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I get the impression that you know someone with depression who may have thought or done some of the things Milah did. Depression and other forms of mental illness are terrible burdens that real people have to bear.
This made me dig deeper about my indignation on behalf of Milah. Having seen the lives of women, and men, in developing countries first hand, I got to see what obstacles they faced. So it angers me when people dismiss the difficulties these people experience. Milah was treated like garbage on the show – murdered, and then tossed into the River of Souls. The sad truth is that underprivileged people are, all too often, treated in a similar fashion in the real world. I will admit that it doesn’t sit well with me when people, many of whom have privileges they don’t even realise they have, are so quick to pass judgement on the less fortunate without taking so much as a moment to try to understand or empathise.
[adrotate group="5"]Wow! This is because if you CHOOSE to become a parent whether you are male or female you have a RESPONSIBILITY to that child to be the best parent you can be. That child does not get any choice in you as a parent they are put in that situation without any consult to them. I don’t think this is archaic or misogynistic. I also think male worth is measured (especially now days) by their parenthood abilities and guess what I have no problem with that. If you don’t want your worth measured by parenthood then you probably should not be a parent.
Not necessarily, and I’m not talking about Rumple and Milah anymore. What about children conceived via rape? Even in less extreme circumstances, in most societies, getting married and having kids is the most socially acceptable life path. The culture exerts a lot of pressure on individuals to conform to this course, and if they don’t, they feel the sting of judgement. This is no longer the case in many Western countries, but it used to be until not so long ago. It is most definitely the case in many other parts of the world. Many people, especially older generations, would tell you that they had kids simply because it was what was expected of them.
I know children’s well-being is important, and I’m hardly advocating that it be ignored. My point is that parenthood is complicated. Parents don’t always conceive children in a fully informed and autonomous manner, and when raising children, they make all sorts of mistakes. They’re human.
We are both advocating good things for children. But what I am saying is that trying to understand, rather than judge parents’ actions is better than condemning them to fire and brimstone. You on the other hand, seem to believe that any parent who hurts their child automatically becomes a worthless human being.
Similar circumstance to what exactly? A woman who is neglectful of her child so she can go out drinking? A woman who hates her husband so much she verbally abuses and laughs at him in front of strangers? Do you mean her poverty? Do you mean the fact that she is married to someone with a physical disability? Please help me understand how poor little Milah is the victim here. Rumple is not abusive, he is not neglectful. He is poor but he does work and is trying to do his best to provide a steady and healthy environment for his child. I don’t know what I am supposed to be compassionate and understanding about. If she was being abused, yes I would have compassion and understand, if Rumple refused to work and laid home all day and refused to help out, yes I would be understanding. You want me to be understanding to a woman who is unhappy in her marriage? Well obviously she was and changed her fate which means she was neither powerless nor a victim of bad predark one Rumple?
Well, let’s see…
A woman who is an outcast in a small, rural community. A woman who is severely socioeconomically disadvantaged. A woman with a small child and a disabled husband. A woman struggling with all three of the above. Your mockery indicates that you simply do not perceive the difficulties experienced by women in these situations. Domestic abuse is not the only thing that can can make one’s life miserable.
I would suggest that you learn a little about the stresses the above scenarios can inflict. Screwball Ninja’s essay http://screwballninja.tumblr.com/post/57657612406/milah-the-curse-of-poverty-essay-in-6-parts is a good place to start, or you can dig deeper. But until you actually understand how a life like this can wear someone down, both physically and emotionally, our discussion needs to be put on hold. Because this is one of the most crucial points in any discussion regarding Milah.
Food, clothing, house, family, physical health — that’s what I meant by comfortable. The “relatively” part was recognition that her situation wasn’t perfect, just pretty good.
I’m still not on board with this. We don’t know that they didn’t go hungry or cold. I suspect being the town reject impacts on your finances, and they weren’t exactly well off to begin with. Also, comfort extends far beyond the physical. Being accepted by your peers is not just nice, it’s a need. As for her family, well, she and Rumple didn’t seem to understand each other did they? If that’s the case then I don’t think her family is a significant protective factor for her.
I really don’t think that the show has given us reason to think that Milah was suffering from depression as opposed to some other reason for her behaviour. When I criticize Milah, I’m not criticizing depression, just going with the broadcasts and not adding detail.
I see it in her actions, and in her line, “This isn’t living.” Milah is a minor character, but I think they throw in small but powerful details here and there to paint a picture of what she was going through. I see it, you don’t – it depends on which aspects of the show you are interested in. As you can tell, I am interested in gender politics, class dynamics and the emotional drivers behind people’s actions.
I get the impression that you know someone with depression who may have thought or done some of the things Milah did. Depression and other forms of mental illness are terrible burdens that real people have to bear.
