Reply To: Rumple and Milah

[TheWatcher]

I will stand alone in my opinion about Milah. There has always been something about her that urks me. She did have a choice.

but I believe her actions stemmed from the same dark place of hopelessness.

But that’s my point. If her life is that terrible and that unbearable that it generates that kind of extreme hopelessness……then why leave a child behind to face it while you escape it? That doesn’t make sense to me. Even as I rewatch the scene where Rump confronts her right before he kills her, I feel more in tune with his feelings as opposed to hers.

It doesn’t make sense to compare leaving a child with a loving parent to leaving a child with an abusive parent.

I’m talking about the home life. Shes leaving her child in a negative environment. One so bad that she felt she had to run away from it. Its not like Milah could have been thinking “Oh, well Baelfire will have a good life, Rump will provide for him, and he will be happy.” She wasn’t. It’s selfish, what she did. Her regretting it doesn’t mean she didn’t have the choice. It just feels like shes putting her own needs above that of her child and I don’t think that’s a natural thing for a mother. So sure, she may have regretted it as said below:

Rumple: “You left him!” Milah: “And there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t feel sorry about that.”

But for the next, what? Like 12 years she sure as heck wasn’t steering that boat back to actually do anything about it. For all she knew, Bae could have been starving dead in a dirty shack while she was living a pirates life. Or worse, torn to pieces in the Ogre’s war. These were both very real possibilities at the time she left. Milah abandoned him. Milah condemned him to a terrible life knowingly and willingly. In the words of Rumpel: Sorry isn’t enough.

They can claim they talked about coming back all they like. But Baelfire was a teenager  or preteen and they still hadn’t resurfaced so far as we know.

The more I think about this situation, the more it gets me heated. Milah really does just tick me off. She’s entirely in the wrong and telling me woeful stories about how she felt doesn’t change that. I would understand and perhaps empathize more if we had more backstory and scenes, but still.

All this I’m talking about in the context of the show nand not in real life though where I think there have been quite a few cases of parents who deserve the death penalty for things they’ve done or allowed to happen to their children, but also agree that there are things we should to do to offer aid, support, and help prevent parents from making bad decisions and all that good stuff. But this is OUAT and if Bae was my child, i’d have crushed Milah’s heart, swept up the ashes, made tea with it and forced Killian to watch as I drank it in front of him and made puns