Rhonwen

lol.. I keep making typos.. I can add them tomorrow, I just need to find what I sent you.. My inbox is filled, so I was hoping you had them so I could fix them and place them in the OP...

Pomc

resent.. ya got a lot of pms

Betsybelle

I haven't even seen the Disney movie, but I want to see it because a slow dance is an intimate thing. I admit that I find it hard to believe they'd ever find themselves in that position, though, unless they happened to be discussing dancing and Rumple happens to mention that he doesn't know how. I can see Belle volunteering to show him.......she'd be in her blue cleaning dress, of course, not the gold dress, but that's ok by me. I can easily see Rumple acting very much like he did in the deleted scene, placing his face in her hair, breathing her in, pressing her in close.......It would be funny, lol, if he got so caught up in the moment that his hand wandered too far, or he almost kissed her!

Kelaine

The thing is that Rumple didn't know Milha left him. He thought she'd been kidnapped and gang raped. For a ballpark figure on how many men would have crewed Hook's ship, the Mayflower had a crew of 50. I was going to write more about that kind of brutality, but underage types may read this.

Anyhow, Rumple had good cause to believe Milha didn't live long. If he loved her, if he cared for her, he had good reason to hope she didn't live long. Hoping for the alternative would be a little like hoping someone you cared about had wound up in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany rather than dying soon after capture--especially when you have no hope of ever getting that person out.

And that's the horrific little picture Hook planted in Rumple's brain.

It kills me though that he does hope when he meets Hook again. That hope is probably rooted in years of nightmares and guilt--the horrible things that would have happened to Milha if she had somehow survived. But, when he confronts Hook, he is imagining saving Milha, rescuing her in the same way he wants to rescue Bae.

I agree your right about Rumple never bad mouthing her to Bae. Even if he'd known she'd chosen to leave him, pre-DO Rumple wasn't that sort. Protecting Bae meant more to him than getting some kind of second hand revenge against Milha by turning her son against her or by hurting Bae by letting him know his mother had abandoned her.

And Milha planned on returning when Bae was "old enough?"



Can I just call that the biggest evidence Hook was lying when he said his father abandoned him? That he didn't see a problem with telling Bae that?

I_Love_Siobhan_Magnus

^ Rumple didn't ever hope for her survival on a ship full of bloodthirsty pirates and return to him and Bae. That would be false, unrealistic and illusional. In his explanation to Bae, she was dead, then she was as he supposed. When Rumple saw her in flesh right in front of him, he lived up to his words.

Kelaine

No, he didn't hope. He maybe had nightmares where she was still alive and still suffering, but he would have known those were nightmares. Or, rather, he would have been almost certain they were nightmares. There would always have been a small corner of him that didn't know.

But, when he meets Hook as the Dark One, it hits him when Hook says Milha's dead. He knew she had to be dead. Yet, in that moment, seeing Hook, he'd hoped the fates had given him a chance to save her. He'd hoped enough--even if he hadn't admitted he had hope and even if that hope had only existed for a few minutes--that being told she was dead cut deep.

Betsybelle

Let's not use a concentration camp analogy, please.

Yes it's true he thought she was gang-raped, but he also saw her hanging out with the pirates, with Hook, looking very happy. Hook didn't hurt her as far as he knew, others did. In all ways, Milha abandoned her son....... He couldn't bring himself to think badly of her because this is what she did to him; she completely destroyed his self-esteem with her cruelty - every day, for years on end, reminding him that he should have died. I despise her.......

I_Love_Siobhan_Magnus

The answer was hung in the air till he got the confirmation from his nemesis's mouth to prove that he was right. There might be a fleeting thought of hope crossed his mind when he was about to crash Hook's heart, but the truth about Milah that he found out was worse than what he expected. All she asked was her freedom with the pirate, not a single word about Bae's wellbeing until Rumple questioned her about that on Jolly Roger. Her unapologetic betrayal to both Rumple and Bae was what really hurt.

AngieBelle

You've never seen the Disney movie?! Get thee to a dvd rental! I've adored it since it first premiered when I was 10 and have seen it so many times I can practically recite it verbatim! (I used to recite the prologue a lot as a parlor trick of sorts when I was in college.) I even know how the dialogue times with the score. It is my favorite Disney movie of all time. I've also seen the Broadway version several times.

