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I played Link's Awakening with my wife and daughter. My wife was taken back at the ending (surprised, not disliking). I think she basically just assumed the whole time that it wouldn't end with everyone on Koholint basically dying, or vanishing from existence.
This got me thinking about how I played this, or watched my brother play it, when I was the same age as my daughter. None of the media she consumes challenges her with difficult endings. Everything HAS to return to the status quo at the end, because we can't risk anyone being unhappy. In Frozen, Anna is unfrozen. In Moana, even Maui gets his fucking hook back after it breaks. Fake out deaths and fake out status quo changes happen left and right, but it is really rare to see something that actually sticks.
I love downer endings, and I think it made me who I am. It makes me sad and disappointed and a little disgusted to see basically all of the media of my kids' day be bland and not challenging them to really feel something other than a vague blandly happy dance party ending. Dance party endings aren't new, but have been made ubiquitous in the past 20 years. Same with fake out deaths, and I blame Marvel for that. I guess I personally chalk this all up to the general trend towards never making anyone uncomfortable, which is tied in with the corporatization of media and corporate-memphization of media.
I too feel like I've see fake-out deaths happen more and more often, and I don't know if it's me growing up or if it's a real thing. But it just seems to keep happening in basically all major mainstream media works, like in the last couple seasons of Game of Thrones where, e.g. Jon Snow was saved from falling into an icy lake by his uncle coming out of nowhere, and then during the Battle of Winterfell, we kept seeing character after character get overwhelmed by zombies, only to cut away, and then later see that they somehow got out perfectly fine. Or the latest Star Wars films where we saw Kylo Ren walk out of a crashing spaceship unscathed without explanation, and then later come back from falling into a pit to save Rey, and then have Rey "die" only to get saved by him. Or recent Marvel films like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness where Wong fell down the side of a mountain, only to be revealed to have landed on a ledge to survive. I haven't watched the latest Jurassic World film, but I heard that there was a scene near the end where a major character says "go on without me" to do a last stand, only to show up 15 minutes later unscathed, to be rescued.
If there is indeed a trend, I feel like it has to do with the extension of childhood that's been happening all throughout the West at least since my millennial generation and possibly longer. The writers want the benefits without the costs, the power without the responsibility, to have their cake and eat it too, to have that emotional death moment without the death. Children get to enjoy some of that, because they (usually) have guardians to take care of the responsibility stuff while giving them the benefits. I also expect that this effect might be stronger among mainstream media writers, as, I'm guessing, they're more likely, due to nepotism, to come from more wealthy and well-connected families which can allow them to live as children for decades at adult age.
At least Rogue One bucked that trend in the Star Wars films. Spoiler: Everyone dies
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