Convicted of heresy by the Roman Inquisition, philosopher and mystic Giordano Bruno was executed by burning at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori, Rome, in 1600. However, Bruno’s radical cosmology made him dangerous, not his theological errors. He boldly asserted that the Earth was not the center of creation, that the stars were suns with their planets, and that the universe was infinite.

At a time when the Church was still firmly committed to the geocentric perspective, in which the Earth (and therefore humanity) occupied a privileged and central position, he promoted the heliocentric model. Thus, the rulers’ desperate attempts to suppress a worldview that threatened to overturn the foundations of their authority and order made Bruno’s execution a religious punishment.

The historical event is revisited centuries later in the anime Orb: On the Movements of the Earth (hereinafter Orb), which reimagines it in a genre typically associated with fantasy and futurism. However, it dramatizes the philosophical and psychological upheavals of a time on the brink of change. The shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric worldview, which changed astronomy and reshaped society’s position in the heavens, is shown in the anime as an epistemological turmoil.

Moreover, in accomplishing this, Orb curls into a multi-layered parable for a recorded dream. It shows a clash between two academies of study: the pluralistic, decentralized ethos of postmodernism, which welcomes obscurity, diversity, and narrative abolition, and the traditional, hierarchical sense of modernism, founded on particular facts and rules. When viewed through it, Bruno’s story turns into a philosophical battleground where concepts clash as fiercely as empires and the pursuit of truth becomes a quest for meaning.

The rationalist optimism of the 19th century further influenced modernism. It was a cultural and intellectual movement that emerged from the Enlightenment’s belief in common sense. In essence, modernism supported the idea that people could advance socially, morally, and technologically by seeking objective truth, using the scientific method, and following the directives of centralized organizations such as the state, the academy, and the church. According to this perspective, if we follow procedures and have faith in authority, the world can be understood, ordered, and improved.

According to philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, modernism is based on what he calls “grand narratives” (universal stories that purport to explain everything from identity and morality to history and knowledge). These narratives give knowledge and social power structures legitimacy and coherence.

One of the grand narratives in Orb is the geocentric model of the universe. Not by chance, but by divine design, the model places the Earth at the center of the universe. The worldview is a political tool, a theological statement, and a metaphysical assertion rolled into one. It is a cosmic defense of the contemporary order, enforced and enforced by ecclesiastical authority. In a way, it reveals how science, religion, and power can come together to uphold a hierarchical view rather than criticize a flawed astronomical model.

Inquisitor Nowak, essentially acting as the physical embodiment of the disciplinary apparatus of modernism, gives expression to the paradigm. He illustrates how power controls truth, not criminals in the traditional sense of the word. His behavior is reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s “power/knowledge” theory, suggesting how systems of control are inextricably linked to what society deems true. Geocentrism serves as a mechanism for enforcing hierarchy, obedience, and order. Nowak acts as its enforcer; he becomes a kind of cosmic scaffolding for authority.

Through public interrogation, ritualistic violence, and the methodical suppression of opposing viewpoints, Nowak ensures that any deviation from the norm is seen as a sin, not as an error in reasoning. His world plays out under an epistemic regime in which challenging the truth equally threatens the state and the soul.

The scene’s animation style reaffirms ideological constraints: The characters are placed in cold, oppressive compositions, and the images are dark with thick, symmetrical shadows. This stylistic device shows how modernism revolves around a central point and insists it stays that way or else. It reflects the same logic you would find in authoritarian thinking.

French philosopher Louis Althusser called the Church’s system of teaching and governing an “ideological state apparatus.” The institutions were not arbitrary. Rather, they were mechanisms for maintaining social order and spreading the ruling ideology. In the anime, people are taught to accept the geocentric worldview as the only true reality through a combination of inquisition, sermons, and schools. The process involves shaping the mind to internalize a certain conception of the cosmos, determined by divine will, and the social hierarchy derived from the perspective remains unchallenged.

