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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.
One problem's that, at scale, it has to get handed over. Even in the height of George Lucas-era Star Wars, you had stuff like suits arguing spice wasn't a drug (one of the bizarre situations where Kevin J Anderson was the good guy!), just because it wasn't practical for some rando writing a weird one-off novel in the universe to talk to the chief, if the chief's doing anything else. And that's kinda the good ending: Star Trek was notorious for no one in corporate caring about anything but the tv shows (and eventually not even that), so you'd get this endless parade of original fiction recycled into EU fic, regardless of whether it fit the characters or setting in the slightest.
But you definitely do get some variation. For all golden age minecrafters complain about Dinnerbone (sometimes with reason: hidden lava one-blocks in the nether), the difference between beta-era design and 1.12+ is pretty obvious. And even then, you can tell people care about the game to some extent, at least compared to some of the more obvious slop.
Star Trek tie-in fiction was rigorously policed; no out-of-character actions for the main characters (from the TV shows), the main characters don't die, no original characters that steal the spotlight from the main characters, everything had to reset so the next writer churning out the next book started from a clean slate.
The very earliest novels got away with more, because (as Diane Duane says) "from Paramount’s point of view, Star Trek novels were merely another kind of merchandising, like plastic phasers and James T. Kirk action figures" so they weren't keeping a close eye on them. But then the tie-in novels became a valuable merchandising stream, and that meant looking for professional writers (rather than fan writers turned pro) to do them, and the drawing-up of guidelines as to what could and couldn't be done in the 80s and updated in the 90s.
I don't know what the current state of play is, given that we got ST: Disco and Starfleet High, so the tie-in novels might be wild and woolly again: yes we welcome trans pansexual non-binary differently abled neurodivergent body-positive multiracial folx of colour as main characters! your villains not only can, but must, be cis het old(er) conservative white guys!
That's fair: very few big intellectual property things are completely unpoliced by their owners. I was moving more from the early TOS works being hilariously off-kilter, but even TNG and some early Voyager stories were often very weird from a tonally and character look. Not even necessarily bad books: Children of Hamlin was reasonably good and even got the general TNG ethos, but it's just written like someone had a glance at a wikipedia summary of the series.
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IIRC, much of the strictness of the guideline enforcement in the tie-in novels was due to one guy (Gene Roddenberry's assistant Richard Arnold) who apparently saw himself as enforcing the Will of Gene on the unenlightened writerly horde. Though it's not clear how much of it was the Will of Gene as opposed to the Will of Richard Arnold; apparently on more than one occasion an author managed to do an end-run around Arnold and contact Roddenberry directly with his proposed novel which had attracted Arnold's ire for some reason or other, only to have Roddenberry say "looks fine to me, go ahead and publish it". In any event, Arnold and his influence on the tie-in novels went away shortly after Roddenberry's death, and the guidelines loosened significantly.
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