AFanfic that picks up where a series, movie or book left off and carries on from that point. Frequently seen for television series orAnime that were cancelled before they could complete theirStory Arcs, or which concluded with deliberately ambiguous endings, orwhose author died with the series still incomplete. Frequently written in order to provide a much more satisfactory ending than the one provided by the original writer(s). May also occur for a series thatlacks a distinctly defined ending, though in that case it doesn't much matter whether a story is set during or after a series (unless it's so long after that the characters have significantly aged or otherwise changed).

The inevitable response to the human need to ask, "and then what happened?"

See alsoNext Gen Fic, which is setway after the series ended.

Anime and Manga

• In The End byV0ID starts seconds after the ending ofCode 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 Servantby 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.
• Earth by Ken Wolfe picks up at the end of theEl-Hazard: The Magnificent WorldOVAs and spins an epic tale that not only cleans up the few loose threads left by the series, but also accounts forall of the pastel drawings of "things that happen after" shown under the end credits for the last episode!
• Richard Lawson'sThy Inward Love starts off at the irritating no-ending ending of theRanma ½ manga and provides a conclusion that is much more fulfilling to the reader.
• Likewise, Vincent Seifert'sThe Taming of the Horse.
• The Neverending Road is an absolutely brilliantHikaru no Go Fanfic that begins right where the manga abruptly ends.
• The number ofYu-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 evenfurther ahead.
• Due to the ambiguous ending of the secondCardcaptor Sakura movie, whenSakura 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 originalTenchi 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. Varioussupplemental material made this even more obvious. But it didn't happen, and twoAlternate Continuity television spinoffs were produced instead. The second spinoff was pretty much a flop, and aside from aMagical Girlparody series andThe Movies that was pretty much the end ofTenchi 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, athird OVA series materialized. But it didn't really advance the story much anyway, aside from introducing several new characters; all themajor eventsnever 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 frequentlyjust 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 aRosario + Vampire fic set three years after the end of Season I, after the main cast has graduated fromYokai Academy.
• Epilogue of Evangelion is a 700-page (non-hentai)Doujinshi following Shinji and Asuka's life afterEnd of Evangelion. It's also crammed withWAFF and of courseit ends withBabies Ever After.
• TheDeath Note fanfictionKira Is Justice is set four years after the series. (See its trope pagehere.)
• There is a similar fanfic to the above calledRyuk Returns, set five years after the series (which also inspired the above).
• And yet another one:Life After Death Note.
• TheMagical Girl Lyrical Nanoha fanfictionMGLN Crisis here is set one year after the third anime season. See its trope pagehere.
• TheElemental Chess Trilogy returns the reader to the world ofFullmetal 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 forChobits.
• A lot ofNaruto fanfics take place after the events of the manga ended; not quiteNext Gen Fic for some.White Rain is a very good example.

Film

• The filmThe 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 leastone series, however, subverted the tendency by saddling the League with an individual completely lacking in supernatural abilities.
• A rather sizable supply ofKung Fu Panda fiction focuses on what happensafterward. An unsurprisingly large amount of it is Tai Lung fixfic.
• WALL-E has many minor continuation fics, but theWALL-E Forum Role Play really stands out.
• Even though a sequel toThe Dark Knight is already in the works, a fanfic sequel was already writtenhere. Of course, considering Heath Ledger is no longer with us and both Nolan and Bale have gone on record to say that no one will reprise the role of Joker, this fic will continue to utilize this trope.
• Pretty much everyLabyrinth fanfic is this, even before theofficial sequel came out. Numerous examples double asfixfics where Sarah "was too young to understand what Jareth was offering her and regretted her decision".
  • Continuing withDavid Bowie films: There aren't near so many of them, but there's a good chance a fanfic forThe Man Who Fell to Earth will take the story beyond theDowner Ending in some way.
• Guest from the Future 2 is set a few years afterGuest From the Future.
• The Fall of San Franciscois aThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly fic that picks up some forty years later, with Tuco as a rich old man living in San Francisco during the quake of 1906.
• Although it was deliberately obscured in the promotional material issued before its release,Tim Burton's 2010 version ofAlice in Wonderland was actually a Continuation of the original books in the grand fanfic tradition.
• A number of fan-made continuations exist attempting to pick up on the ambiguous ending of John Carpenter'sThe Thing. One particularly noteworthy story isUnfinished 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.
• About 75% ofTron fanfic deals with the aftermath ofTron: Legacy.

