Like ElfQuest But Not: Please Help Me with Large-Cast Project

Okay, so I've been writing stuff inspired by Elf Quest for well over a decade, maybe two decades by now. Only by "writing" I mean mostly that I spent 98 percent of that time compiling biographies of the main characters (who begat whom back 230 years) and the other 2 percent writing plots that either need the EQ plot and characters to function, or that are too similar to EQ to avoid the "she's just ripping off EQ" label. Or are just plain dead-end stories and bad writing.

So it seems like I have a giant cast without a plot. I like my giant cast. I'm sorta giving it a workover, trying to put the characters into different configurations, different families and such, messing with ages, but the main characters I created way back when I know so well that I can write them all down from memory even if I haven't thought about the project in a year and a half.

Could you please help me brainstorm a plot?

Here's some details that can help narrow this down:

One of the main characteristics of my story is the large cast. I wanted to go even bigger than EQ so I pretty much doubled the cast. My main group has 32 characters. I'm going with a comic book, since that seems the best medium for a bunch of characters whose background activities don't interrupt the foreground action.

These guys are elves, of course, though that's negotiable (and at one point I toyed with making them into gnomes... or gerbil people). They have a tribal system with the exception that they don't choose leaders by lineage. I've actually come up with some ceremonial stuff that I like.

For example, the marriage ceremony starts with proving that the two really want each other, by having the man's friends hide the girl away and lead him on a wild hunt to find her, and if he can't find her by sunset then the deal is off (for a while). It's the friends' job to cut it close! They also make deals for info, to see just what he's willing to give up to get to her in time. And after that's done, the two of them spend a month outside the camp to prove the man could support his wife on his own if he had to.

There's another ceremonial thing where a kid at 8 is handed off to another adult (of the kid's choice) to be raised for 4 years in a kind of apprenticeship. And when I came up with multiple tribes (13 at last count), I tried to work out ceremonies of regularly sending members off to visit other tribes, and marrying out-group.

Let's see...

The First Plot I Tried

Humans or a natural disaster drive the elves from their home, and they scatter; the largest group heads off to locate a tribe they know of, only to find it's been destroyed (they pick up some survivors). I wasn't sure where to go from there and also it's far too similar to EQ.

The Second Plot I Tried

A magical war bled the land of mana except for a small piece of land protected by magic and/or scientific shielding. Some people fleeing the war ended up entering the sheltered area but after generations no one remembers this, so when an outsider comes seeking forgotten magic, it's a shock.

The villain finds magical crystals that amplify powers, but are useless to those born outside the sheltered area, since mana was bled out of the populace at large. Finding that the kids born inside the sheltered area can use powers with the help of the crystals, he kidnaps a bunch of kids from the tribes and the survivors of this attack band together to get them back.

Anything else?

Eh, I dunno. That second plot is kind of a remash of some older plots not connected to this project, so it sort of leaves me cold. But I really don't know what to make of this, where I should go or anything.

Please throw in any suggestions you have, no matter how weird.

Firstly, your cast and ideas so far sound really interesting. I like the ceremonies, especially the one with the 8-year olds.

Maybe you could try a story not quite as large-scale as natual disasters and broken homes ect., at least at first. Perhaps some sort of large beast or monster has shown up in the area they live in, and they have to figure out a way to get rid of it, either by killing it or driving it away.

... Okay, writing this, I just realized that EQ had a similar plot, but it was minor and more of a background story, right? I can't really remember, I never got around to read the whole thing. I hope you can use my suggestion anyway.

All suggestions are welcome. It's in the sifting through them (good and bad) that the real brainstorms come on. Nothing new under the sun, except for the combinations, right?

I'm open to the idea of a small-scale plot. In fact, I had wondered if I couldn't do a sitcom (though comedy isn't my forte) or a soap opera (more on that in a second) or something else from a genre that tends to get set in real life and not fantasy.

Let me through in some details of the relationships I've come up with.

You're Beautiful As You Are

One elf ends up marrying a woman who (at least in the original script) was born to a faithless father who ran around with another woman. The father's misdeeds left each of his kids with scars, and hers is that she doesn't believe she's beautiful unless she's dressed up (fancy clothes, fancy hair... if they had makeup, she'd be using that a lot too).

