@packmule3 Compare and contrast is always fun! I couldn’t resist.
I liked Goblin. I also really like several of its OSTs, especially the instrumentals and the one entitled ‘First Love’ (or Last Love).
Just going for the obvious stuff to compare between Goblin and HDL:
Punishment and new Job – Both the leads are being punished for killing wantonly after being nifty with a sword, and their punishment by a deity has them stuck in limbo on earth, until a certain condition is met.
I can’t remember if Kim Shin actually died and was brought back as the undead, but both Goblin and Man Wol are given ‘minor deity’ powers to meddle in people’s lives. I’m unclear about what good Goblin is supposed to do besides keeping an individual alive or thwarting Reapers and ghosts if he felt like it. We know MW’s job and she actually worked pretty hard as she built up her hotel.
On the whole I felt Goblin’s powers were few and far between. He needed door portals to zip around through and only ended up in a few places.
Goblin was also laughably at the bride’s beck and call when she summoned him by blowing out a flame.
MW’s powers were lots more fun and to the purpose, because she really used them thoroughly to get her job done.
However Goblin seemed to have an endless access to gold (from other people’s vaults?) while MW had to get money through trickery or selling ghostly services.
Sword – Goblin ends up with a sword, a mark of his guilt, stuck in him which he cannot remove, and so cannot die. He needs help from his bride to draw the sword so that he can finally end his life with the chance for reincarnation.MW’s sword, also a mark of her guilt, plus of her grudges and thirst for revenge, also gets stuck inside her in the form of her spirit tree. Ma Go decides to send her help, to help her end her life.
Reincarnation – Reincarnation is the constant background theme in both shows and the choice is to end one life of punishment in order to be rewarded by another life, or not.MW purports to want to end her existence, but she still has an axe to grind and won’t leave. Goblin did want to end his existence but changed his mind when he fell in love.
The Helpers – Both Chan Sung and Eun Tak were chosen by a deity from their birth or early life, through a choice made by Chan Sung as a child to save Man Wol, and by Goblin when he saved Eun Tak’s mother (and therefore Eun Tak) from death.
Both the helpers were pretty pure, good souls and would be required to make sacrifices.
Choice to remain undead vs choice made for MW to die – The ending choices were different. Goblin chose to return to earth from a lifeless limbo between the Afterlife and Earth to continue in endless life (with no further recourse for death unless the deity could kill him) waiting for Eun Tak’s reincarnations. He forewent his reward for a love who could not remember him.
Chan Sung chose for Man Wol to not be stuck on Earth with him, and they hoped to be reincarnated to live new lives together in the future. MW did want to end her existence after she found love, even though her lover would never forget her, even though she was sad to leave him and he would pay the price. She wanted her reward but she let Chan Sung choose for her.
Eun Tak was not given that choice, but she also paid a price of sadness and sensing that she had forgotten something important.
In both shows the deities let characters have free will to make choices, except that Eun Tak’s choice was taken away out of need.
Still, Sunny was able to demand and keep her memories.
Deities – Goblin’s deities only numbered 2 and were not as interfering as MW’s. Sam Shin Granny was more caring and Butterfly god basically ignored Goblin most of the time.
MW had the chance to meet several MGs and even knew how to benefit from them. There was an exchange of goods over the flowers, and rich MG may have helped MW become rich for a while.
Ghosts – In Goblin they didn’t play much of a role except to be Eun Tak’s companions and to give Goblin info. There was only one vengeful spirit who was Goblin’s nemesis, both in life and after death.
If not for him and the threat of Eun Tak’s dying, there’d have been little conflict in the show.
I prefer the several ghosts of the week in HDL that showed us the choices that lay ahead for MW and CS. In the end, the so-called enemies of MW were a pathetic firefly and an innocent Mi Ra whose destruction by MW, CS was able to prevent.
CS was meant to help MW leave in peace, which he did, after almost dying himself because of her curse. He chooses to not cut ties with her spirit and gets to see her in his dreams (that’s my take on the ending). He lives on.
Eun Tak was meant to remove the sword so as to end Goblin’s time on earth but Goblin took that decision for her or from her, rather. She is forced to forget, never knowing why she is sad.
