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Enter Orb: On the Movements of the Earth. Published in Shogakukan’s Weekly Big Comic Spirits, Orb has been considered a hidden gem since its 2020 debut. Fans have been tirelessly drawing comparisons to Vinland Saga since Netflix’s 2024 anime adaptation, carefully crafted by Madhouse, brought it to a much wider audience. It turns out that behind the feeling of similarity, there’s a reason much deeper than most fans realize. Netflix struck gold with its adaptation of Orb; here’s why every Vinland Saga fan should give it a watch.
Orb Tells a Rare Kind of Story
In 15th-century Europe, the Church held a monopoly on truth. Orb places its initial focus on Rafal, a child prodigy in Poland studying theology with a passion for reason at all costs. He’s drawn into studying the movements of the Earth by a heretical scholar, becoming infatuated with the forbidden idea of heliocentrism over the Church’s doctrine of geocentrism.
Orb is a fairly short story, with only eight volumes. The anime adapts pretty much everything. As a result, it’s hard to talk about the specifics without giving away some of its most interesting plot details. But for selling Orb, some context is crucial. Orb takes place within the historical context of scholasticism, a philosophical movement seeking to reconcile Greco-Roman philosophy with Catholic doctrine that lasted from the 1100s to the 1700s.
As such, Orb never opposes secular reason to religious faith directly, like we often do today. Not only would it be way less interesting, it would also be ahistorical. Instead, Orb shows something far more compelling: how what’s “reasonable” came to be defined at all through the prism of a medieval European worldview, with a narrative featuring dark intrigue punctuated with heavy drama and biting action. In Orb’s world, the lines between heretics and believers blur constantly, and every fickle alliance has something to gain.
Vinland Saga Fans Have Found A Lot in Common With Orb
On the surface, Vinland Saga and Orb already have a lot in common, even without digging a little deeper. Both series share settings based, however loosely, on real historical periods, with an attention to detail so vivid it makes one feel fully immersed in the show.
Within those settings, Vinland Saga and Orb both cultivate an oppressive atmosphere with complicated protagonists driven by something bigger than themselves. Both fill their atmospheres out with rosters of characters who feel just as vivid, ready and willing to die for the things they hold dear. Here, Orb even arguably wins out: its focus and its relatively short length lend the opportunity for a tale where every character has a role to play.
Although both have heady themes, they express them eloquently through absolutely killer dialogue. There is no shortage of memorable lines in Orb as characters stake their claims to truth, faith, and reason. Orb’s character-driven drama plays out over its key institutional, religious, and political tensions through deep-running motivations, resulting in one of Netflix’s most bingeable anime ever.
