No Periods, Period/Playing With

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Basic Trope: Female characters of child-bearing age are never seen to menstruate.

• Straight: Alice never menstruates.
• Exaggerated: Women don't even appear to have reproductive systems; babies just materialize without explanation.
• Justified: Alice used to be a man.
  • Or she lives in an Alternate Universe where human reproduction works differently.
  • Or she's ill.
  • Or she's always pregnant.
  • Or she's not exactly a human
  • Alice has been taking extended-use birth control pills (or is always skipping the placebo week with regular ones), so that she doesn't have periods.
  • Reproductive processes are not relevant to the plotline, and so are not dealt with in-story.
  • Alice was born without a uterus.
  • Alice has some kind of hormonal problem (such as polycystic ovary syndrome, for example) that prevents ovulation and periods.
  • Or she's prepubescent.
• Inverted: Alice menstruates perpetually.
  • Literally everyone is menstruating. Possibly even the men.
• Subverted: Alice goes for several months without menstruating, only to discover that it's because she's pregnant.
• Double Subverted: ...but the pregnancy is ectopic and she requires a hysterectomy, preventing her from ever having a period again.
• Parodied: No waste ever comes out of a woman. Not even carbon dioxide.
• Deconstructed: Alice feels like she's not a real woman because she can't menstruate, causing her to go to extreme lengths to "prove" her womanhood.
• Reconstructed: Alice lives in the future, where Applied Phlebotinum allows women to safely turn their menstrual cycles on and off at will.
• Zig Zagged: Sometimes Alice gets regular periods, and sometimes she goes for years without one. A visit to the doctor confirms a hormonal imbalance... but the hormones involved shouldn't be affecting her periods.
• Averted: Alice gets her period once a month.
• Enforced: Alice is the heavily-armoured protagonist in an action-adventure game, so removing her periods is an Acceptable Break From Reality.
  • Alternatively, the author forgot that women menstruate, or was too embarrassed to mention it. Or just thought it would be too gross.
  • Mentioning it serves no purpose, so the author doesn't mention it.
• Lampshaded: "You know," said Bob to Alice, "of all the lame excuses you've used as to why you don't want to sleep with me, your period has never been one of them."
• Invoked: Alice becomes an adventurer in the hope it'll make her periods stop.
  • Alice has a hysterectomy, or starts taking the Pill and always skipping the placebo week so she won't have any more periods.
• Defied: Alice pretends she's trying to get pregnant so she has an excuse to talk about her periods.
• Discussed: "If this were a movie, I'd probably be doing something productive right now instead of curling up in a little ball of cramp-induced self-pity," moaned Alice.
• Conversed: "Hey, ever notice how female characters like Alice never seem to keep a box of tampons in their inventories?"

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