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Continuation
aka: Continuation Fic

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King: No! What happens next? What happens next?
Announcer: And this concludes the final episode of "Bleeding Hearts."
King: WAH!
Luz: Buddy, let me tell you a little something about fan fiction.
King: ...Go on.
The Owl House, "Coven Lovin Soap Opera"

A type of Fan Fic that picks up where a series, movie or book left off and carries on from that point; they're frequently written in order to provide a much more satisfactory ending than the one provided by the original writer(s).

While these can exist for any work, they're most often seen for those that were cancelled before they could be completed, concluded in a deliberately ambiguous (or incomprehensible) manner, or had their original author die with the series still incomplete. Any work that ended on an "And the Adventure Continues!" note is also fair game. Overall, Continuation Fics serve as a response to the human need to ask "and then what happened?"

See also Flash Forward Fic, which is set way after the series ended, and sometimes following the children of the original cast (who may or may not be official). Fan Sequel is a similar phenomenon, where the fans actually try to continue the series in its original medium (or something close to it). Compare Conclusion in Another Medium.

If you're looking for the trope referring to when a previously cancelled show actually continues, then that's Uncanceled. Which, in turn, makes any of the continuation fics made by the fandom Outdated by Canon, unless they're very good at guessing.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Assassination Classroom has Adventures in Solitude, taking place 15 years after the finale.
  • Continuations of Code Geass:
    • In The End by V0ID starts seconds after the ending of Code Geass. It fills in some of the moments that went unexplored, and continues on to the chain of events following the last episode.
    • Another series, The First Servant by Firelord Zuko starts off a few years after the ending, mainly through the eyes of Nunnally's son and heir, Faramond vi Britannia, though it spans several more decades. The story itself also fleshes out the universe (including scenes set in the EU) as well as the fallout of Zero Requiem on the world stage. All while Lelouch watches from the shadows.
  • Death Note:
  • Earth by Ken Wolfe picks up at the end of the El-Hazard: The Magnificent World OVAs and spins a tale that not only cleans up the few loose threads left by the series, but also accounts for all of the pastel drawings of "things that happen after" shown under the end credits for the last episode.
  • Things Are Gonna Get Easier follows Kawajiri Hayato following the ending of Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Diamond Is Unbreakable, showing him recover from the trauma dealing with Yoshikage Kira, helping his mom push through the death of her husband, and growing closer with the Stand Users of Morioh.
  • Richard Lawson's Thy Inward Love starts off at the No Ending of the Ranma ½ manga and provides a conclusion.
  • Vincent Seifert's The Taming of the Horse is anotherRanma 1/2 fanfic which solves the manga's ambiguous ending.
  • The Neverending Road is a Hikaru no Go Fanfic that begins right where the manga abruptly ends.
  • The number of Yu-Gi-Oh! fanfics of this type is staggering — and the release of its sequel series, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, did nothing to slow it down; instead, authors have either focused on filling in the ten-year blank between series or moved even further ahead.
  • Due to the ambiguous ending of the second Cardcaptor Sakura movie, when Sakura finally tells Syaoran that she loves him, and the movie fades to black as Sakura jumps across a chasm created in the last (har de har har...) "fight scene" of the movie, many fan authors felt the need to clarify what else happened. This has led to a number of continuation fics, many of which involve new cardcaptors (who may or may not be self-inserts) picking up where Sakura left off, and an incredibly popular obsession with Alternate Universe romance fics whose only basis of being part of the canon is that the guy is "Syaoran" and the girl is "Sakura", and they may or may not have friends or relatives with familiar names from the series.
  • When the original Tenchi Muyo! OVA series (actually two series of 6 episodes each, plus a special episode between them) ended in 1995, little had been resolved. While the first OVA was entirely workable as a standalone story, it was blatantly obvious that the second was intended to lead into something bigger. Various supplemental material made this even more obvious. But it didn't happen, and two Alternate Continuity television spinoffs were produced instead. The second spinoff was pretty much a flop, and aside from a Magical Girl parody series and The Movies that was pretty much the end of Tenchi Muyo. Thus, assuming the story would never be completed, fanfic writers naturally took it upon themselves to make their own endings. The majority of Tenchi fanfics seem to have been Continuations of the OVA storyline, while the remainder was filled mostly with similar fanfics for the first TV series (which had a non-ending in its own right). Then a decade after the franchise had seemingly died, a third OVA series materialized. But it didn't really advance the story much anyway, aside from introducing several new characters; all the major events never really happened. Thus, Continuations are still common, but their writers have to either set them after the non-events of the third OVA, or perhaps more frequently just ignore it because it sucked.
  • Samurai Champloo has spawned a number of fics based on what happened after the trio split up.
  • Thawing Permafrost is a Rosario + Vampire fic set three years after the end of Season I, after the main cast has graduated from Yokai Academy.