In contrast, postmodernism arose from a deep skepticism of universal claims to explain everything. Postmodernism challenged the idea that history follows a straight line or that there is one unchanging truth. According to Lyotard, postmodernism is “a disbelief in metanarratives.” It refers to the refusal to accept grand narratives meant to neatly and coherently organize all human experience, whether religious, scientific, or political. Instead, chaos, contradiction, and the idea that truth is always partial, situated, and shaped by context are welcomed.

The heliocentric model symbolizes a break or departure from modernism’s ordered universe and dramatizes the philosophical shift in Orb. When Earth is no longer at the center, there is an existential upheaval, not a change in astronomical fact. The comfort of divine certainty and humanity’s privileged position in the universe are lost.

The heliocentric view directly destroys intellectual and theological bases that once appeared absolute. In accomplishing this, it offers fresh air in the world, one that is vibrant, decentralized, and nervous but too sensory for fresh pictures. The anime emphasizes the postmodern condition through the astral dress. Orb embodies the postmodern spirit through characters like Draka, Jolenta, and Rafal. Each of them subverts the established order by gradually distancing themselves from inherited structures. They also make room for different ways of knowing rather than starting a full-blown revolution.

For example, Rafal begins as a devout theologian assimilated to the school’s worldview. However, he begins to doubt everything he has been taught when he discovers secret manuscripts and forbidden knowledge. His transition from devout student to underground scholar reflects the shift from hierarchical authority to a contested and fluid understanding of truth. His exile becomes a symbolic departure from the story that provides a structure for his life rather than a physical displacement.

Jolenta and Draka, on the other hand, use different but equally subversive strategies. Jolenta spreads information orally and avoids official institutions. Draka adopts a more concrete strategy; in a society that seeks to silence dissent, she fights back by modeling alternative values in her daily life. The characters work together to create a decentralized knowledge network. Because their resistance is improvisational, flexible, and based on local actions according to the situation, they do not need a single leader or ideology. Postmodernism is shown where truth is seen as messy, collaborative, and constantly changing.

Here, Thomas Kuhn’s theory of “paradigm shifts” offers a lens into what is really going on in Orb. Kuhn argued that scientific revolutions are not neat, orderly steps toward truth; they are disruptive changes in which dominant views are overthrown and replaced by something fundamentally different. Not only do further points occur, but whole forms of noticing and analyzing the world are rewritten.

The anime bears out the narrative instead of speaking it. It eschews an unbent storyline by changing between timelines and techniques. Rather, we are provided a combination of views, with peeks of opposition, suffering, and hints of longing interwoven with points of martyrdom.

What is important is that no single character starts the revolution itself. No Galileo Galilei shows up and changes the course of history. Instead, each character makes a small but significant contribution to the old paradigm. Each of them is like a crack in the wall: Jolenta spreads a counter-narrative, Draka lives differently, and Rafal finds a forbidden text. While they do not overthrow the system, they weaken it, making it increasingly difficult for the geocentric-modernist view to survive. In a way, Orb is about how change actually happens, more often, unevenly, through sporadic acts of resistance at critical points.

Orb vividly embodies Foucault’s notion of “subjugated knowledge” (ways of understanding suppressed or ignored that exist outside the prevailing system of thought). Knowledge is not depicted in anime as something discovered in the laboratories of venerable institutions. Instead, it depicts heliocentric concepts in the shadows: whispered in back rooms, written in the margins of banned books, passed around secretly from person to person, or encoded in symbols the select few brave enough to read. Science is, at its core, an act of rebellion (not just some institution).

The ones who really know things are outcasts, wanderers, rebellious students, curious kids, and academics pushed into the shadows. They wear scars, not lab coats. By building their own spaces where different ways of seeing the world can survive, they work outside the usual systems of truth. It transforms undervalued individuals into agents of change by showing how the knowledge that does not “fit” into the structure can still thrive underground, waiting for the ideal opportunity to emerge and pose a threat to the system from within.

However, postmodernism is wary of grand narratives and neat conclusions. It thrives on multiplicity, ambiguity, and disjunction. By eschewing an unbent basis and assuming a stretchy, open-ended storytelling fashion, anime assumes the heart. Stories overlay without necessarily finishing, characters arrive and drive, and time itself appears unsure. This narrative technique recalls the problems anime talks about: decentralization, delay, and the abolition of selected substances.