Her husband, however, is down-to-earth, and doesn't care for all this frippery. He puts up with it for a few years, thinking she just needs time to get over it, but eventually there's a character moment when he takes her down to a pool, undoes her hair, takes off her clothes, and shows her that she's beautiful just the way she is.

The Gang

This one got confusing when I tried stating it without names, so here's the working names at present:

Foxgarden and Merryline (brother and sister) are close friends with Darepear and Owlsound (brother and sister), such that eventually Foxgarden marries Owlsound and Darepear marries Merryline. I was debating about starting the whole story with the "marriage hunt" of one of these two pairs, just to get instant immersion in the ceremonies of their world.

Now, I haven't yet figured out a really legendary way for these four to get into trouble, but that was the gist of The Gang's characterization. These guys aren't bad people, but they're mischievous and high-energy (well, Owlsound more comes along for the ride) and do things the rest of the tribe wishes they wouldn't. If you know Elf Quest, it's like three and a half copies of Bearclaw's human-tricking fun... except I don't really want humans around.

Eventually they'll have kids, two major characters for the ongoing story. (The Gang used to be backstory for the main cast, but then I realized that their characterization was way more interesting than anything I'd come up with for the main story, so I switched some ages around.)

A Girl and Her Uncle

One girl is raised by her uncle, since her parents died when she was very young. The uncle loved her mother dearly but ended up being just a couple years too young to try to court her when his older brother won her heart. So there's a bittersweet backstory to this family.

Also, the girl is a tinker, one of the few elves who explores physics and mechanics when given the chance, whereas the uncle relates to people and doesn't understand machines at all. Sometimes she comes to him with questions about personal relationships and social niceties that he's at a loss for how to explain to someone who doesn't get them intuitively.

The Bachelor and the Widow

A woman loses her husband in the first story arc, and over time a bachelor (who has been friends with her a long time) starts drawing closer to her, to the point where they marry and start up the second set of kids for this already large family.

I wanted to draw this out, to show the hesitancy and uncertainty of how to start this relationship. I mean, he is close to the family, and all the kids (mostly adults now) know and like him, and yet... the feeling that things will change if he makes a move, you know?

Conclusion

So... that's just some of the relationships I've worked out that I'd like to expand on. But a lot of this just doesn't come with plot in and of itself. They're background relationships, most of them, that develop over the long-term as the plot stays in the foreground.

Anyway, hope it helps give you some of the tone of what I'm after.

Hey, maybe we could help each other as I'm in the very same situation! I know what I want out of my story, I just don't know how to get from the three major story events (Kat imprisons demonic personality in her own soul - Demon gets out and gives Kat odd powers - Kat takes down her first major demon general)

If you've got a thread up about it, add a link! I don't think it's a good idea to mix stories within a single thread or we're going to get hopelessly confused. But I'd be glad to take a look at yours.

By the by, I'm open to switching my cast over to something outlandish, like sci fi (planetary or space station), urban fantasy, maybe even plain fiction (recasting the characters as a neighborhood instead of a tribe) or mystery. So if you have ideas that delve outside the low-tech fantasy realm, do add those too. It can only help.

I mainly specialize in Suburban Fantasy where character interactions are important. Do you characters hold any jobs?

It still sounds very interesting. The tinker girl is a good idea, technology is a neglected theme in fantasy.

You say you're going for a comic book. Do you want to make a continued, spanning-over-several-years plot? Because otherwise, you could consider taking some of those ideas you have and write/draw them as one-shots, maybe one issue switching between viewpoints/storylines, if you follow. It would be a little sitcom-like, now that I think about it, and it could be really interesting seeing one of those in a fantasy setting.

Jobs: Well, I had them assigned to stuff at one point, but at present these jobs are all for the genre in which I started, which may or may not shift well. Let's see...

I had a "Hunting Hand" of four hunters (including the Hunt Chief) plus an apprentice learning to hunt. There's the regular Chief, of course. There's a tanner/tailor, who later learns how to make cloth... actually, more on that in a sec. A fisher, who also makes nets and works with clay. A woodcarver, and possibly a carpenter of sorts who helps with building shelters and any other large-scale construction projects.

