Needless to say, I was not looking forward to this episode of Orb. In spite of last week’s being one of the series’ best, which is a high bar. Nor am I looking forward to writing about it. In spite of this being the most interesting series of the season to write about. I mean, in writing about it I have to revisit it, and visiting it once was unpleasant. That’s not a criticism of the intrinsic quality, as subjective as that is – as usual, it was excellent on all fronts. I just don’t particularly like where it went.
This is the second time Chi Chikyuu has annoyed me with valid story choices, in fact – the first in killing off Rafal after two episodes of being a great protagonist. In this story the individual characters are secondary to the larger ideal – that’s just a fact. It’s true of Rafal, it’s true of Gras, it’s true of Oczy. There’s a thread that connects all of them in myriad ways. They’re shepherding that ideal at great personal expense, whether they know it (in fact none of them do at first, but do by the end) or not. And in truth, they’re all victims of an orthodoxy which claimed countless numbers of them.
“Torture porn” is one of those terms that gets devalued because of massive overuse in anime circles – like “slice-of-life”. But when you’re doing a series where the Inquisition is a major player, you obviously run that risk. It could hardly be more literally true, could it? I don’t really know whether this qualifies – as I said, it’s a valid story choice. Despite what the apologists says scientific “heretics” were tortured plenty in the Inquisitions. And anyone being tortured makes the specifics of who was and who wasn’t kind of irrelevant. As soon as Oczy’s sword shattered you knew where this was headed (I kind of knew anyway). And he certainly would have been better off dying of his wounds.
It’s easy for Badeni to talk about accepting a nightmare situation when it happens, but not so much when you’re actually in a torturer’s hands. Oczy’s concerns were spot-on of course. By destroying all the evidence beforehand, they were depriving themselves of an out once the torture started. They were doomed to execution anyway for having taken up arms against the Church, but Nowak has the power to determine what the build-up to that looks like. And unfortunately this is personal for him, because his daughter is involved.
I’ve seen some commenters defending Nowak, even calling him sympathetic. This is baffling in the extreme for me – he’s garbage, plain and simple. Politeness is in no way a mitigating factor in his defense. Neither is believing the claptrap he spouts, which he apparently does. We don’t know right away (and neither does Oczy) that Badeni has also been captured. But that makes Oczy’s situation even more perilous. This is a nightmare on all fronts. Especially as it happens just as Oczy is in the midst of a personal awakening. He’s grown more than any character in this series and it’s not even close. But snuffing out the limitless potential of the intellectually curious was the specialty of the Church in the Middle Ages (and not just then).
The truth is, Oczy has nothing to tell Nowak, and Nowak knows it. But that’s not the point, he’s merely a tool. We all know what’s really driving Nowak here, and this puts Badeni is a fascinating situation. He obviously doesn’t want Oczy to be tortured. But it’s not clear if he doesn’t want it enough to try and stop it, and he’s powerless to do so anyway. Badeni now knows that Jolenta is Nowak’s daughter. His originally plan as he described it was to blame it on a witch if they were ever captured. Whether he would have done that or not is uncertain. He doesn’t even try with Jolenta, for obvious reasons – Nowak is never going to believe it anyway.
With that trick unplayable, Badeni – and Oczy – would seem to be pretty much out of cards here. At a stretch one might say Jolenta’s involvement is a wild card, but how could Badeni leverage that to his advantage? What’s less clear is the endgame – they have nothing Nowak could want. The other crucial element is that unlike the ones who preceded him in this line of succession, Badeni has show no inclination and made no preparations to pass this mantle on to someone else. Either he’s secretly done so against his own expressed wishes, he’s going to come up with something miraculous in the moment, or the pair of them have left some clue behind without being aware of having done so. Heliocentrism won’t die here, that much is certain.
The post Chi.: Chikyuu no Undou ni Tsuite (Orb: On the Movements of the Earth) – 13 appeared first on Lost in Anime.
