Sometimes you look at a chart and it just makes sense, and for me it was this wonderful visualisation of the Sherlock fandom by @fffinnagain that came across my dash the other day. Full disclaimer - I didn’t even read their full post, but I think this is one way of looking at the data that speaks multitudes for itself.
Take a look here and tell me what you see!
I’ve divided the “waves” here into a few categories - “On Air”, when ATLA was airing for the first time, “Pre-LOK”, the time between ATLA and LOK, the “LOK era” which is self-explanatory, and then every year individually after that. A creator is assigned into a wave based on the date of their earliest fandom work (due to the way AO3 works, this isn’t always the date they published their first work, but rather the date this work was last updated).
Once the creators are assigned to their groups, the colors are used to track any additional works they produce in the fandom. Such works are counted up per month, which explains the small local variations in these waves. I’ve marked a few key dates on the graph as well - one or two of which might explain the 2020 boom ;)
The ATLA Renaisance of 2020 brought almost 10x the amount of new creators to the fandom as any other year! How many of these fanwork creators will be around in a couple years? Well, judging from previous waves, it does seem that contributions from creators who entered a fandom die off to a trickle come the next year. The bunch that entered during the LOK era seem to still be contributing consistently however, and there’s a definite resurgence of the OG fans coming back to the fandom, as you can see from the little blue-purple bump in the year 2020.
We’ll have to wait and see if the new fans are here to stay - but for now we can enjoy the wonderful content they produce!
Let’s take a look at the next-gen Avatar fandom, too. Overall there are far less works in the Legend of Korra tag, although its release on USA Netflix has given it a popularity boost as well - one that’s even bigger than the one it got from the landmark series finale.
I’m interested in eventually examining the crossover of creators between these two fandoms, to answer questions such as: how many creators participate in both fandoms, and of those, what’s the fandom of origin and the lag between the crossover?
Anyway, for now, tag urself I’m a 2019 ATLA baby, and I still can’t believe I’ve never written a stand-alone for LOK (side-eyes my fanfic drafts folder).