  • Asuka & Shinji's Infinite Playlist is an Evangelion fanfiction which picks up right where the manga adaptation left off, telling the next events in Shinji's life and expanding on the new parallel reality created by the Third Impact.
  • Epilogue of Evangelion is a 700-page (non-hentai) Doujinshi following Shinji and Asuka's life after End of Evangelion, and it ends with Babies Ever After.
  • HERZ continues the series changing the outcome of the Final Battle against SEELE (due to a chain of events the Third Impact was averted). The story begins twelve years after, showing how the world and the characters have changed and what challenges they are facing while gradually showing how they got to that point.
  • Scar Tissue: It is a Dark Fic that starts out eight months after End of Evangelion, following Shinji and Asuka while they repair their damaged relationship. Meanwhile, humanity is slowly returning and rebuilding their civilization, and Seele has also returned and is plotting another attack against the remnants of Nerv.
  • The Lyrical Nanoha fanfiction MGLN Crisis here is set one year after the third anime season. See its trope page here.
  • The Elemental Chess Trilogy returns the reader to the world of Fullmetal Alchemist, beginning almost three years after the Promised Day and concluding roughly five years farther on.
  • Rebellion definitely seems to pick up right after the last episode of the anime for Chobits.
  • A lot of Naruto fanfics take place after the events of the manga ended. White Rain is a very good example.
  • Stars Above takes place around two years after the events of Puella Magi Madoka Magica... two years from Homura's perspective, anyway. The bulk of the story takes place in 2007, four years before Madoka.
  • Stars Through Darkness by Kurisaki-sempai on FFN takes off after the OVA ending of Black★Rock Shooter. It comes with its own origins for the Other Selves, starts with The End of the World as We Know It, and puts everyone on the “can be killed” list.
  • Several Blood+ fics that continue where the anime left off center around such things as the Queens' hibernation theory and Saya awakening to live a peaceful life, among other things.
  • Just an Unorthodox Thief is a continuation fic for the Lupin III universe, although primarily being a continuation of the Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine animé, with references to other parts of the franchise.
  • Cooler Rising falls into this for Dragon Ball Z. It's set after the battle with Buu, going off some off-hand comments made in one chapter. It's also a continuation of the movies in which Cooler starred, obviously.
  • The webcomic Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: Season 2 picking up where the series' infamous Cliffhanger Gainax Ending left off.
  • The Revolutionary Girl Utena and Penguindrum crossover fanfic Seinen Kakumei Utena has its story beginning ten years after the Duel called Revolution, and several weeks after the Fate Train Transfer.
  • Since the ending of Valvrave the Liberator left a lot of time and loopholes opened, the fanfic The Return picks up after the last battle and fixes what many fans consider a bitter ending. Haruto's father has H-Neun, now a prisoner of the Magius and under their control, steal his corpse to extract the Runes and resurrect him.
  • Beyond the Winding Road covers the events after the main body of the story in PandoraHearts, beginning just before the events of the epilogue and continuing afterwards. It's mainly a Slice of Life story about how the characters deal with the remains of their past lives.
  • Betray Me Not takes place starting from the last few scenes of Gungrave. It is an attempt to resolve the anime's Ambiguous Ending, in which Brandon/Grave isn't truly revealed to be dead or alive. It centers on the consequences of Brandon's actions in the last episode and how he reconciles with Millennion and Mika, whom he has betrayed by hurting their agents to protect Harry.
  • The The Legacy of the Cursed Mask Series (save for the prequel) serve as this to the Inuyasha game, Inuyasha: The Secret of the Cursed Mask, focusing on Michiru (the "male" Player Character) at first, though his sister Kaname (the "female" Player Character) soon joins in before they journey to the Feudal Era with InuYasha and the others.
  • Soul Eater: Troubled Souls is an implicit one for Soul Eater. It begins after the battle against Arachnophobia, which went primarily like in the anime. Focusing on the divergence point between the anime and the manga, the fic prides itself on combining the events of each medium in the most comprehensive but logical way, and keeps on going from there, alluding to a possible future encounter with Arachnophobia.
  • Cross Ange: Futatsu Sekai no Border is an Italian fanfic that continues the events of Cross Ange, including a 20 Minutes into the Future moment where Mana has regain their power again and are wrecking havoc on True Earth.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh 5D's: Beyond the Future is a sequel that takes place ten years after the series ended.
  • Reunion is a Wandering Son story set a few years after the manga ends. Nitori, Anna, Takatsuki, Chiba, Mako, Kanako, and Chizuru decide to meet up for a reunion.
  • The Case Closed fandom has an interesting take on this, because the series is about as episodic as you can get while still technically having an ongoing storyline. As a result, many fans have taken to writing "endgame" fics depicting the Final Battle between the good guys and The Syndicate, knowing full well that in a few years it'll all be Outdated by Canon. MangaLuva's When Pandora's Box Is Opened is a pretty good crash-course in what to expect from these fics: full-on Canon Welding with forerunner series Magic Kaito, the mysterious Pandora gem driving the plot, and every one of the canon material's carefully-segregated Cast Herds cheerfully mingling and playing Xanatos Speed Chess with aplomb. Oh, and Shipping. Lots of shipping.
  • Solar System is a Pokémon: Diamond and Pearl Adventure! continuation about how the Team Galactic characters takes the dissolution of the team.

