Current Events > "Your friends were erased from existence, but it's okay-

(+) Yeah! (+)

You are depressing. Sheesh.

What piece of media attempted to call this a good ending?

1. Star Trek
2. Life is Strange
3. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

1. Deep Space Nine has an episode where the crew meet a settlement of 8000 people who are their descendants. The main conflict being that the crew is fated to fall into a temporal anomaly that sends them back in time, where they become stranded on a planet, set up a new colony, and eventually create the city that exists in modern time. They initially decide to follow the course of fate to prevent erasing 8000 people from existence, but shenanigans ensue, they avoid their fate, and the colony disappears. Episode ends with the captain giving a quote that the topic title paraphrased.
2. At the end of Life is Strange, you have a choice of keeping your best friend alive, but letting a hurricane fuck up your coastal hometown, and going back in time, letting your friend die in the past, and averting the crisis. Before letting you make this decision, the characters have some existential discussion, and something along the lines of "the time we spent together still happened in your memories, even if they never actually happened" is used to soften the blow of potentially killing your friend. However, in their time with you, your friend was also able to repair their damaged relationship with their family. If you go ahead with killing them in the past, their family just lives on thinking their daughter hated them and died pointlessly over some drug deal.
3. JoJo is slightly better about this because of the particular mechanics involved. It's not really "time travel", more of a repeated cycle of time, with the potential of removing people from each new iteration of the cycle. So even though only one character remembers the events of the story, with the rest of the cast essentially transforming into new characters with new lives and memories, it could still be believed that the ones the readers saw still existed in the distant past. The "memories" angle is less bitter here, but still, ugh. >_>

I think the most fucked up version of this happened in the CW superhero shows. At one point, the entire multiverse is wiped out by an entity called the Anti-Monitor. They're able to create a new multiverse, but it's an actual-facts brand new one. So all of their friends and family are dead, just replaced with copies. And then to make matters worse, they give the new copies the memories of the old ones, essentially killing the new copies too.