Minus is known as a dash and a plus is usually known as and
The answer would be C. The antagonist in a story is the “bad guy”
Night is a 1960 memoir by Elie Wiesel based on his Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, toward the end of the Second World War in Europe. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the parent–child relationship as his father deteriorates to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful, teenage caregiver. "If only I could get rid of this dead weight ... Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." In Night everything is inverted, every value destroyed. "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends", a kapo tells him. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone.
I'd choose this dialogue to revise your sentence:
<span>“Did you hear?” I asked them. “My painting got selected! Exciting, right?” I smiled. “Especially given that I felt so incompetent at the beginning and that the competition was ruthless!”
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It feels like the option that best uses the dialogue to improve this sentence, because the other options are either too informal or just the same sentence as the original one.