Literature

• Animorphs, which ended with ramming the Blade Ship into the One. ApparentlyRamming Doesn't Always Work for some readers.
• The epic poemThe Aeneid ends with Aeneas killing his nemesis. Many felt that the ending was incomplete, andin 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 fromThe Iliad sometime after the fall of Troy. It could be considered a continuation fic itself.
• One of the primary reasons Cervantes wrote Part II ofDon Quixote was that so many people wrote Continuations of the original that were, in his opinion,Completely Missing the Point of said original.
• Harry Potter: It's a fairly popular genre in the ficdom now, either with those who support the canon pairings or those who, well,don't.
  • Weirdly, there are those who accept the Epilogue rather than label it asnon-canon, while still writing fics where theirpreferred couple get together. This leads to bizarre results where Harry decides after twenty years he doesn't really love Ginny after all, and spontaneously gets together with Hermione, who has likewise realised the magic's gone out of her marriage with Ron. Ultimately everyone's okay with it and it's all happy families andBabies Ever After. In other cases it turns out thatGinny was dosing Harry with love potion and Ron is a violent rapist, and the two find comfort in each other's arms.Usually there is some retaliation.
• After John Polidori's vampire tale "The Vampyre" was adapted into a French stage play by Charles Nodier,^[1] an unauthorized sequel novel by Cyprien Bérard,Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires (1820), was attributed to Nodier.
• Prior to the prequels, most of theStar Wars Expanded Universe was a continuation from the original trilogy.
• Ludovico Ariosto'sOrlando Furioso was written as a sequel to Matteo Maria Boiardo'sOrlando Innamorato, which in turn is aPrequel toThe Song of Roland. If one takes the former two to be canon, then Roland had avery interesting past.Orlando Furioso also classifies as aDeconstruction Fic, due to how it deconstructs a number ofChivalric Romance tropes.

Live-Action TV

• WhenBuffy the Vampire Slayer ended, countless virtual series popped up in its wake. The majority of these took the Scooby Gang to the Cleveland Hellmouth. These were, ironically, Jossed by the new season of Angel and the new season of Buffy, in comic form. These tend to phase out characters who are disliked or a challenge to write dialogue for. The absence of such characters are usuallyexplained away as them having left to fight demons elsewhere; if they appear at all, it's only in phone calls where their end of the conversation isn't heard.
  • The siteVirtual Mutant takes this to an extreme. Beyond giving bothBuffy the Vampire Slayer andAngel two additional seasons and a feature film adaptation each (all their stuff is written inscreenplay form), it has a total of six additional spinoff series, and eventually grew into asite for dozens of fanfic and original virtual series. Furthermore, the site runners have identified specific actors to play the new characters—particularly important for the spinoffs, where most of the characters never appeared in the original canon series. One could imagine that Virtual Mutant series were produced in an alternate reality where Mutant Enemy became a network in its own right.
• Charmed got two more seasons on charmed-net.de. While the site has been closed after 10 years allscripts arestillavailable. Surprisingly it takes the not so popularPost Script Season and turns it into something really enjoyable.
• The folks at stillflying.net took a rather unique approach, continuing from the end ofFirefly in which the remainder of the first season and the first half of the second is a buildup to the events of the filmSerenity, 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.
• TheFirefly fanficForward is a continuation of the series set after the end ofSerenity, though it is partially alternate universe, in thatall the heroes survived the film's events.
  • Post-Miranda fic is very common in theFirefly fandom nowadays.
• Almost every single fanfic forThe Sarah Connor Chronicles released since its cancellation has been a continuation, with most opting for aFix Fic approach with John getting together with Cameron.
• SeveralJAG fanfics take place after the series finale, includingLife for a Life,The Cabal, andFace On the Milk Carton.
• Forever Knight got two fanfic virtual continuations:FK4, aScript Fic series whichretconned theDowner Ending, andV4S, a prose series that took the ending as canon and continued in a darker vein.
• The Tenth Kingdom has one in the fanficReality.
• "Post-Gauda Prime" has been aBlake's 7 staple for 30 years now, postulating that the crew was shot with stun guns, that it was some kind of loyalty test, or that it wasn't Blake that got shot at all.

