The End of an Era

It seems that today, a once dominating feature of the Avatar Wiki fanon portal has disappeared, or at least has diminished severely. Our wiki used to be the home of countless "post-war" fanons, stories depicting the tales of Aang and his friends after the last episode of the television series. In other words, their authors attempted to answer the question "What happened next?" Many of our fanon titans were of the "post-war" genre, namely, , and by , , and , respectively. These two legends are well-known and honored by anyone in the fanon community, but, like all things, they eventually came to an end. Others, like 's and  by. were simply abandoned, never to see another chapter. Now look around you. How many "post-war" fanons do you see? Not many.

So what's the cause of the plight of the "post-wars?" Is it that the idea of Team Avatar running around the world to stop some new threat of Ozai loyalists became old and cliche? Perhaps, but plenty of authors found ways to dream up different, creative plots that separated their story from the rest and made it interesting. Another possibility is that it's simply been too long since Avatar: The Last Airbender has ended? This theory may seem plausible at first, but it doesn't hold up. If we've simply become tired of the original Avatar universe, then why do we still edit its canon pages? Why are we still obsessing over the Gaang and complaining that the Krew could never be what they were? As a community, we are nothing if not nostalgic over the original series, yet the fanons regarding our favorite heroes are scarce.

Of course, the rare species of "post-war" fanfiction is not entirely extinct. I, for one, am a huge fan of 's, and by  is relatively recent. Still, "post-war" stories are no longer the talk of the town, and it's not like a new brand of fanons have come to take their place. This is a curious phenomenon that I'm still trying to piece together. One moment, we have numerous stories about Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Toph's second journey across the Earth, and then over a period of about one month the whole idea seemed to die. Perhaps after we held AvatarRokusGhost and The Bos in such high regard, no one was brave enough to step up to the plate and try to follow in their footsteps.

I'm sure I'm not just speaking for myself when I say that it would be nice to have a good "post-war" fanon around. Who's willing to accept the challenge?