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The Life and Mind of DamnBlackHeart
This is to help me stay actively writing. So expect to see rants, tips on writing, thoughts on subjects, me complaining of boredom, reviews, anime, movies, video games, conventions, tv shows and whatever life throws at me.
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Fanfiction: It’s That Time Of The Month (Or Is It?) |
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Its become common knowledge that majority of fanfiction writers are predominantly female, many of which are teenagers. I bring this up because many of them aren’t afraid to write about menstruation when it comes to their female human main characters. It’s a natural biological process. There’s nothing to be ashamed of about it. But many other stories, such as TV shows and movies, even in some books, its something that doesn’t seem to exist for their human female characters. It is rarely even indirectly alluded to.
The only time this biological process is hinted at is when there’s a pregnancy going on, a young girl is going through puberty or for comedy reasons. When it comes to vampire and werewolves there might be a brief reference to "time of the month" and a woman "smelling of blood".
Depending on the setting of the story it makes me happy to see that it’s mention. It adds a sense of immersion when a female human character is struggling to deal with her period while trying to survive an zombie apocalypse. It’s not only realistic, but it’s interesting as well to read what she does when it unfortunately happens or doesn’t happen.
Though sometimes it understandable that some writers may not want to spend too much time on the subject, but it doesn’t hurt to at least allude to it. It would make sense to mention it when a completely human female character is in a situation where it may come up.
For example, what if an adult human female character falls into the world of Undertale and is taken prisoner by one of the monsters. The monsters are beings made of magic so they don’t need as many of the same things to function as humans do. So while she’s there for months as their prisoner her period will eventually happen whether she likes it or not. If it doesn’t, again it doesn’t hurt to say why it doesn’t either.
Some women, perfectly healthy, and often athletes, don’t menstruate at all. That’s because their bodies are too busy doing physical feats to worry about shedding the uterine lining. Women who are in a stressful or physically demanding situations will find that their body suppresses the function of the hypothalamus, which controls the pituitary gland — the body's master gland — which, in turn, controls the thyroid and adrenal glands and the ovaries; they all work together to manage hormones.
If the human female character isn’t in a stressful situation, there are other ways that she may missed or have irregular period besides pregnancy and that’s a poor diet, too much exercise or low body weight. Birth control can also affect the menstrual cycle. Some women may experience lighter bleeding, and others may skip their periods entirely.
It’s annoying when this natural biological process is completely ignored in stories, especially in certain situations because realistically it’s something that happens to all female human characters. It’s understandable that it’s not always mention such as when the story is set in a normal everyday life, but when a character is kidnapped, teleported or whatever else it makes the readers curious about how that character deals with it (or doesn’t deal with it).
I’ve read a couple of fan fictions about a human female character stuck in a spaceship with aliens (be it Yautja from the science-fiction franchise Predator, Transformers, and so on). Once the female character settled down and adjusted to her new environment she had to deal with her period. It was surprisingly interesting to read about it. The readers got a bit of insight on the alien’s biology of how similar or not so similar they are to humans, while the character explained to the aliens the why and how.
Sometimes the female character had to improvise a pad or tampon and other times she’s introduced to advance alien medicine that can put her body on pause with a shot or a patch. Either way, it’s not a bad idea to have this subject mention in a story when you want to add a bit of realism.
 DamnBlackHeart · Sat Feb 11, 2017 @ 06:57pm · 0 Comments |
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