Not exactly. I just have some knowledge of emotional drivers behind behaviour. It’s a complicated and fascinating topic. The main thing I have learned is that common inappropriate behaviours (alcoholism, gambling, cheating and many, many others) are not rational, they are often driven by some form of emotional pain. Most people do not realise this, and hence, are prone to condemning, seeing people who engage in such things as having a character flaw. The reality is more complicated.
I don’t find that persuasive. Lots of people do hard work and don’t always get what they want, and they don’t act harmfully as a result. Many people drink to excess and behave irresponsibly, and depression isn’t always the cause. We haven’t seen much of Milah’s environment and backstory, and what we have seen just seems ordinary and relatively comfortable though bland, not the stuff of tragic tales.
You’re oversimplifying my argument. I refer you to my comments about depression in other posts. Also – you think being a social outcast in a feudal society is “relatively comfortable”?!! If you’re serious, then I would suggest that you have no idea how stressful this situation can be! Screwball’s essay gives good descriptions about what this might actually mean from a practical perspective. Also, humans are social creatures. Evolutionary speaking, if you were excluded from your tribe, you were as good as dead. So, the brain developed to respond to rejection with a flight or fight response. This is why any slight can hurt us. Rejection from an entire community over a prolonged period of time will raise this stress response exponentially, becoming a huge risk factor for mental illness. I can assure you, there is nothing remotely comfortable about it!
TheWatcher Participant I will stand alone in my opinion about Milah. There has always been something about her that urks me. She did have a choice. sciencevsmagic wrote: 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.
Because, when you’re in that dark place, you are incapable of being rational or unselfish. That is why depression is categorised as a mental illness.
Also, I think it’s fair to say that our discussion (between you and me) is drawing to a close. In your comments,
There has always been something about her that urks 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.
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.
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
you’re pretty clear that you see things exclusively from Rumple and Bae’s perspective, and also that you have a great fondness for these two. You’re upfront in admitting that you have a strong bias against Milah. That’s fine. But it does mean that you are not capable of being objective when it comes to discussing evidence and interpretations of her character, which makes further discussions between us seem fruitless.
Actually I believe this Proves my point, Milah cared about Rumple when he could provide for her but became abusive and neglectful when he no longer could Provide for her.
No, it doesn’t prove your point. You’re twisting the situation to fit your POV. Rumple made the decision to disable himself and leave the front. He must have known his family would suffer repercussions. But he did it anyway. ANYONE would be angry if their spouse made a major decision that affected the family’s well being without consulting them. If they weren’t, they’d be a saint or a doormat. And no, being angry in this situation does not mean they are a selfish person who is simply resentful that their spouse can’t provide for them.
Also, I’m not advocating verbal abuse, but how else was Milah supposed to vent her frustrations exactly? Her life nosedived, and not because of anything she did. Also, Milah is a peasant, probably without much education, so I’m not surprised that her methods of self expression are limited and crude.
I see Milah as she was presented by the show. She was a mother who left her young child at home alone so she could go out drinking in a bar and flirt with men
I just rewatched the bar scene in 2X4. There was nothing in there to suggest that she left Bae at home alone. She could well have left him with Rumple. All we see is Rumple bringing Bae with him and asking him to wait outside. If you have any other evidence that she used to leave him at home alone, please share. Otherwise, it would seem that you are projecting your assumptions onto that scene. There is nothing in that scene that conclusively proves that she didn’t leave him in good care. Also, Milah looks completely chastised when Bae walks into the bar. She immediately gets up and walks him out. That reaction is pretty motherly, and shows that she does have feelings for her son. But you completely overlook that part in your comments.
Could be why Rumple ended up taking the dark one powers.
This is ridiculous. Rumple became the DO to save his son from being conscripted into the Ogre’s War. How exactly would Milah’s presence have changed this?
People were not about to die on the boat and yet she fails again to ask about Bae. And we do have repeated instances of Milah ignoring Bae becasue I do believe Milah was the one who left a very young Bae alone at home so she could go drinking and then again she left Bae to run off with a pirate which would also being ignoring Bae and his feelings.
Rumple was about to kill Hook the first scene. I admit, this isn’t the case in the second scene, but the situation is still highly tense. Rumple is obviously in a cold rage, and when the DO is mad, the potential for death is very high. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, Milah doesn’t look great in this scene, but given the situation, I still don’t think it’s fair to vilify her for not asking immediately. Rumple brings up the subject quite soon, and she does express her regret. Again, apart from these two scenes, do you have any conclusive evidence that she used to ignore Bae?
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.
Totally agree with all of this!
I disagree. Emma was in jail and Snowing had no choice but to leave their daughter or let their entire family be cursed for possibly all eternity. Milan chose to leave her kid behind to chase a better life. She didn’t have to. That’s entirely different.
You’re assuming Milah had a choice. Sometimes people get into a very dark place mentally, where they literally cannot see alternatives. This is why people commit suicide. Milah didn’t commit suicide, she ran away, but I believe her actions stemmed from the same dark place of hopelessness. In ‘The Crocodile’, she says to Rumple
“This isn’t a life. Not for me. Why can’t we just leave?”