The idea of Belle teaching Rumple to dance makes me think of "Shall We Dance" from The King and I.

We've just been introduced
I do not know you well
But when the music started something drew me to your side.
So many men and girls
Are in each other's arms
It made me think we might be
Similarly occupied

Kelaine

I wasn't saying that lightly. I know I'm about to sound defensive and justifying--and maybe I am. But, let me say why I used that analogy.

What Hook said he was going to do to Milha made me think of accounts I've read by survivors of the Khmer Rouge. During the short period they ruled Cambodia in the 70's, the Khmer Rouge killed one to three million people out of a country of eight million (current estimates generally say one and a half million, but nobody's certain).

Some escaped on what were often poorly made boats. But, there were pirates operating in the waters they had to sail through. There were women and children (maybe men, too, but they either didn't talk about it in the accounts I read or didn't survive to tell) who suffered exactly what Hook described.

The horrors of the Killing Fields, as they're often called, were on par with the concentration camps. That's not an overstatement or hyperbole. Yet, for some of these survivors, what they suffered at the hands of pirates was worse. It destroyed them emotionally and psychologically when the Killing Fields failed. That's when they survived it physically. Many didn't.

That is what goes through my mind when I think of what Milha was supposed to have gone through. I hope my mind is far more of a cesspool in this respect than the writers' and that nothing close to this ever crossed their minds. But, it's where my thoughts go.

So, I would have written that hoping Milha was alive when Rumple could do nothing to save her was like hoping she was alive and going through that, but I find that not as many people seem to know what you're talking about if you bring up the Khmer Rouge--that, by the way, isn't one of those comparisons where you try to guilt people out for not knowing about one of the world's horrors. Unfortunately, I think history has overwhelmed our ability to absorb all the bad things that have happened. But, so long as we retain our ability to be horrified by them rather than become numb to them, I think we're on the right side of the curve.

I_Love_Siobhan_Magnus

^ Why make a selfish elopement so bloody complicated? Since Rumple fled from battlefield as a branded coward, Milah had been longing to dump her husband for a man with huts and wealth like Hook who can provide her a better life. When she met such a man, she seized the opportunity. How old was Bae at that time? Around four, maybe? Then Rumple should've seen it coming in the past four years. The distance between Milah and him wasn't formed in one day. With or without a confirmation, Milah was dead to him since. It pushed his soul closer to utter desperation.

Rhonwen

what you and Kelaine say makes sense.

I am rewatching Croc and seeing the look in Rumple's eyes and his slight falter when Hook tells him Milah died.. it proves all that you both said.

And there's no way Rumple being crippled would have been able to fight him with a sword, and survived. He wasn't about to leave his son an orphan.I know there are defenders who say Hook wouldn't have harmed Rumple, but there is no proof of that. and certainly no proof for Rumple.
Really when it comes down to it, Hook and Milah are equally to blame for the events that happened. They should have owned up then, at the beginning.

I'm still making my Croc collage, I'm at the point ot the mine rescue.. so hopefully later today I'll have it posted.

Jan_RCFan

I always felt that Rumple was protecting Bae when he said Milah was dead. Deep down I think he knew that she had left him, and in doing so, had abandoned her son. Either way, he would not badmouth her to Bae, would not ever let him grow up thinking that his mother had abandoned him.

When they introduced the Hook was abandoned by his father story in the season finale, it jarred me. I took it to be an outright lie from Hook, but I'm not sure that's what the writers intended. Most people took it as evidence of how poor little Hook was abandoned and that helps to excuse his behavior and make us like him better. My first reaction was that if he really had been abandoned himself, then how could he consider a woman who had abandoned her own child at an even earlier age to be his one true love... one he loved so desperately that he'd spent centuries trying to exact revenge for her death. The whole thing made me want to barf.

Rhonwen

I dont trust anything Hook said either. I think it was his way of trying to "bond" with Bae and learn the Dark One's secrets. I agree, if he was indeed abandoned he'd have a hard time letting Milah leave her son like that.

Jan_RCFan

Yes, I think once he knew who Bae was, he thought he'd be able to bond with him and thereby learn the DO's secrets, by making up a story about how his own father abandoned him as a child. In any case, the whole idea of Milah being Hook's one true love has rung false for me from day one. I like to look at it like this - you get the true love you deserve:

Charming got Snow, Rumple got Belle, Hook got Milah

Need I say more?