    Comic Books 

    Crossover 
  • The Secret Return of Alex Mack is a crossover with dozens of other stories, including an assortment of B-movie monsters, and frequently takes the opportunity to continue past the original ending and deal with the aftermath. Such as what Hanna did after all her friends and enemies were dead, or how the world responded to the outbreaks of silicate monsters on the mainland.
  • Tangled Adventures in Arendelle actually counts as a continuation for two movies, Tangled and Frozen. It starts after the wedding in Tangled Ever After, dives into the reasoning and the influence of Rapunzel and Eugene's cameo in Frozen, and then continues the Frozen story with Tangled characters as part of their story.
  • Brutal Mario has one known as The Middle Path ROM.

    Fan Works 
  • THIS IS IT! is the title of a Lucky Star fanfic of another, long-deleted fic titled Cries Unheard, detailing its antagonists' demises that led to the flash-forward prologue with Miyuki under police interrogation by Yui but never got to play out way back then. That, however, is the only thing its author meant to resolve, albeit with some actual buildup that revolves mostly around Konata and Yutaka's liberation.
  • The Delinquent and His Lover had been a Dead Fic since 2017 before another author picked up where they left off.
  • Kage became a Dead Fic in 2017. In 2022, a couple of fans created Shadows over Meridian to follow up the story with what they think would have happened had it continued.

    Films — Animation 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Last Night in Soho: Lavender is an Ellie/Sandie Slash Fic that starts right after the final scene of the movie.
  • The film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was of variable popularity with fans of the graphic novel, but among those who enjoyed it, there developed a large number of 'what happened next' stories. Most of these involve adding characters to the League with powers that weren't already part of the cadre, such as werewolves or psychics. At least one series, however, subverted the tendency by saddling the League with an individual completely lacking in supernatural bilities.
  • The fanfic by fellow troper sparx13, Lost the Last Place I Could Stand provides an end to the story of The Operative from Serenity.
  • A number of fan-made continuations exist attempting to pick up on the ambiguous ending of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). A notable example is Unfinished Business, which attempts to connect both the 1982 film and the prequel, and opts for a more optimistic tone despite the dark nature of the stories it was based on. Other fanfics have often gone for much bleaker approaches, often having one (or both) the survivors (usually Childs) turning out or implied to be infected.

