Orb: On the Movements of the Earth and imagining radical futures

Spoilers for Orb: On the Movements of the Earth

Orb: On the Movements of the Earth is a 25-episode anime dramatizing the conception of the heliocentric model over the course of the 15th century in the Kingdom of P. When it began airing in October of 2024, I was frantically in the process of writing up my various graduate school applications with only a guess as to what the upcoming U.S. elections would mean for my dreams of making a career as a writer and academic. I was prepared to stand my ground as a queer Asian American, but it was another thing to have it fall out from under my feet entirely. As I watched Orb‘s various protagonists stake their lives against a violently oppressive religious institution, my real-life government grew alarmingly hostile toward my existence and those of my ilk. Watching Orb became an acutely personal experience, demonstrating the force with which established power structures will suppress truths that threaten their authority and how hope for radical change can be found through community and collective action.

Despite rooting for each of Orb‘s protagonists to come out victorious, I found a strange kindred spirit in Nowak, the church inquisitor responsible for arresting and torturing heliocentric heretics. Nowak is devoted to his work and does not hesitate to terrorize his victims, but he is continually perplexed by how willing they are to lay down their lives in defiance of the church. After arresting Oczy, a poor uneducated mercenary turned heliocentrist, Nowak requests privacy from the other inquisitors to ask, “Why do heretics keep appearing? I mean, it makes no sense. God made us a promise. If we live a good and quiet life, we can go to heaven. Why would you deliberately give that up?” While Nowak frames his question through the authority of God, he is transparently speaking from the stance of the religious state. It is not God but the church that promises that citizens who “live a good and quiet life” will go to heaven. Therefore, what constitutes a “good and quiet life” is one that acquiesces to their institutional power and does not challenge it. To do otherwise means to be branded as a heretic, giving up the comfort of both your life and afterlife.

Nowak’s line of questioning reveals how he does his job not out of a profound sense of faith, but because it is what he is “supposed” to do. It is only after decades of doing this job and facing his imminent death that Nowak can acknowledge to himself how he is not merely keeping his head down to stay alive, but actively helping the church brutalize those in defiance of its power structures. He epitomizes the spineless cowardice that leads many to excuse their own active participation in systems of oppression, yet I could not help but sympathize as I, too, was weighing my personal safety against my ideals.

Initially, I was not shy about filling my applications with proud declarations of myself as a queer Asian American and the influence of my intersectional identities on my academic research. As the U.S.’s political situation decidedly took a turn for the worse and one rejection after another graced my inbox, I feared that maybe I was too loud. Maybe I shouldn’t have ticked those boxes self-identifying as an asexual and nonbinary trans person. Maybe I shouldn’t have made my queerness and immigrant background so central to my application statements. Maybe I shouldn’t have put queer Asian literature as my primary research interest and instead focused on something more generally palatable. I looked to my future with dread and contemplated if I could survive going back into the closet to help secure my academic career goals. Surely, I could keep my head down and stay alive. I could speak out at a later (safer) time, after all.

I could not help drawing parallels between my academic work and Orb. I watched its characters barrel toward danger and wondered if I was willing to do the same. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman refers to politics as fundamentally “conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order,” making it so, “that queerness should and must redefine such notions as ‘civil order’ through a rupturing of our foundational faith in the reproduction of futurity.” Orb positions heliocentrism as a disruptive force against religious institutional power in a similar relationship of redefinition. By rejecting the conventional narrative of futurity provided by the church’s promise of life and afterlife, Orb’s protagonists likewise practice their own death drive.

The type of conflict between heliocentrism and the church is one inherent to all radical ideas and the power structures whose authority they question and endanger. Just as Orb‘s cast could not help but be drawn to the truth of the stars, my queerness was not something I could so easily hide and cast aside until some mythical “safer time.” Writing was how I made sense of myself after experiencing discrimination in pursuit of a more traditional line of work. Even if I managed to go back to the closet and claw out a career, it would be profoundly disingenuous when my interest in academia is so deeply tied to my experiences as an intersectional minority. I was facing the reality that fundamentally conservative social structures not only constrict what is allowed to be said, but who is allowed to speak.

Orb‘s cast features multiple characters whose marginalization justifies their suffering at the hand of the religious state. Oczy surrenders to Nowak after trying to help a heretic escape, but Nowak decides to kill him because, “You’re of no use to me anyway.” Later, the inquisitors interrogate and torture Nowak’s daughter, the aspiring academic Jolenta, on the grounds that, “The very fact that a woman sought to be a scholar is suspicious enough.” However, the actual reason is that Antoni, a church leader, wants to get at Nowak and climb the church’s ranks. Oczy’s low social class and Jolenta’s gender mark them as disposable. Oczy’s life and Jolenta’s suffering mean nothing to Nowak and Antoni, who see them as little more than obstacles or a means to an end. They are labelled heretics to make their subjugation under state violence not just tolerated but encouraged. This systematic dehumanization of heretics and the marginalized enables the inquisitors to uphold the church’s power through terror.

