The funniest thing in the world to me is when people write mermaids that are bothered by humans eating fish. Like do you think fish don’t eat each other? The ocean is full of little freaks that will eat whatever or whoever the fuck will fit in their mouths. If the mermaids haven’t been eating fish this whole time what do you think they’ve been eating? If the answer is humans, that doesn’t make it any less funny. They’ll eat the species that looks like the top half of them but won’t eat a species that looks like the bottom half? Peak comedy.
This bothered me when I was a tiny little kid and the little mermaid was a brand new disney movie. I loved it but I knew that almost all their sea creature friends were predators and that there isn’t much actual plant life in the ocean anyway. Now as an adult I feel like the issue is that they just don’t like humans eating THEIR fish.
It feels like a sort of taxonomic blindness, like how often people talk about birds eating other species of birds or predatory mammals eating others in the same (cladistic) family as cannibalism. Cannibalism is within species, like humans and cows are both mammals but it's not cannibalism to eat a cow. But a lot of people tend to think of things like "fish" as a single group in the same way, so end up viewing interspecific predation as a form of cannibalism.
Found this in the tags.
Thought it was worth sharing.
