Reading the screenrant article about the backlash caused by the first episode, I actually watched it. The article was a little of an exaggeration and so I found, paradoxically, the anime tamer than I expected (with more fanservice outside the controversial scenes). We have goblins that are in state of permanent war against humanity. They plunder, kill and rape humans. They are not exhibiting a behaviour that's any different than humans in state of war: accounts of the Thirty Years War don't seem any rosier than the situation depicted in the comic. Even nowadays war crimes happen despite the risks: authorities measure the negative effects on civilian of their own nation, everything can easily get filmed as used as proof... And the TYW hierarchy on both sides wasn't proactive in preventing them.
I don't see the premise as "controversial" anymore than the Illiad where the main story is around intra-party strife over who get the nicer-looking captive woman. We don't ditch Homer because he dealt with this theme. Having the goblin acts described is necessary to understand the single-mindedness of the titular character: as a child, hiding in a closet, he saw his family murdered and his sister gangraped by goblins. His dedication at killing them, including goblin children, stems from that traumatic event. If it wasn't mentionned, and established that this is actual goblin behaviour, we'd have a character that would certainly be seen without any empathy when he wipes out goblins as evidenced in
@Alzrius's excerpt. The titular character says that any surviving goblin will grow into a threat and become more dangerous than the ones before, and that he's the human survivor that goblins should have killed. The trauma explains a lot of his behaviour, making him an ambiguous character locked in an unending circle of violence.
It links pretty well with all the threads about "always evil" races but gives it a graphic treatment. If the goblins are "always evil", then GS is justified in his pest control approach of the problem (whether it happens on screen or not). If they aren't, he should let the next generation live, even if it means that some of them will, given that they are orphaned due to the action of GS killing their parents for their crimes and being already raised in a rape-advocating society, want to seek revenge, while others (a few? Many?) will break that cycle of violence. That will mean doing what is just, at the price of a few raped farmgirls that would have been avoided by doing the radical choice of not showing mercy. Always evil = easy solution, no moral conundrum, Not always evil = what do you do? Asked by the heroine if there could be good goblins, even GS, who could be an unreliable narrator, recognize that maybe some would turn out good. So we're really in this situation of moral conundrum that always evil would have conveniently avoided.
I am now interested to see how it turns out (I only watched the first 3 episodes). The rest of the world seem very... "D&D as if the characters knews about the rules", with outrageous exploitation of RPG tropes. I am not sure it would be a setting to tell another story than the one about GS, though.