Ten years later she summons Goblin again and is briefly happy with him until she dies, choosing to sacrifice herself for others. This time paying a price that had nothing to do with Goblin.
Grim Reaper – GR was a plot device in HDL but has his own story in Goblin. Unlike HDL where MG interfered, the pairing up of lovers of the past continue in the present and future.
The Human Assistants – Goblin had a family dedicated to serving him through the generations while Man Wol had 99 human managers. At least MW managed on her own for a long time before she felt the need for a manager. In spite of being minor deities, they are quite hopeless with modern day stuff with Goblin and Reaper being far worse in not even knowing how to use the mobile phone properly. LOL
Gotta run!
Looking back now, I disliked the idol actor (Sungjae?) who played the Goblin’s manager-in-training. He was too cutesy and distracted from the plot. It was a weak character and seemed to be added as an afterthought. He wasn’t that critical to the plot.
The bellhop in HdL was panned for his acting, too, but at least his role had purpose.
Overall, I think HdL was better written than the Goblin. Although the Hong sisters’ love for ambiguities, word play and doublespeak made the story at times confusing, we had fun anyway trying to figure them out.
Unlike the Goblin where some episodes relied on gimmicky interaction between the two handsome male actors, and schmaltzy love scenes (and not to mention annoying Subway product placement) to hold the viewers interest, I think the HdL plot was more cohesive. I can probably think of only three scenes in HdL that could have been edited.
Each episode moved the plot forward. Each ghost story was relevant. BTW, I feel sorry for those viewers who didn’t figure out soon enough the importance of the ghost stories, and whined that the ghost stories were boring. Aigoooo. They shouldn’t underestimate kdrama writers, especially veteran writers like the Hong sisters.
Each character had an integral role to play; none of them were superfluous or irrelevant. The acting was generally on point.
Most of all, I like that each new development in the relationship of Manwol and Chansung revealed a missing puzzle piece needed to complete Manwol’s story. They were progressive steps towards her end journey.
Great comparison @packmule3 … I’d forgotten all the ‘terms’ of Goblin’s punishment.
Since I’m stuck at work waiting … here’s more that I recall and in response to some of your thoughts.
Assuming (unlike yourself, @packmule3) Goblin regarded Reaper as the reincarnation of the king and Sunny as the reincarnation of his sister, then he was full on incensed that he’d ended up housing the very ‘person’ who’d killed his sister. However, he did not do anything about it except move out of his own house with Eun Tak because he did not want to see Reaper.
So there were no repercussions taken against Reaper except that he got more lonely for a while and could only meet up with Eun Tak separately outside. The guys more or less buried the hate when Reaper came around to give Goblin warning that Eun Tak’s death was once again on the cards (literally). Reaper also came along to help get rid of the vengeful ghost, showing that he was no longer like the king of old who’d listened to that ghost character who’d been his advisor. Reaper did get into trouble with the Grim Reaper bosses though, for helping Eun Tak escape death.
The confusion then is that she’s shown at the end back alive as a high schooler in another life with memories intact (because she had refused the oblivion tea) and she had gone to Quebec and sought out Goblin. So she was supposedly in her 2nd reincarnation at the end. I took their showing her in a church as just one of the places of refuge that she would seek out since young, but not proof that she was actually a Catholic LOL. 😉
BTW I’m sure you’ve noticed too, whenever kdramas want to portray a church for anything, it’s 99.9% likely that it’s a Catholic Church. Maybe the other denomination’s churches are not so widespread. Or the RC Church is the most open and gives permission for a myriad kdramas to be filmed inside the churches.
Yes. That was a relief. It was so quietly done that most viewers never knew that she did indeed die. Eun Tak’s death was so out of left field. I can’t recall any foreshadowing of it in the previous episodes. This is soooooo unlike HDL where anything of significance is foreshadowed even episodes earlier, with references made to it here and there.
The great fun of HDL was that it was like a game for those of us who realised that the Hong Sisters and the PD were dropping clues for us left, right and centre. It was such a fun challenge examining every minute of the show for metaphors, parallels and allegories.