That first sentence in particular is a major red flag for me. These are the sorts of phrases people used when they are seriously depressed – “This isn’t living”, “Life isn’t worth living”, “My life is pointless”. Anyone who has experienced serious depression can attest that it will drive you to doing things which can be hurtful to your loved ones.
What Rumpel did was also bad but he spent centuries trying to get back to Bae.
Well, how fortunate for Rumple that he had those centuries. So lucky that his life wasn’t cut short by murder, like he did to Milah.
I mean let’s pretend Milan was a real life woman in a real relationship where Rump was actually physically and emotionally abusive. Imagine if she had the chance to escape (with her child) but just booked it out of there alone.
This is a false analogy. It doesn’t make sense to compare leaving a child with a loving parent to leaving a child with an abusive parent.
For me it seems like Milah had moved out and moved on toward a new life with no regard for her child. And given the connection between a mother and her child that does seem way worse than killing someone you have no connection to at all. I’m not saying she can’t be forgiven but at that point it doesn’t seem like she really feeling bad about what she did.
First of all, I disagree that child abandonment, as bad as it is, is remotely in the same moral league as mass murder!!
But, moving on….there are multiple instances of her stating that she does in fact, feel bad.
1) 2X4 – ship scene.
Rumple: “You left him!”
Milah: “And there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t feel sorry about that.”
2) 2X22 – JR
Bae: “She abandoned me.”
Hook: “Not a single day went by that your mother didn’t regret leaving you Baelfire. We talked about going back for you when you were old enough.”
3) 5X14 – boat scene
Milah: “My unfinished business was never Killian. It’s Baelfire, our son. I should have been there for him.”
Milah (a few moments later): “…so I can see him and I can say to him, ‘Son, I’m sorry for everything.'”
Does she deserve to die? Well I wouldn’t want many mothers like her walking around.
I agree that situations like theirs should be minimized. But I would suggest that shaming parents and judging them as deserving of the death penalty is hardly the way to go. I advocate cultural change, social support, education and family planning resources.
In fact, being a bad parent is the one reliable symptom of villainy on OUAT. Similarly, villains are made sympathetic via their “correct(ed)” attitude to motherhood/fatherhood (hence Rumple, Zelena, Regina, Maleficient, and eventually Cora all have their sympathetic side revolve around their relationship to their children, and their redemption, when applicable, is framed around that too).
This is a valid point. I have always had a deep problem with this aspect of the show. Women especially seem to have their worth measured through their parenthood. It’s archaic and slightly misogynistic.
It’s that the show systematically equates ambivalence, rejection, or improper interpretation of parenthood (see Cora & BF) with moral bankruptcy. I think we can discuss whether that’s a problematic message or not, but I think that’s what’s behind the audience’s dislike of Milah.
The show presents many ideas to the audience – whether the audience accepts them is another question. To use a contentious example, the show’s been telling us that CS is a great romance for years – but as we all know, there is a faction in the fandom that strongly reject that idea. There are many other examples as well. However, the case of Milah is interesting because the audience has swallowed the show’s predominant line about her without any protest at all.
I loved the “May we meet again” repetition. I always love that line. I loved Clarke saying “My fight is over” as a nod to her being willing to die and using grounder language in that moment.
Agree. Being a dork, I am tempted to start using that line myself.
I still think it is a little crazy that the writers have wiped out all of their world building in one go. The world building is the best part of this show and it is gone and that is crazy to me. It really feels like a mistake right now. I don’t really like the idea of them fighting people with technology. I liked the like lord of the flies way of the show more then people with guns, but we will see where they go with it. It is possible that this ship of prisoners docked with the ring and that Bellamy and the others are on that ship as well. I do like the idea of the grounders and skaikru being the wonkru and going against these new prisoners with technology, but not for it to just be all about the technology now. We will see, i guess.
I have mixed feelings about this. The grounder conflict was the meat of the show, but by the beginning of this season, it was beginning to grow old. So, I’m open to a new conflict next season. I just want it to be good.
Along with deaths, I’m wondering about births. We know that Skaikru had restrictions on birth (one per family) because of limited resources. You gotta wonder if the Bunker and the Ring have something similar set up and how that actually went down with every one. I find it hard to believe Octavia wouldn’t have strong feelings about putting in that kind of mandate under ground.
I was wondering about that too. There would be no way around this in the bunker, whether or not Octavia had strong feelings. It would be hard to enforce though; tough decisions would have to be made. We might even get a flashback of Octavia dealing with such a situation. As painful as it might be, it would be good character development for her to see it from the other side. It would bring that part of her story full circle.
As for the ring, the Skaikru kids would have birth control measures in place, I’d imagine. But Echo and Emori don’t. It’s hard to imagine any of them wanting to conceive in space though.
Overall, the finale was solid. Lots of good tension. I do agree that this season has been a bit back and forth. But it was ultimately better than I expected, after season 3.
