I love them so much because they’re about as sharp as a baseball and their anatomy is ridiculous to the point of them literally being classified as plankton for years because they just sort of get blown around by the ocean and look confused, but because they lay more eggs than ANY OTHER VERTEBRATE IN EXISTENCE, evolution can’t stop them
Why is no big predator coming and gnawing on them?
Their biggest defense is that they’re massive and have super tough skin, but they do get hunted by sharks or sea lions sometimes and they just sort of float there like ‘oh bother’ as it happens
Even funnier, because they eat nothing but jellyfish they’re really low in nutritional value anyway, so they basically survive by being not worth eating because they’re like a big floating rice cracker wrapped in leather.
So basically the only reason natural selection hasn’t taken care if them is because they are the most useless fish
yes, they’ve perfected uselessness to the point of being unstoppable
The single best piece of writing advice I ever got was from a professor teaching a playwriting class, who told us that in every scene, especially scenes that were just dialogue, every character should want something. Making every character in a scene have a goal is an easy way to avoid dialogue that’s just exposition, and to make sure your dialogue drives the plot forward and/or reveals characterization.
It doesn’t have to be complicated or super weighty–as long as the characters have a goal, there will be tension in the scene even if the goals are small. Character X wants to borrow a pen, and character Y wants to make a good impression on character X. X wants to insult Y until they go away, and Y wants to annoy X by pretending not to notice the insults. X wants Y to give them the last slice of pizza, and Y is super full but still doesn’t want X to have it. No matter what your character’s goal is, it will reveal something about who that character is to the reader, and the conflict between your characters’ goals will give the scene momentum.