Orb seems to tune into the frequency of the rebellion signal in each episode. Rather than giving us a single, cohesive storyline, it alternates between multiple storylines revolving around the idea of a heliocentric resistance. Oczy’s internal conflict as he struggles with the moral dilemma of deciding between faith and truth is one example of how some of the episodes focus on very personal matters. Others question the geocentric order, such as the episode detailing futile attempts to publish a manuscript, focusing externally.

The anime adopts a polyphonic, multi-voice structure. Each speaks from a position and experience, deliberately avoiding a single timeline or narrator to guide us. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “dialogism” is quite helpful in situations where the anime leans towards dialogism. Bakhtin defines it as the coexistence of multiple voices or points of view, with none taking precedence over the others, no single truth being revealed from above.

Instead, truth emerges in the void between voices (in conflict, overlap, paradox, and enlightenment). The end effect is a story that asks the audience to piece things together for themselves rather than making claims of certainty. The acceptance of narrative plurality is subtly revolutionary in a world characterized by doctrine. Time itself seems slippery as the show shifts between flashbacks, dreams, prophetic visions, and mystical fragments. The shifts disrupt our perception of past, present, and potential futures. It is sometimes hard to tell if we are watching a historical narrative, a memory, or a symbolic tale.

Orb‘s visual design actively contributes to the ongoing philosophical debates on the show and sets the tone. Each frame reinforces the conflict between heliocentric disorder and geocentric order through theoretical work. It tends to use stiff and closed imagery when examining geocentrism, such as tall cathedrals, vaulted ceilings, and dim, dark hallways and feels claustrophobic, serious, and heavy.

To evoke the idea of a universe with a single fixed point, characters are usually framed squarely in the center, locked in a symmetrical composition. As if the room itself were imposing ideological submission, they are encased in thick stone walls, seated beneath holy men, or dwarfed by religious iconography. The scenes have a slow, formal animation style with minimal movement; everything seems planned and deliberate as if conveying the idea that everything already has its place.

However, when the anime starts to lean towards heliocentrism, the tone changes drastically. At such a point, the visual language becomes fluid. Wide sky shots, sweeping camera movements, and golden lights flashing across the screen are all part of the show’s opening in earnest. There is a sense of movement and breath, exploration and instability. The universe is now an expanding, unknowable expanse, not a closed dome.

The animation accelerates and becomes natural to convey the emotional release resulting from moving away from dogma and toward freedom through uncertainty. The ideological shift from the modernist world craving structure and certainty to a postmodern sensibility embracing complexity, change, and decentralization is directly reflected in the contrast of the aesthetic, which is not just there for style.

The small pendant, a circular disc engraved with a planetary diagram, is one of the powerful visual elements connecting all. Although a subtle object, the pendant continues to appear in different characters and timelines. It can be kept, worn as a talisman, or passed from hand to hand like a secret. Although not in a doctrinal sense, it is a symbol of continuity.

The pendant symbolizes the way knowledge persists (not as stored in institutions, but as embodied, transportable, and reinterpretable). Knowledge is resilient but also fragile and easily lost. In many ways, it represents the heliocentric concept itself: not imposed from above but transmitted from below through symbols, stories, and silent acts of resistance.

Orb is a reflection on the nature of knowledge, authority, and human inquiry: a historical drama. It highlights the emotional, philosophical, and political consequences of epistemological change. It dramatizes what happens when grand narratives collapse and marginalized truths emerge through the use of characters, visual language, and nonlinear storytelling. However, it does not give us a resolution. What kind of universe do we inhabit now if knowledge is never definitive and the truth is always tentative like Bruno looking up at the sky, which, according to him, contains infinite worlds? Is our center stable or just an illusion waiting?

References

  • Chowdhury, A. P. (2025). How Anime Hit ‘Orb: On the Movements of the Earth’ Became One of the Most Dangerous Stories of Our Time. The Hindu.
  • Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books.
  • Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press.
  • Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
  • Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
  • Rowland, I. D. (2008). Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Yates, F. A. (1964). Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. University of Chicago Press.