Oczy and Jolenta’s acts of heresy change their relationship with marginalization to one of disidentification. In Disidentifications: Queers of Color And The Performance of Politics, José Esteban Muñoz characterizes disidentification as “a survival strategy employed by a minority spectator […] to resist and confound socially prescriptive patterns of identification.” Rather than trying to identify with or reject minority stereotypes, the spectator instead disidentifies with them and retains their marginalized identity but redefines it for themselves. Oczy is introduced as an illiterate mercenary, fighting duels to the death in proxy of noblemen, but learning about heliocentrism inspires him to seek a proper education. Badeni, a half-blind priest and Oczy’s co-conspirator, derides Oczy’s writing for being amateurish, yet concedes that this very quality makes it more valuable to preserve than Badeni’s own academic research. When Oczy later attempts to intercept the inquisitors and protect Badeni, his mercenary training becomes repurposed as he fights for himself rather than some aristocrat client. Despite previously surrendering to Nowak, Oczy now has the strength and resolve to face an army of inquisitors head-on. Oczy neither embraces or rejects his marginalization and in doing so redefines himself through disidentification.

Likewise, Jolenta is labelled a heretic and falsely accused of leading Oczy and Badeni’s research as a woman under the influence of demonic possession. Jolenta’s charge recalls real historical practices of stereotyping women as uniquely weak in their religious faith. After escaping the church, Jolenta’s disidentification as a female heretic manifests in her involvement with the Heretic Liberation Front. She leads a group of underground heretical revolutionaries not for a lack of faith but because the object of her faith has changed from religion to heliocentrism.

The disidentification of the marginalized uniquely primes them to come together through shared opposition to the dominant social order—what Muñoz calls “counterpublics.” He argues that such communities are “social movements that are contested by and contest the public sphere for the purposes of political efficacy–movements that not only ‘remap’ but also produce minoritarian space.” The friendship formed between Oczy, Badeni, and Jolenta through researching heliocentrism creates one such space. Jolenta teaches Oczy to read and write and Badeni chooses to preserve Oczy’s book, enabling their counterpublic to grow into a true social movement through Jolenta and the HLF. Draka, a poor woman of color, already doubts the church from her experiences as an intersectional minority, but has instead adopted a philosophy prioritizing personal financial gain and individual survival over anything else. Having read and burned Oczy’s book, Draka attempts to negotiate a deal for the information with Jolenta only for Jolenta to steer the conversation into a philosophical discussion. In response to Draka’s confusion, Jolenta tells her, “I’m desperately trying to share how [heliocentric theory] inspires me.” 

By connecting with Draka on a personal level, Jolenta hopes to communicate the magnitude of heliocentrism not just as a piece of academic thought but as a means of community. This sentiment echoes the words of Orb‘s first protagonist, the 12-year-old Rafal, who found that “inspiration is probably more important than lifespan.” A heretic inspired Rafal, who inspired Oczy and Badeni, who inspired Jolenta. Oczy’s work, preserved only in Draka’s memory, has the potential to continue this community long after his execution, and Jolenta is trying to share the importance of that with the only person who can make that reality. Draka joins the cause because this community assuages the existential fear of death that her self-interested ideology never could. The counterpublic formed around heliocentrism is one that transcends time, a form of collective action that has kept this radical idea alive even when the individuals involved are long dead. This space exists at the margins of society because it could not have existed anywhere else.

When I was going into a tailspin over the state of the world and my place in it, it was community that pulled me back out of it. I spoke to friends and peers that shared my fears. I consulted mentors for advice and they took the time to reassure me when I needed it. Being with others who are or were in similarly precarious situations as myself was profoundly reaffirming in a political climate that has only grown continually more antagonistic to my existence. Reading the works of scholars like Edelman and Muñoz helped me recognize that I am not singular in my ideas but one in a vast collective that stands stronger than any individual. I am not glad to be fearing for my safety, but it is a fact that my marginalizations make me who I am. There is joy in that.

We—the queers, the marginalized, the radical—continue to exist. In this sense, the “rupturing of […] faith in the reproduction of futurity” that Edelman describes may not be a rupturing at all. Muñoz rebuts Edelman in Cruising Utopia “by arguing that queerness is primarily about futurity and hope. That is to say that queerness is always in the horizon.” Orb‘s characters were always casting their gaze to the skies, ever looking towards that horizon. Each person left a long trail of inspiration that extended far beyond their deaths. That, too, is futurity. Queerness, defined by and creating spaces in the margins, is not so much anathema to futurity as it is to the conventional notions of it. The communities we create, the people we inspire—those, too, are futurity.

At the advice and encouragement of those around me, I applied to further graduate programs overseas. Having succeeded, I will soon be continuing my academic pursuits. Rafal tells Nowak, “The thing you all oppose isn’t me. Nor is it heretics. It’s part imagination and part curiosity. In short, it’s truth itself.” Oppressive institutions can grab at power all they like, but there are truths of reality that cannot be quashed no matter how hard they try. Queerness is my truth.