#this turned into a huge meta abt fae and i'm only sort of sorry

[havocmadden]

Wait, what did you and your friend decide on? *Does* Mal have blood? Is it like... fairy blood? Because if she's half-dragon-fairy and half-god, then she quite literally doesn't have a drop of human blood in her. Greek myths say golden ichor flows through the gods' veins, but all their half-god, mortal children have human blood like their human parents. This would imply that, if Mal has blood, she has the same kind of blood as Maleficent.

okay so in order for any of this to make sense we are operating under a few assumptions:— that hades isn't mal's dad because i think it's dumb and it does not spark joy. if you want god-fae blood analysis go somewhere else. — that mal's non-maleficent parent is human.— that maleficent, like fairy godmother, flora, blue fairy, etc, is a fae / fairy / faerie / however you want to spell it. a lot of ppl ( myself included ) write mal w/ traditional fae-traits, such as resistance to iron, empathy, pointed ears / horns, a true name, all that fun stuff. and blood has a FUCK ton of iron, so fae have copper based blood ( which i must say i LOVE bc it gives jane blue blood which is v important to me as a human person ) but mal is only half fae, so the question remains — does mal have blood??? if mal were to have straight up human-esque iron blood, it'd probably give mal some kind of autoimmune disorder like autoimmune hemolytic anemia. except, like, the fae version of that. but we also have to consider that maleficent, being fully fae, would have blue blood, and that carrying a half-human fetus in her body would probably a) give maleficent blood poisoning or b) cause her cells to attack the fetus or c) some combo of the two. so in order to have a viable half-human half-fae the kid either has to be carried by the human parent or outside of the fae in some way. also we're making a bold assumption that maleficent is fully fae and not half-fae half-dragon. so wtf do we do abt the fact that maleficent seems to just. be a dragon. are dragons a subspecies of fae, or vice versa? let's say for the sake of argument that dragons are cold-blooded reptilian-esque creatures.  but mal and maleficent don't seem to be experiencing any of the issues that a cold-blooded animal might have. so let's say that maleficent is fully fae, and not a dragon, simply something SIMILAR to a dragon that isn't cold-blooded — to be specific, maleficent is a dragon mimic. so let's say maleficent is warm-blooded. the 2016 film definitely paints her closer to birds than it does to dragons. let's say that faeries have bird blood ( their blood cells have nuclei and bone marrow doesn't have to create new blood cells ) that have hemocyanins ( binding the oxygen to copper cells rather than iron cells ). this enables fast healing and gives them lighter bones which is needed for flight. and from there it makes sense that a subspecies of fae developed that is a mimic of dragons ( which is what maleficent is ), as birds and reptiles are fairly closely related as far as relations in the animal kingdoms go. baby birds, too, require a lot of parental care after hatching, similar to human infants after birth. there are plenty of species of birds that generally only have one egg at a time, so let's say that's the norm for fae, too. we can also assume that the egg, once out of the mother fae, would have a fairly long incubation time after birth because “typically the larger the bird, the longer the incubation period.” i imagine that fae eggs are highly prized, and often kept and turned into shields / helmets / etc for when the fae is older, given the ratio of hardness of the egg shells of birds. this also means that baby fae have an egg tooth, but i digress.so if maleficent is a fae who has all the BIOLOGY of a fae rather than the biology of a dragon ( which is a whole other spicy fantasy anatomy discussion ), while we don't have to worry about her cells attacking a human fetus as fae lay eggs, fertilizing would be. um. complicated given that it's likely that fae and humans would have completely different sets of chromosomes. but let's say for the sake of argument it gets done somehow. and maleficent lays an egg that gestates for a little over five years ( that's mal! ). what kind of blood she has would probably depend on what exactly the dominant gene is. i personally think that since humans seem to be the more common species in this universe that the human genes are dominant and the fae ones recessive, which gives mal a human-based blood that have nucleated red blood cells. however, her heart probably beats faster than other humans, and her body would be unable to process iron, so mal has a lower threshold than the rest of us as to how much iron is too much iron. so she wouldn't like iron-rich foods much — they'd upset her stomach. and her body, being unable to process iron, ends up with a fuck ton of green waste product called biliverdin which bonds with the iron ( it normally doesn’t do this but let’s say it does here just because ). in humans, excess biliverdin can be fatal ( there's a species of lizard where it's not fatal to them ??? and scientists can't figure out why ??? which is just a fun fact ) BUT since mal has a larger liver due to her fae mother ( as birds have a larger liver than humans, like. proportionally to the rest of their organs ) i think she'd be fine. like, her blood would be green because of the excess biliverdin, and that'd be real fucking weird, but like, aside from being Generally Intolerant to iron, and having weird green blood, she'd function relatively normally i think. she’d probably also be infertile like a lot of hybrids ( mules for one ) which could suck for her later on ig? but that’s not smth i imagine she’d be super heartbroken over.tldr; mal has green blood and i have taken some liberties with science because i am not a bio major and half of these articles were incomprehensible to me, your long-suffering philosophy major who hasn’t taken a biology class since high school