Mike: This was an old idea we had from years prior that we never fully turned into anything — this idea of seeing what a post-apocalyptic Avatar world would look like. Shortly after, we came up with the big concept: What if there were two Avatars? What could we do with that?
Bryan: As Mike said, we had this idea right after the original series. It was 2008, and it wasn’t the right story to tell when we got to make Korra, so we sort of put it on the back burner.
We were developing all these projects at once at Avatar Studios in 2021, and we found ourselves going back to that old idea. It wasn’t the exact same thing, but we did bring a lot of that in.
That came in with new thoughts we had about what happened after The Legend of Korra, and this rapid acceleration of technological development. It was a really fun, fertile ground for a lot of ideas. You never know when old ideas will come back. I tell the students I lecture to: “Keep every idea, keep every sketch. Don’t judge it. Just get it down, put it away, and keep it archived.”