Video Games

• Go Not Gently continues the story ofFinal Fantasy IX so deftly, and with such thematic follow-through, that you'd wish itwas canon if it wasn'tso sad.
• Several fan fictions based off of 'Mother 3 focus on after Lucashas pulled the last needle and awakens the Dark Dragon. Most of these relate to the main castadjusting to the new world that has been created while others touch on the characters' relationship(s) with each other, such as Kumatora's friendship/relationship with Lucas or Duster. A couple have involvedClaus actually surviving the end of the world.
• There are also a few that take place betweenEarthBound andMother 3 in which either Pokey/Porky returns to cause trouble or Giygas is revived. Even fewer take place betweenEarthBound Zero andEarthBound to explain what happens between that small time period between those games.
• Parallel Symphony is one of many fanfics that pick up afterThe Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, in this case telling the tale ofthe young Link who was sent back to the past.
• Also in the universe ofThe Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time isThe Legacy of Hyrule, which picks up with the sages, three years after the end of the battle with Ganondorf.
• The Count's World is aSuper 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 endingsuch 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.
• Irya Sheen Ace Attorney is made as a continuation of theAce Attorney series.
• Two Step is aLeft 4 Dead fanfic that takes place after the ending to the sequel.
• Twisted Fates takes place a year afterGhost Trick, and deals with Sissel trying to take on aSerial Killer

Western Animation

• The Gargoyles Saga, which picked up where the seriesGargoyles left off.
• TheKim Possible fanfic community really blossomed into an all-out industry when theGrand Finale aired, with hundreds of stories picking up right after the junior prom, many very conscious attempts to be asOriginal Flavor as possible. Then the series wasUncancelled, and the vast bulk of those stories were contradicted by season 4. Now, after the newGrand Finale, it's all starting over again with a new crop of continuations, heading off to the college years and beyond.
• ManyAvatar: The Last Airbender fics are being written about the fate of Azula after she lost her mind. And Zuko's quest to find his mom. Maybe some stuff about the defeated Firelord as well. Azula going mad and Zuko demanding his father for the location of his missing mother is a Plotbunny screaming, "WRITE ME, BITCH!"\\a good example of this isWhere do we go from here. A 20 part of the story is being written now. dealing with the first ten years after the end of the war. all the main characters are used.
• Azula Trilogy, intended as both canon-compliant andOriginal Flavor (albeit somewhat darker because, well,Azula) picks up all these threads, especiallyAzula's
• Danny Phantom also has quite a lot of this, jumping off from two timelines to make it even more complicated; usually it involves mishaps in Time and Space. Oddly enough,DP didn't leave any threads dangling and left very little to say "what then?" about. This is probably a major contributor as to why the finale is so hated and people prefer to add on their own endings.
  • What aboutValerie Grey? In the episode beforePhantom Planet, she discovered that Vlad Plasmius and Vlad Masters were the same person, and vowed revenge as she flew away. Then she gets little more than a cameo inPhantom Planet, and seems to have nothing to say about the revelation that Fenton and Phantom are one-and-the-same.Fanfic Fuel, anyone?
  • Not to mentionDaniPhantom...
• There is a series of photocomics depicting events after the conversion of Cybertron at the end ofBeast 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.
• X-Men: Evolution has a large selection of "Season 5" stories on Fanfiction.Net.
• Depending on how long it takes for aTotal Drama World Tour postseason special to air, assuming it airs at all, we're going to be in for a lot of fanfics that cover the events of a final aftermath special. Which will all eventually beJossed by the real special.
• MostGalaxy Rangers fanfic is set after the series and sometimes gets called "the second season," especially if it's close toOriginal Flavor.
• The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes has multiple "season 3" fanfics, includingone, for example.
  • Hawkeye: The Series is probably one, as well as a continuation ofWolverine and the X-Men andThe Batman.
• Final Stand of Death picks up sometimes afterCelebrity Deathmatch with many of the survivors seeing a group ofMechas searching for the undisputed champion,Marilyn Manson, for one more battle. Note: This handles the original, NOT the 2006 revival.

• Trope
• Fanfic Genres
• Continuation