A lot of the characters fell into the miscellaneous category, which means I figured they would probably be out gathering food that didn't need to be killed first. I also had a scout and some message-runners for getting word out about dangers or gatherings. There's a "dream-keeper" who acts as historian for the tribe, keeping the details of their myths and stories and collective memories.

Certain jobs wouldn't be "no other main duties" jobs: different types of music (no professional dancers or drummers), and advisors to the Chief. However, a person who got injured enough to be unable to perform other duties could take one of these up full time. I did have some characters in the history books who had broken their backs or something.

There's one or more watchers of children, to keep the little ones from getting into trouble, but bear in mind I accepted that only because it's in a tribal setting in which everyone knows everyone else... coming from a homeschool background, it's my basic inclination to avoid any sort of group child care, in favor of having a mother (or possibly father) be the direct caregiver at home. So the watcher wouldn't translate to the modern world really well, unless he's kin of the kids being watched... or possibly in charge of a summer camp.

Plot: I started with the idea of a grand overarching plot that, well, was a lot like Elf Quest. Part of me still prefers that, because I like that sort of thing; but maybe it'd be best in my other projects and not in this one. I do think a fantasy sitcom or... situational drama, sitdrama?... would be something that just plain has not been seen before. It seems like there could be some groundbreaking work here if I got headed in the right direction.

I had thought about something like Saved by the Bell, but really, I'm not much for comedy. I enjoy dramedies, such as The Slayers or Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but in just about everything I've ever done, I've leaned heavily in favor of the drama. That's not to say I won't throw in a joke or two as it feels natural to do so, but I've seen far too many dramatic moments spoiled by inappropriate comedy asides, and it bugs me.

On the other hand, melodrama isn't much my thing either. And I've never been the soap-opera-watching type... if you don't count Buffy and Star Trek Voyager as soap operas. So that's kind of new territory for me as well. Still, situational drama might actually be the way to go, and I'm very open to exploring it if I get a good heading to follow.

Let Me Add...

...that an undercurrent of almost all my projects is a basic respect among characters, and this project leans very strongly that way. My dad and I have long thought that the secret to Star Trek was that the characters cared for each other, enough to sacrifice their lives for each other... in contrast to the Teeth-Clenched Teamwork that so many others seem to cling to as a source of "conflict". Elf Quest proposed "passion and compassion" and I certainly see the wisdom in that.

So yes, some of my characters will be negative ones, and sometimes even the good ones will do negative things. But the main tribe is cohesive, a unit, and they're going to work together instead of at cross-purposes all the time. Not to say they won't argue, or fight to woo the same girl, or maybe even come to blows here or there for whatever reason... but they're a clan, and they're going to stay that way.

I'm not sure how that'll affect the potential for conflict in a sitcom or soap opera. It seems to me that these often deal with interpersonal conflict, and there might be constraints on that given my setup.

Oh, and vignettes seem like a good idea. I don't know if it'd be sufficient to make those the entire series, though.

Wow, long post. I decided to make this a separate post instead of making the first one even longer.

The "more on the tailor in a second" thing:

My initial story had the tribe meeting various other tribes as they traveled, and slowly evolving technology. Here's some highlights:

The tribe encounters cloth-weavers, and the tailor/tanner (or another) learns how to work with fibers enough to start creating her own cloth.

The tribe starts with melee weapons and slings, and later meets a tribe that uses bows, so they learn how to craft bows.

The tinker girl starts actually inventing stuff that, little by little, gets used by the tribe. I'm not sure what, but I wanted to make sure that the technology development wasn't entirely assimilation from other tribes.

One guy works on developing a writing or mathematical system. I might use "rope knotting language" here, as I'd planned to use it in a different work and it might be interesting to see ropes used for writing here.

The tribe gains colors as they encounter new pigments from various sources, which means they'll start with a rather limited color set and later improve on it.

Anyway... stuff like that. While I don't want the Cro aspects to become the main plot, I do want to show the tribes passing information around, helping each other to do things in new and interesting ways. And I want to be at least a little educational, showing correct info about how these things work, about the considerations that go into them (real, if a bit simplified, data).