I finally got round to watching Goblin, and instead of feeling heartbroken, I’m mostly unsettled.
I know Guardian: The Lonely and Great God is widely praised as a sweeping, poetic love story. And on the surface, I understand why. It’s visually stunning, the music is incredible, and the characters are genuinely charming. There are moments in it that really do feel moving.
But the more I sat with it, the more the underlying story bothered me.
At its core, this is a narrative that asks us to deeply sympathize with a man who, in his lifetime, killed countless people. Kim Shin’s past as a general is treated less as a moral weight and more as distant backstory, something to justify his curse rather than something the story seriously interrogates. The focus isn’t on the lives he took, but on his suffering afterwards.
And even the origin of his suffering is rooted in something that feels telling: male ego. A young king, made insecure by Kim Shin’s popularity and power, is manipulated into seeing him as a threat. That insecurity, fuelled and amplified by another man at court, leads to betrayal, massacre, and the curse that defines the entire story.
So the central tragedy isn’t just “fate” or “punishment.” It’s a chain reaction of male insecurity, pride, and power struggles. And yet, the story doesn’t really sit with that. Instead, it pivots quickly into framing Kim Shin as a tragic, wronged figure whose suffering becomes the emotional core we’re meant to invest in.
And the show really wants us to love him. He’s framed as gentle, lonely, even playful, someone who has “paid enough” and deserves peace. But that redemption feels unearned when the actual victims of both his violence and the king’s decisions are almost completely erased from the story.
Then there’s Eun-tak. She’s introduced as a high school girl, isolated, grieving, and emotionally vulnerable. Into that steps an immortal man who tells her she’s his “bride,” the only person who can end his suffering. Even if the romance is delayed until she’s older, the dynamic is already in place, and it feels uncomfortably close to grooming. The power imbalance is enormous, and the framing of “destiny” doesn’t soften that, it disguises it.
What bothered me even more is how much the women in this story are made to suffer in order to deepen the male lead’s arc. Eun-tak’s pain, her loss, even her death are framed in a way that elevates Kim Shin’s tragedy. The same goes for Sunny and the other women tied to these past lives. Their stories orbit his, and their suffering gives emotional weight to his journey.
By the end, the show doubles down. His continued existence, his waiting, his longing, it’s framed as noble. But I couldn’t shake the imbalance. A man shaped by violence and by the destructive egos of other men is given depth, redemption, and endless time, while the women around him are repeatedly asked to sacrifice, die, and return in service of his story.
And what really stayed with me after finishing Goblin wasn’t just this one story, it’s how familiar the pattern feels.
There’s a recurring narrative where men are allowed to be violent, broken, morally complicated, even destructive, and still be framed as worthy of deep love, admiration, and forgiveness. Their pain is meaningful. Their suffering redeems them.
And women are so often written as the ones who make that redemption possible.
They endure. They wait. They forgive. They suffer, sometimes over and over again, so the man’s story can carry emotional weight.
Goblin feels like a particularly polished version of that pattern. Kim Shin is given centuries to suffer, reflect, and become someone we’re meant to love. But the women in his story don’t get that same narrative space. Their pain isn’t something they grow from, it’s something the story uses to deepen him.
And that’s the part I can’t quite accept, never mind see as “romantic.”
Because when you strip away the cinematography and the music, what’s left is a story that still expects women to love men not just despite their harm, but in a way that almost justifies it.
Maybe that’s why it unsettled me so much. It’s not just the age gap, or the power imbalance, it’s the feeling that I’ve seen this dynamic over and over again, dressed up as something beautiful.
And I’m tired of it.