    Literature 
  • Besides the major canon-divergence of Tom being alive, the Eleutherophobia series is set during the aftermath of the war in Animorphs #54: The Beginning.
  • The epic poem The Aeneid ends with Aeneas killing his nemesis. Many felt that the ending was incomplete, and in the 15th century, an Italian poet named Maffeo Vegio wrote a continuation for it, which was widely printed in later editions. The Aeneid, of course, follows the adventures of a minor character from The Iliad sometime after the fall of Troy. It could be considered a continuation fic itself.
  • One of the primary reasons Cervantes wrote Part II of Don Quixote was that so many people wrote Continuations of the original that, in his opinion, didn't understand the original.
  • Arthur Conan Doyle reluctantly had to continue writing his Sherlock Holmes stories due to this. Had most of Victorian Britain not started writing godawful fanfiction to try and resurrect Holmes, Doyle would have been content to leave a character he'd grown to despise dead at the foot of Reichenbach Falls.
  • After John Polidori's vampire tale "The Vampyre" was adapted into a French stage play by Charles Nodier,note  an unauthorized sequel novel by Cyprien Bérard, Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires (1820), was attributed to Nodier.
  • Prior to the prequels, most of the Star Wars Expanded Universe was a continuation from the original trilogy.
  • The North Remembers, which takes place after the events of A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. It focuses where it left off with all of the previous POV characters, along with some new ones who are Ascended Extras, namely Sandor Clegane, Val, Edmure Tully, Jeyne Westerling, etc.
  • Hottie 3: The Best Fan Fic in the World is a fan sequel to Burning Ambition, the sequel to the novel "Hottie" by Jonathan Bernstein.
  • Timeline-191: After the End is a continuation of Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 series that picks up from the end of the Second Great War in 1944 and taking the world to 2009.
  • The Extended Railway Series is a continuation of Rev. W. Awdry's The Railway Series, picking up after Thomas And Victoria (the last book of the original series, Thomas And His Friends, hadn't been published yet).
  • Demetrious Polychron started to sell an unauthorized The Lord of the Rings spin-off/sequel on the Amazon, called The Fellowship of the King, and tagged himself as a co-writer to make sure people perceive his novel as an official continuation. The story follows Elanor Gamgee Gardner on a quest to find the Rings of Power and prevent Middle-earth from falling again to Morgoth’s evil servants. He also filed a copyright suit against the Tolkien Estate and Amazon, accusing them of using his story for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Charmed got two more seasons on charmed-net.de. While the site has been closed after 10 years all scripts are still available. Surprisingly it takes the not so popular Post-Script Season and turns it into something really enjoyable.
  • "Epistolary: The 50 Years Before We Were Born" is a Doctor Who fic centering on the lives of Amy and Rory after "The Angels Take Manhattan". The story is written in epistolary form, as the title suggests, as Amy contacts Bracewell (from "Victory of the Daleks") and renews their friendship as he agrees to collect Amy and Rory's diaries and letters to present to the Doctor so they can share their lives with him, even if they never see him again. River Song appears intermittently, as does Jack Harkness, whom Rory meets when he's drafted into the Army and fights on the European Front during World War II.
  • Firefly:
    • The folks at stillflying.net took a rather unique approach, continuing from the end of Firefly in which the remainder of the first season and the first half of the second is a buildup to the events of the film Serenity, and the second half of season two is the events of that film with much more room to dig into the characters and flesh out the story. They also plan to continue into season three.
    • The Firefly fanfic Forward is a continuation of the series set after the end of Serenity, though it is partially alternate universe, in that all the heroes survived the film's events.
  • Forever Knight got two fanfic virtual continuations: FK4, a Script Fic series which retconned the Downer Ending, and V4S, a prose series that took the ending as canon and continued in a darker vein.
  • The Game of Thrones fanfic There and Back Again starts like this. Four months after Jon Snow killed Daenerys Targaryen and he is exiled Beyond the Wall, Jon is visited by the Stranger, one of the Gods of the Faith of the Seven. The Stranger reveals that the events of the entire show were hijacked by an Evil Sorcerer known as Bloodraven so that he could get rid of the Targaryens and rule Westeros in the guise of "Bran Stark". So the Stranger offers Jon a chance to fix things before the Long Night comes again, so the story becomes a Peggy Sue.
  • During the period where Manifest was cancelled, The Manifest Completion Project was written by sitcommunism to continue off from season 3, with two seasons currently publish. Even after Manifest was renewed by Netflix, the author plans to conclude their own interpretation of how the series would have gone.
  • The 10th Kingdom has one in the fanfic Reality (Shay Sheridan). In fact the website Kingdoms Press maintains a whole slew of fanfics, many of which are a Continuation and, while varying in quality, mostly rather good. Surprisingly few of them involve OCs, and even when such characters appear and heroically save the day, the writer usually preserves the Official Couple of Virginia and Wolf; if new romance enters the story at all it's either by finding a Love Interest for Wendell or Tony, or providing one for said OC.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Twenty years after West End Games lost the license to make Star Wars games and went out of business, there are still roleplayers making supplements with game stats for the characters and vehicles from the latest movies.

