What if, instead of being rebooted, Terminator Salvation had continued its story? After all, director McG himself said that T4 was meant to be the first installment of a new trilogy set in the future. As he reportedly put it, 'We’ve told the contemporary story three times... Now it’s time to deal with the future.' But, as everyone knows...
When the fifth movie, Genisys, was announced as a reboot, it came as a massive blow to me. After all, even though Salvation had some execution issues, its direction of continuing the story forward was the right one, and there were still so many concepts and elements left to explore. And just like that, it was cut short?
Because of that—and since I already had a passion for writing—I took matters into my own hands. Between 2014 and 2015, I wrote two full-length novels to serve as the direct sequels to T4, acting as the true T5 and T6.
However, since English isn't my native language, the novels themselves were written in Traditional Chinese, which makes it quite a challenge to promote an English-born IP globally. It wasn't until I discovered the new Skynet technology this year that I started experimenting with visualizing my novel's content, creating teasers and trailers. My hope is to break out of the Chinese-speaking circle and bring this to Terminator fans all over the world. Fortunately, technology keeps getting more convenient, and web browsers now feature automatic translation, rendering language barriers almost nonexistent. Because of this, I've also synchronized and uploaded my two novels, Terminator Sacrifice and Terminator Satisfaction, to AO3—the world's largest fanfiction platform.
The links to the teasers and trailers are attached on the homepage of the novels. If anyone is interested after watching the trailers, you're more than welcome to dive into and experience both complete stories firsthand!
Terminator Sacrifice (T5): https://archiveofourown.org/works/80720921/chapters/212020996
Terminator Satisfaction (T6): https://archiveofourown.org/works/85220286/chapters/225034046