I agree with your assessment of the Goblin and how HDL was better written and organised. I never bothered to think about it before, but looking back and in comparison with HDL, some points become evident.
The dead who passed through Reaper’s tea room did not strike me as making a comment that tied in with Eun Tak’s or the Goblin’s life/fate/decisions. My memory is hazy … They might have been incorporated only to bring home the point that all kinds of people die and death is both impartial or maybe unfair if one wanted to think of it that way.
The ones that stick in my memory are the old man who had been blind and his dog who came to the tea room to lead him to the Afterlife. That was a very mild parallel with the old man and dog in HDL. This added nothing to the story except pathos. Then there were the mother and daughter spirits (in HDL there was the father and son) also victims of an accident, I think. And there was the husband who had been buried in North Korea who came to meet his wife who had finally died in SK.
Goblin was only involved in one of the spirits, ie the boy who had been abused by his adoptive father and who had become an old man and died. All these stories did not seem to have any part in the overall arc. That was a weakness in Goblin. By comparison, Chan Sung kept consulting MW about the ghosts he was meeting or helping and she was actively involved with all of their ‘cases’.
Eun Tak’s friendships with Sunny and school friend were in no way linked to anything of great moment. They were there to comfort or to be supported by Eun Tak and that’s all I recall of them.
Goblin’s life was rather purposeless, except for when Eun Tak was around and he (and even Reaper) became her protector. Other than that, he was just a mopey deity, sitting on the fence about having his sword removed.
The fact the Reaper was only paying for his own sin of suicide rather than for having caused the death of many others by his foolishness, is also a bit of a sore point, now that I think of it. He should have been allowed to remember and regret his part in Sunny’s death earlier.
These considerations make Goblin the weaker show.
Where OSTs are concerned, Goblin had heaps more than HDL, which were also very good, and they sounded more different from each other than HDL’s OSTs. I like both soundtracks though and I have both playing in my car, LOL.
Goblin sort of wins in terms of the grand romance, where the love is manifested in official dates and a wedding, and lasts across reincarnations. HDL was less a romance than a sincere ‘save Man Wol from dissipation’ project. Still, show did suggest that the OTP would never be truly apart even in death.
I also liked the outdoor scenes in Quebec, the man-made promontory at the sea, the buckwheat field in Goblin. HDL had most scenes indoors (or in a studio made to look like outdoors?). Maybe they saved money on travelling far and wide for shoots and spent it on MW’s wardrobe! Heheheh!
For the well-planned ghost of the week side-stories that contributed to the plot of the show alone, HDL would have won hands-down as the better show. When we add the amazing camera work, the lighting and the sets, the costumes that indicated MW’s state of mind and the fact that we did not need any gratuitous scenes of pretty boys or men, I’d say HDL was much better than Goblin too.
I thought the first thing I recognized when watching the show was how the dynamic between the main leads are the same as Goblin.
The purpose of both leads falling in love is to kill the long living one. Their roles were to make the other person fall in love, and because they are now in love, this person can finally kill them and they can go to the after life.
That’s essentially where all the drama and dynamics came from. “You need to love me so now I can kill you and you can finally die, and I will feel so much pain doing so because I love you too.”
Heheheh! @Peachietime, that’s an interesting way to put it. I guess the dynamics of getting the right party ‘killed off’ was to get them into a relationship of some kind. As long as they were alone and aloof and did not need anyone, they were safe. Once they got attached to the right person who’d help them move on, they became vulnerable. Then only (and more so in the case of Hotel Del Luna than Goblin) they were sufficiently healed, and became open to loving and being loved, and making up for their bad choices.
Having reached that level of being ‘human’, they were then able to gain their reward of resting in peace. Only thing was that Goblin rejected his chance to remain in the Afterlife. And in HDL, Chan Sung was the one to reject being disconnected from ManWol so his normal life was still infiltrated by ghosts and dreams in which he meets her.
In theory, neither Eun Tak or Chan Sung needed to have been loved, or to have loved their partners. It just turned out that way so that we get the great conflict of letting die or killing one’s loved one for their own good.