help the bombardier

Age of Scorpius:

Main couple is two queer ladies

A world separated into four nations (the Unions)

The world capital, the Hub, is the only place all four of these nations consistently intermingle

Each nation has a unique set of powers specific to its people

All but one of these nations has an elemental power explicitly available to them and them alone (Conviction has fire, Autarchic has Water, Societal has Light, while Assiduous has no such power)

The most dangerous power in the land can mess with other people's powers (this power is called "Turning")

The most specialest person in the land (the Archpower) has the most dangerous power but narratively we know it's totally okay if they're the one using it

The ritual to reveal this power is called the Ceremony of Rebalancing

The world was destroyed in ages past because of "machines," as technology is evil and bound to tear humanity apart if allowed to fall into the wrong hands

Audra Winter started this story at some point in 2015

Legend of Korra:

Main couple is two queer ladies

A world separated into four nations

The world capital, Republic City, is the only place all four of these nations consistently intermingle

Each nation has a unique set of powers specific to its people

All four of these nations have an elemental power explicitly available to them and them alone, but one of them was all but wiped out, rendering one element more or less missing until later in the series (Fire, Water, and Earth having well-established nations, with Air having been the victim of genocide)

The most dangerous power in the land can mess with other people's powers (these powers are referred to as "bending")

The most specialest person in the land (the Avatar) has the most dangerous power but narratively we've already seen it's okay if they're the one using it (Aang removing Ozai's bending in Airbender vs. Amon removing random people's bending in Korra)

A key plot point involves an event called Harmonic Convergence, in which elemental powers are, explicitly, rebalanced all over the world

The world is thrown into turmoil repeatedly by the utilization of advanced technologies capable of posing an existential threat to all existing social structures and multiple planes of reality (the Equalists with their various gadgets, Kuvira with the Colossus and the Spirit Energy Cannon)

This series ended in late December of 2014

Oh yeah also, here's Rieka Spring, main character of Age of Scorpius, versus Asami Sato, main love interest in Legend of Korra:

And here's Rowan, Reika's hot dad with water powers, versus Tonraq, Korra's hot dad with water powers:

(Note: I won't hear a single fucking word against the artists who drew these pieces, their work is phenomenal and I love it. These people were commissioned to illustration character art, and they did—it's none of their business if it resembles an existing character. They deserve every cent earned for the work they've done, and more besides. They deserve all the support in the world.)

Audra Winter is a lesbian in her early twenties. She was tween when Korra first aired—and it ended with a queer main female protagonist going off into a whole new world with her queer secondary female protagonist at her side. Korra mirrored the framing of a heterosexual wedding shown moments prior so that Steven Universe could show Ruby and Sapphire get married on-screen. It was an enormous deal for queer fandom as a whole, and hugely formative for a lot of baby gays who got to see it air on primetime television.

Age of Scorpius is written as though the worldbuilding was done in advance, as if we should all already understand what's going on and what basically everything means—Legend of Korra is also written this way, but it earned it by being a sequel to one of the best Western animated series of all time. We went into Korra with the knowledge we got from Airbender: we knew about the four nations, about bending, about the Avatar and the related reincarnation cycle and berserk state. We didn't need it all spelled out in advance. Hell, we even had one of the biggest plot twists of the first season of Korra spelled out in advance in Airbender through its portrayal of bloodbending.

Scorpius does not have the benefit of being a sequel, and I don't think Winter understands that. She tries to patch it with the aforementioned infodumps, but it doesn't work because she's trying to patch it into something based on a story explicitly written without these gaps being a problem.

I don't know if Age of Scorpius was ever an out-and-out fanfic, mind you. More likely, it was Winter deciding she was gonna write something of her own using the trappings of something she loved without understanding what made those trappings so distinct in the original work. I think most of us who started writing as children have written something that copied another work of fiction almost beat-for-beat, because we loved it so much we wanted to make it our own. Imitation is referred to as the sincerest form of flattery for a reason.

What most of us didn't do was decide we were going to publish that mimic fic, and spend a decade refusing to accept genuine criticism or make difficult revisions in order to polish it into something that lived up to the love we had for it. Most of us didn't market our mimic fics like they were fully edited finished works, get a bucketload of preorders, and proceed to brag constantly how we were child prodigies and are above criticism, calling ourselves masters of the craft and going on at length about "owning a six-figure business," claiming to have set a world record, and that we're better than everyone else who has ever self-published their debut novel.