I'm not sure how the arcs are defined, but the Oczy and Bedini part was definitely the highlight and it feels like it got the most time, but I'm not sure if that's true. The gypsy girl's story was kind of boring and felt like a sidestory that was somehow competing with and occasionally overshadowing the main story.
As is tradition the ending to a Japanese thing was quite nonsensical.

also in addition to the OP the premise is very muddy. The epilogue was kind of metaphorical to scientific progress and it came across in a way where the viewer had to really piece together what the author was intending

It felt like the author was going out of his way to make Nowak the most pathetic and miserable character out there. Out of some perceived grudge or something to the anti-heliocentrism movement that he had Nowak stand in as the metaphorical punching bag for and it's not even really true that people killed each other for such research back then. So sorta it's the author taking out his grievances for a perceived notion of the past that he doesn't agree with and coming off as somewhat petty in the process. At least that's what I felt about the author.

Purely as fiction that has about as much to do with reality as the average isekai, part 2 is definitely the strongest. Best characters, best conflict, best developments, a cool twist, and that's reflected in the overwhelming prevalence of OkuBade art. Part 3 really fails to live up to it, its MCs don't have nearly as much chemistry and it starts to drag as the quest for heliocentrism gets stuck in the book publishing phase for the whole arc. But part 4 schizzes out for no particular reason leaving people universally confused, and its inversion of Rafal for the sake of painting the picture of a truth-seeker gone wrong is rather weird given all the blood that its MCs have shed, so I'd actually rate it lower than 3.
>>86837
Nowak is a weird invention. Historical inquisitors were well educated and in close contact with other chuch officials, by design it was impossible for part 3's ultimate twist to take place. It's possible to interpret Nowak as being not as much of an automaton and having a legitimate fight against a cognitohazard given that these people are genuinely fighting to the death over some random and seemingly cursed theory they haven't even proven, but the ahistorical death penalty over science doesn't help his case. He's much closer to an agent of a totalitarian state's secret police, translocated into a medieval setting.

>>86843
I guess he had to top off the story and say "yeah, there are some subjective things we can't agree on". The idea of a future where truth is not absolute is not the same as the belief that the pursuit of truth is an absolute goal. That individual freedom is to be valued and someone who tries to take that freedom away isn't doing anything noble at all.
It spends a lot of time showing Nowak killing people for going against the religous order of stability, then we get an alternative story where Rafal is killing people who go against the rational order of progress.

I guess this is the japanese "both-sides"-ism that is so prevailent in their media, where they encourage people not to take sides in a story. But he obviously made the story to show that faith based systems are inferior and contradictory to rational based ones so it falls flat, and the 4th protagonist ultimately says "yeah, killing my dad was probably in the right"

>>86844
>obviously made the story to show that faith based systems are inferior and contradictory to rational based ones
That's one of history's greatest ironies: Copernicus was working off his faith that there was a more logical way to order the universe mainly for aesthetic reasons, going against the establishment even when he saw his system as incomplete, despite that he was welcomed for it. Galileo was even more dogmatic and faith-driven, he actually rejected Kepler's idea that orbits were elliptical rather than perfect circles and called it dross, while evidence mounted up that the Keplerian model was simply better than the geometric perfection of Copernicanism. He also tried to discredit his opponents who had real scientific criticisms of heliocentrism, something that Orb obviously left out because it goes against the standard narrative. Oh, and Kepler had wanted to be a theologian but was encouraged to do astronomy thanks to his skills (literally the opposite of Rafal's story), all of his work was deeply mystical for him and he collaborated a lot with Jesuit astronomers, a really important group as well.
The simple narrative of faith vs reason is not something you'll find historians repeating nowadays, they much prefer to talk about "negotiation" between this and that. Orb's wrong in ways that aren't so obvious as its blatantly false history.

>>86846
I don't mean that in an atheist sense. I meant it in a secular sense.

The show wasn't anti-religious at all as well... it sounds like you just tuned out for the entire 24 episodes and aren't making an honest criticism of it's message

>>86848
I suppose to explain my opinion on Orb and religion it'd be best to look at the Prince of Nothing trilogy and its take on women.
Bakker, the author, wanted to write a dark gritty medieval world, with all the ugliness of the crusades, and he wanted to show what happens to women under oppression, specifically looking to counter the girlboss character who rises above it all as if it weren't such a heavy thing. But the way he goes about this is by making all women into whores. The main FemMC is an actual prostitute, another is the concubine of her successive kidnappers, and a third is an aging incestuous palace crone. The priestesses are sacred whores, each has sex with several soldiers as a ritual, and random unnamed women delight when being raped by orcs and men alike. There's one point where the actual prostitute, already cheating on her lover with a separate guy, gets possessed by a villain's hentai pheromones and the two have spontaneously sex in an alley. She climaxes as soon as the guy enters her, so powerful is his manliness. It's written pornographically because Bakker believes this creates greater impact, and they are called whores/bitches/prostitutes/etc and womanish is repeated as an insult literally hundreds of times to reflect how much in contempt they're held by the characters and their unreliable narration.
The problem is that he puts women in a position that is much worse than what they actually had in history, he degrades them also compared to his sources (Dune/LotR/Blood Meridian(yes, really)), and Bakker doesn't do well at portraying himself as a feminist when he also argues that men are inevitably hardwired for rape. It makes some parts painful to read, in a cringeworthy way. It's perfectly possible to defend this as fans of the series do, there is most certainly a logic to it, but it shouldn't be a surprise to see a huge amount of readers thinking its message is akin to that of an ota post. Even so, I mostly enjoyed reading the trilogy's 1500 or so pages.

Orb has a schizophrenic approach to the church and Christianity. It starts off with the classic trope of anti-science zealotry, of being forced to choose between theology and astronomy, and builds a fake world that has nothing to do with reality while throwing in elements of actual history, real thinkers, real tools and methods, but it remains deeply flawed even as it tries to add extra nuance here and there. No, nobody was tortured for wanting to read forbidden books that were already present in their accessible library. That wasn't even tied to heliocentrism, it was a comically insecure monk attacking Badeni well before the idea got into his head. There is an attempt here at tackling religion, at doing something with it, but it's executed very poorly, and as it happens with women and Prince of Nothing you can find many people correctly identifying its usage of negative stereotypes and believing it's anti-Christian propaganda. I'm not religious myself and I obviously think persecuting people for their beliefs is a bad thing, but the treatment of faith in Orb is definitely one of its weakest points, one that is very obvious and very visible throughout.

>>86849
To compare it to an author describing medieval treatment of women basically as sex slaves is just his own delusion with no accuracy. It's contrived because there is zero world on which "the handsmaiden tale" can exist, nor can this fantasy. It might be executed well but it has contrivances that undermine the plot

Orb's antagonist is a misguided inquisitor being conned by the bishop to do corrupt thought repression. At no point does it critique relgion as anything more than a tool of man to supress others and blind them to the status quo. It's basically just a couple of plot points you didn't like and now you see Orb as akin to pointless obscenity.

There are many extremely well thought put momements to this that capture the conflict of people who exist in societies where the truth is considered blasphemy. It is not a true historic work but a more abstract one about the meaning of truth in a medical setting