The Legend of Korra begins 70 years after Avatar, while the Star Wars sequel trilogy takes place 30 years after Return of the Jedi. Largely ignored in its time and widely considered inferior to the original Avatar series, Korra has seen its reception grow somewhat more positive in the years since it ended, and I think its portrayal of a legacy setting - when contrasted with the more well-known Star Wars - will be viewed much more warmly in years to come as an example of how to follow up a legendary series. It concluded its run almost exactly one year before the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the film that kickstarted a trilogy of legacy sequel films that ended this weekend.
The Legend of Korra, a sequel series to Avatar, aired from 2012 to 2014. Both Avatar and Star Wars have returned to their storytelling well years after the fact, but the approaches their two continuations took are radically different. But there is a right way and a wrong way to approach the idea of a legacy continuation of your story - or at least, an interesting way and a really boring way. The idea of returning to a classic narrative decades later to explore the ways the world has changed and the characters have grown is an incredibly appealing one (and an incredibly lucrative one). These days, legacy sequels are all the rage. Star Wars' fingerprints are all over Avatar, from the basic hero's journey plot structure to the character archetypes and arcs, and it's even got Luke Skywalker as the main villain. For a number of kids like myself who grew up in the 2000s, Avatar was like a Star Wars unto itself - an incredibly high-quality and influential work that defined our interest in fictional narratives. It influenced hundreds of stories across film, television, and other media, and one of those stories was Avatar: The Last Airbender. Star Wars was the defining fiction story for many young people who grew up in the last few decades.
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