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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.
I was thinking about Star wars recently, and one conclusion I came to is that it's really strange that these are films that:
Like, I wouldn't trust my corporate self to write and produce the continuations of beloved franchises. When you're at work, if you're not a visionary, you just care about not getting fired and keeping people happy.
It's just bizarre. Of course they failed so hard.
Star Wars failed in the fan mind before it was handed over to corporations. Lucas had control of the prequels and they had problems.
Not to the same extent as now, IMO. The prequels have their haters, but they have just as many fans. The sequels are so bad that even some prequel haters have softened their stance and talk about how at least Lucas had a vision, even if it was imperfect. The sequels do have fans, to be sure, but they are by far in the minority whereas opinion on the prequels was much more evenly split.
I'm an Old School Star Wars fan (I saw A New Hope in theaters when it was just a little SF flick starting to get buzz).
I think you're forgetting just how much fans loathed the prequels when they first came out. Well, loathed is a strong term. They still went to see them. Fans had been waiting for 16 years after Return of the Jedi, the hype was overwhelming, and while A Phantom Menace was of course a box office success, hardcore SW fans were trashing it and the rest of the prequels almost immediately. Today maybe the backlash against Jar Jar Binks and Jake Lloyd's acting seems overdone, but at the time those prequels felt like a huge let-down, as pretty as they were. The plot went in weird directions, the characters weren't what people were expecting, and of course over a decade of EU content and fan speculation got blown away. The prequels were really... not good, and the consensus was that George Lucas was a good visual director but hugely overrated as a writer.
Of course, then the sequels came out and made the prequels look like golden age SF by comparison.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the prequels were (mostly) fine as movies, particularly The Phantom Menace. They weren't fine as Star Wars movies.
I think my take is best summed up by the midichlorian scene. In a different setting, this is a fine scene! Sure, you can measure the space magic capabilities of someone with a blood test. That's fine! If it was in Star Trek, sure, or if it was measuring for bionic strength in Mass Effect, for instance. It is, however, completely wrong for Star Wars and The Force.
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How much of this is just a function of people who saw the prequels as kids imprinting on the films at an early age, and enjoying them despite their uneven quality? Similar to all the people who love Disney direct-to-video sequels because they grew up with them.
If that's the true explanation, then just as the prequels started to be rehabilitated in the public eye as people who saw them as kids grew up and started making video essays about why the prequels were great, I wonder if we won't see the same thing happen as the kids who grew up with the sequels grow up?
This is an open question, and certainly it's nonzero, but my anecdotal experience is that, even among the younger viewers, respect for the prequels (mostly undeserved, IMHO) seems more driven by how much better they are than the sequels than by nostalgia. I've seen a number of completely new young fans who never watched the prequels or the sequels (or the originals) until recently express the opinion that the prequels are much better than the sequels.
We should be able to detect this pretty soon, if not now. The Force Awakens came out 11 years ago, which is less than the 16 years between The Phantom Menace and that film, but still plenty of time for then-10-year-olds to become influential in the social medias to shape the overall public view of it.
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Partly that.
But part of it may be that but a lot of it is just that the term "prequels hate" can mean the films or the setting.
A lot of people hated the films for the way they handled certain characters and plots or because they felt the CGI was overdone. But that is not the same as hating them as settings.
Many fans were willing to take the bit of the films they didn't like in exchange for a living Republic and Jedi Order and Republic and all the stories you could tell with them
So a lot of people have more fondness for the "prequel era" because that stuff also included Republic Commando, The Clone Wars, etc.
That audience is younger and so has gained more power and influence over time. Especially since the attempt to mainly cater to the OT-setting fans after the LucasArts sale was a huge disaster, partly because they confused Prequel Film Hate for New Worldbuilding Hate.
We might. The problem I see is that there's almost no consistent throughline in these movies and their setting is basically the OT setting but worse. But maybe the books are cool. I couldn't bring myself to check.
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The prequels were disappointing to fans because they weren't what we had been waiting all this time for, it barely "looked" like Star Wars but they were Lucas's new vision, something new cooked fresh with new base ingredients. Now it turns out I'm allergic to slapstick cartoon rabbits in my space operas, but that recipe can have its fans. The sequels were exactly what the fans had been waiting for, it looks like Star Wars from front to back, but they ultimately served us an old batch of og Star Wars that had been wasting in Lucasfilm's vault with moldy rotten ingredients; yes it's the original recipe but the quality and freshness isn't there anymore.
What would have satisfied fans is doing what Jon Favreau did with seasons 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian. The original recipe for Star Wars is samurai/western + pulp sci-fi setting, The Mandalorian (seasons 1 and 2, it got bad after) was adapting new or different samurai/western stories in the setting. Same recipe, fresh ingredients.
Given that Disney owns both now, I've been thinking a spiritual successor to Firefly would fit well in the Star Wars universe. But I wouldn't trust the company blindly to produce a good show these days.
Andor was good, though. Same idea; new characters and setting.
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