Hey Nic, I don’t see any petulance here – you are in your right to tell the story you want to tell. The story is in your head and this process of back and forth is just a way of fleshing out the elements.

Initially what I found confusing about your logline was the ordering of the elements. As you say you start with a protagonist, you define the goal, provide stakes and expand with an explanation as to why. Nothing wrong with this technically but my taste moves towards an approach where the inciting incident is put up front , then present the the protagonist (and flaw), define the goal and then define the stakes. This may sound a little formulaic (or maybe even spoon-feeding audiences) but I like to do this because I think this is the order in which someone listening will most quickly and easily hook into the logline, even the final screenplay or movie (unless you’re doing some funky Tarantino type thing). Tell the audience the big moment that sets the story off (informed of boyfriends intention to break up), tell the audience who the story is about (self focused haematologist) and then send them off on their journey (joining LARP and battling thousands of enemies) and if they don’t achieve what they need to what happens (forever lonely and miserable). Again, it’s just taste.

Agreed that making the story about her winning the competition would be the wrong way to go, a misstep. I think you got the important part which is to have her turn up at the LARP and show for the first time to this soon to be ex-boyfriend that she actually cares about what he is interested in and what he enjoys. This is an internal journey goal so I wonder how to show this through the achievement of an external goal which will be visible to the boyfriend? With achievement of this goal it would be the moment where he’s “Oh you actually care about my interests, I won’t break up with you anymore.” This is probably where the haematology skills and the action of ‘battling thousands of enemies’ and sewing descent into the ‘evil’ army would come in. Leave it with you to work out a cool solution!