However, the case of Milah is interesting because the audience has swallowed the show’s predominant line about her without any protest at all.
That is very interesting.
I think one of the big exciting potentials and then disappointments of OUAT for me is how the show has dealt with the intersection of gender and class. The source material often deals with socioeconomic hierarchies very explicitly, especially when the fairytales aren’t about “princes” and “princesses” (which is usually what Disney gravitates towards), but about “common” folk. OUAT has at times tried to tackle class directly — Rumple’s story is, in a lot of ways, a story about class and masculinity — at least that’s how I read his DO “genesis” backstory. And it’s actually done fairly well — it is complex and compelling and ambivalent (for OUAT), which makes for satisfying storytelling.
But when the intersections of class & femininity are tackled – Cora’s story, and by extension, Regina’s, but also Milah’s story, and also to some extent Belle’s – this gets really hoary, heavy handed, and often extremely flat-footed. I suspect the reason behind it is that the show frames motherhood as a requirement for the full self-realization of its female characters. So while we all ooh and ahh over what a sweet dad Rumple is (and he is, and Bobby does this sort of role amazingly well), we (the audience) don’t usually extend the same credit to female protagonists, and even minor missteps are represented by the show as major violations. By extension, many of the female characters who fail to have children altogether (either naturally or by adoption) are either permanently villified (Cruella, Nimue) or infantilized (Guinevere, Emma until she ‘accepts’ Henry as her child). [With the exception of fairies, whose reproductive patterns are unknown]
Yet, despite this apparent focus on motherhood/parenthood, OUAT is risibly unconcerned with the pragmatics of the process once the child “pops out”, in particular in the most recent seasons — baby Snowflake disappears into the ether for most of 3 seasons, children are aged up to actually make them interesting or important to plot (Gideon), Robyn is nothing more than an accessory to Zelena’s redemption etc. The show doesn’t actually focus on anything even remotely realistic in terms of the pragmatics of rearing children in its rather crazy world. Belle and the nuns just babysit whenever needed. In other words, the actual pragmatics and dilemmas of parenthood, and its intersection with, say, class and gender — outside of the grand dramatic gestures of rescue and abandonment — don’t interest OUAT in the slightest. But this is totally unsurprising: this is a Hollywood product, after all, and Hollywood is itself the product of a particular culture/mentality.