July 2025 saw beloved manga Vinland Saga finally ending after 20 years, but we know what Netflix series fans need to check out next. With four parts comprising nothing less than one of the manga’s most sprawling stories ever, Vinland Saga has wowed fans with a compelling tale as deep as the Norse epics from which it drew influence. It presented a narrative of uncompromising depth that can have few equals; in its wake, fans are left hungry for the next story that might come close to scratching the same itch.
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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.
The Hard Sell: What Makes Orb Required Viewing for Vinland Saga Fans
Orb shows that words cross as readily as swords, and it can be just as thrilling when they do. While Orb emphasizes power through ideas and Vinland Saga emphasizes power through violence, they both make one thing perfectly clear: history doesn’t take its victors for granted. Although they work over different expressions of power, both Orb and Vinland Saga concede that the way things are and what’s accepted as truth is a matter of power, plain and simple.
To illustrate with an example close to Orb‘s heart: the story of Galileo Galilei is actually much uglier than most believe. Galileo was tried by the Inquisition and convicted, sentenced to a bloodless death, capping off a terminal house arrest. While he’s seen as a pivotal figure now, the so-called “Galileo affair” would be forgotten over time for many years before being recuperated in the early modern Age of Reason. Not for nothing: that recuperation became possible because of, and would be partially borrowed from, the Church’s internal debates on heliocentrism after Galileo’s death.
The creation of truth is messy. What Vinland Saga and Orb lay bare is how arbitrary and blameless history is: in the moment, people do what they feel they must, while even the highest callings are always steeped in circumstance. But it’s that circumstantial positioning which makes those callings the highest: as sure as Thorfinn’s father died, the Earth does travel around the sun.
Today’s words and deeds become anything at all because of yesterday’s circumstances. Be that as it may, we can’t extricate ourselves from today. Beneath the drama, blood, and grit, Vinland Saga and Orb show journeys to create the meaning of what’s true, what’s good, and what tomorrow looks like. These entrenched histories come to life through figures, factions, and interests who make perfect sense to themselves.
Orb: On the Movements of the Earth and Vinland Saga are both stories without substitutes, and Orb isn’t simply another Vinland Saga. But their key meditations and compelling sagas reach beyond their set-ups with incomparable aplomb, and Orb is the perfect alternative while you wait for Vinland Saga Season 3. Let us know your thoughts on Orb in the comments, and if you want to see more historical anime like Vinland Saga, click through to the link below.
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