idea intersecting with Brudzewski.

    I work as a professional physicist (if you couldn’t tell from my posts on the discussion threads for this show), and in our field we often throw around the phrase that we are “standing on the shoulders of giants” (I always thought this was a Newton quote, but I guess it can be dated to before him when I just looked it up now). This show is basically the perfect encapsulation of that idea: the pursuit of scientific truth is not a solo endeavor, it is a never-ending relay race in which the exchange of ideas takes place over generations and are always building on one another. Every now and then an idea comes along and acts causes what Popper would call a paradigm shift. Heliocentrism is certainly one of those ideas that fundamentally changes our understanding, but it wasn’t developed in a vacuum and many contributed to piecing it together.

    Back to the show, I think that the choice to have an alternate version of Rafal at the end of the show ends up being confusing from a narrative perspective if we look at this series from a story being a sequence of events perspective. However, I think the alternate Rafal at the end is really meant to show that absolutes taken too far are dangerous for the pursuit of knowledge. In the early part of the show, Rafal (and others) die to an absolute faith that suppresses any kind of dissent. In the end part of the show, Rafal ends up killing others when they don’t share his radical openness viewpoint. In both cases, the actual research is impeded and researchers are cowed. It wasn’t until there was a more open exchange of ideas in the university that Brudzewski attended, that heliocentrism could be fostered and grew.

    Overall, this is one of those series that is going to stick with me a long time. Just like any piece of philosophical work, there are countless ways to interpret it and none of them are wrong.