Opinions and critique on my plot,please

[Elvin Cross]

So I read this other thread,about wanting some criticism on his plot,and I thought,"why not I do it as well".An opinion of a good judge can be an opinion to the many,and I just came up with that quote,and I'm not entirely sure if it's true.

Anyways,my plot goes like this.

Thirteen Pioneers are the first humans to travel into another dimension and establish contact to foreign intelligent life. The world they traveled into, is set in the victorian era where magic exist and with oddly an absurd amount of different intelligent races,even including dragons larger than godzilla.

The first one they encounter is a little girl being surrounded by nasty kidnappers.They beat up said kidnappers,ties them up,and brought them back for interrogation *cough*human experimentation*cough*.

And about the little girl,apparently the kidnappers were a big gang of slave traders that burned her village and she doesn't know whether her family is alive or not.Of course the pioneers had trouble guessing what she was trying to convey,but seeing the burned down village, they assumed what happened,and took the girl under their care.

Later on in the story,the little girl was given proper education and was now capable of talking with them to some degree.Now she wants to go outside and try to look for her family if possible,and the team also decided it was now also time to conduct more contact after learning a bit of the language after that "interrogation".And so they assigned Mackenzie Raudeberg,the main character and the closest one to Yara,the elf girl,to accompany and act as her guardian.And the two now set in a journey to learn deeper about the fantasy world as well as looking for Yara's missing family.

There are more to this story like discovering the truth about magic, the return of an invading alien race which initiated a battle between the gods and them in the long past,and firmly establishing a territory for the pioneers to set as a settlement for more humans. But that's just a quarter what I have in mind to put into my story,and this is how far spoilers will go .

 

[Sammo2191]

I think that your story sounds really good! I like the part about different dimension taking them back to the Victorian era and that magic and aliens exist!! This sounds like my kind of story!!

 

[Renae]

This sounds like a great story something I would definitely read.. please keep us posted on when and where we can read!!

 

[Lou Bill]

I feel like the elf girl could become kind of stereotypical. What type of elfs are these?

 

[martinH]

I like the magic Victorian era setting with aliens, but I think the most important thing is not to get too carried away in world building and focus on the story. To be honest, the world you have created is way more interesting than the story you described so far. I might be wrong, it is a bit hard to tell from just the exposition part of the arc. Are the Pioneers supposed to gather information about the world? Conquer it? Or befriend it? Or do they act only as a vessel for the reader to explore this new fantastic world.

Plus I have to say, the elf girl is pretty cliche. Sorry, for being blunt. But burnt down village, orphan looking for vengeance... Good call though for not having her as a main character. When I see something like this I straight up expect either a twist where the girl burnt her village by accident or some kind of a play on the whole orphan with antagonist destroying their home thing. Is there some sort of a twist coming, or is it just to make the baddies look bad?

And what about Mackenzie Raudeberg. There isn't much about the character in the plot summary, despite the fact it is supposed to be the main character. Why is this particular character the closest to Yara? I mean there is a huge space for flushing out the character through the relationship with the girl—especially during the "getting to know each" other part. Is it a surrogate child for the character? Is it just pity, that makes the character care? Is it pragmatism, where the character does have genuine interest in Yaras fate, only in information they can gather?

Maybe you do have answers for all of these. If so, then never mind. But if you dont, you should probably think about it. I usually have a story arc for the main character ready before I start throwing in secondary characters and fantastic mythos. That way I know what is the purpose of all characters and fantastical scenery is in relation to what I want to happen to the main character. In the past, before I was doing all this work before I would often get stuck during writing and realizing I have nowhere to go with this particular motive.