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roselightfairy ([personal profile] roselightfairy) wrote2021-07-09 04:56 pm
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So there's a headcanon I've had for awhile - or more like one of those niggling questions about elf biology that becomes a headcanon.


I believe there's some Word Of God (or possibly just glorified fanon) re Tolkien's elves, where they basically . . . only get pregnant if they want to and having children is more a matter of will and desire than chance. Thinking about this headcanon made me wonder if that means elves don't menstruate, since menstruation is kind of an "in case it's time for a baby" bodily function, and elves' bodies could presumably prepare when they knew it was time.

And THEN, thinking about that made me wonder about Arwen, an elf who becomes a mortal. I'm curious about which elf features she retains and which ones she loses, and I wondered if that chosen-fertility might be something she loses. Which might mean Arwen would get a period for the first time ever, three thousand years into her life. And what might that be like??

I've had this headcanon for awhile, and today the stars finally aligned for me to write it. I do want to warn, though, that the discussion of menstruation tends to reduce the people who experience it to "women" within the writing of this piece. That's not an opinion I personally hold, but it was the way the characters talked about it and I couldn't figure out how to make it more inclusive without losing the specific conversations and revelations they were having. So warning about that binary language, if that's something that upsets you. But if not, there is the link!