    Video Games 
  • The Legend of Zelda:
  • Repairs is but one of many Metroid post-Fusion fanfictions. There's hundreds of the damn things thanks to Nintendo taking nineteen years to actually continue the series story beyond Fusion!
  • Telltale's Game of Thrones: Season Two AU follows the remaining members of House Forrester after the climactic battle of Ironrath against House Whitehill.
  • The Count's World is a Super Paper Mario fanfiction series that picks up after the game ends and continues in the style of a Saturday Morning cartoon. It explains away some of the ending such as Tippi returning to being Timpani and the player defeating Dimentio, as both of them appear as main characters. Rather than existing for the purpose of tackling unanswered questions or elaborating on the story, it mainly focuses on the characters trying to make the world a better place, getting into odd situations along the way.
  • Two-Step is a Left 4 Dead fanfic that takes place after the ending to the sequel.
  • Twisted Fates takes place a year after Ghost Trick, and deals with Sissel trying to take on a Serial Killer
  • Thanks to the extensive modding community surrounding Neverwinter Nights, continuation fics don't just exist as stories or scripts, but as playable episodes that a player can import their hero into and experience. BioWare even held a contest to create a somewhat official interquel between Shadows and Hordes.
  • The Camera Loves You and its sequel The Dreaming pick up where the Tomb Raider (2013) reboot left off, using the plot of the original Tomb Raider as a basis for its storyline. The events on Yamatai have left Lara and Sam traumatized, famous and uncertain of the extent of their feelings towards one another.
  • Pokémon:
  • Fire Emblem Fates: Aftermath takes place just after the Revelation path of Fire Emblem Fates, and focuses on the rebuilding and Valla and the cultural and political consequences thereof.
  • Sly Cooper: Thief of Virtue is a webcomic that serves as a sequel to Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time.
  • Sonic Rift is a webcomic that starts three years after Sonic Forces.
  • Resident Evil: The Progenitor Chronicles is this starting from Volume 3, Chapter 6 on, where it details the aftermath of Resident Evil 6 and the protagonists' response to the Family.
  • Sly Cooper: Thieves and Robbers is an unofficial sequel of Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, written as if were an actual game on the PlayStation 4, complete with a walkthrough. It's set right after Thieves in Time, and contains more Cooper ancestors, resolves the infamous cliffhanger ending, and justified Penelope's betrayal.
  • Tyrantly Ever After follows the events of Disgaea 4, aiming to develop Valvatorez, Fenrich and Artina's relationship into a polyamorous one, though not without considerable conflict (and a Crisis of Faith) first.
  • Ebott's Wake starts off around a year and a half after the end of Undertale. Its prequel, Terra Incognita, takes it a step further by having the first chapter literally be a retread of the Pacifist ending cutscene and having the next chapters show what happens immediately after that. The fic as a whole shows roughly the first month of attempts to get monsters out onto the Surface.

    Visual Novels 
  • Coda takes place after the events of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. It takes the form of a series of short stories starring the Remnants of Despair as they wake up from the simulated Jabberwock Island and now have to navigate a post-despair world where there all living on the run.
  • Cicada Psalms is a sequel oneshot to Higurashi: When They Cry. It's set 7 years afterwards, in 1990. The gang has since grown into adults and are happily moving along with their lives.
  • Katawa Shoujo:
    • Weekend at Hisao's follows on the Maybe Ever After ending of Shizune's route to look at Shizune and Hisao's relationship after they leave Yamaku Academy.
    • Similarly, Sisterhood tackles the period immediately after Hanako's good ending. It provides a huge amount of added character development for Hanako and Lilly, and it feels like a natural extension of the route.
    • Thing You Cannot Forget takes Rin's ambigously depressing "neutral" ending where she transfers to another school and through a Crossover has her wander into the plot of Persona 5, and it is there that her character journey continues.

    Web Animation 
  • Truer Than Fiction: This series is several stories that serve as a continuation of the ACTUALLY HAPPENED Web series, picking up where the stories left off, tying up the loose ends of the original story, and giving character arcs to the characters from the stories.

    Webcomics 

    Western Animation 
  • The Gargoyles Saga, which picked up where the series Gargoyles left off.
  • Don't Haze Me is a Dark Fic of Kim Possible asking "What if, seeing the world differently as an adult, Kim became an Anti-Hero and teamed up with Shego?"
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • There is a series of photocomics depicting events after the conversion of Cybertron at the end of Beast Machines. The series begins with a story entitled Obsidian's Lament, which picks up with Vehicon generals Obsidian and Strika where the series left them, in orbit around Cybertron. From there it explores the effects of the reformatting on Cybertron and the population.
  • The Contractually Obligated Chaos series is a continuation of the Beetlejuice cartoon, which had no defined finale. It skips ahead a few years to Lydia's senior year of high school and goes on from there.
  • The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fanfic novellas written by Zarius continue the adventures of the Fred Wolf animated series Turtles. For added measure, they are said to place after the 2009 crossover movie Turtles Forever, with the author even coming up with a Hand Wave explanation for the classic Turtles odd behaviour in the movie

Alternative Title(s): Continuation Fic

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