So. I expected a complete garbage fire, and I feel like I got something that was... not good, lord knows, but not as outrage-inducing as I expected? I feel like it managed to land on "acceptably mediocre".
(Though admittedly, it may also be that I'm willing to settle at this point because I'm exhausted. Still, Sansa—the one actual competent leader left—gets to be Queen in the North, and Jon actually petted the doggo this time. I'll take what I can get.)
I am, however, still incandescent with rage over how they basically ignored 7 and a half seasons of character arc for Jaime last episode. I think that's the thing I'm angriest about this season, because there was no payoff in that narrative. At all.
Anyway. One general observation on the entire storyline which I have to make: if this really is the ending that GRRM has had planned from when he first started the series, then he would've conceived this endpoint in 1995 when writing the first book, when the world was a in very different place.
Back then, the world felt somewhat less bleak, and huge epic fantasy that seemed to follow expected narrative paths was quite prevalent; you didn't get many where the hero fell to darkness, where the quest went horribly horribly wrong and never got back on track, and so on. If the character arcs had been properly built to this ending—so that it didn't feel so forced and abrupt—an ending like this could have been a potentially-interesting subversion of the general fantasy milieu of the time.
But now, even if the arcs hadn't been forced, the world is in a different place. I've seen a lot more really cynical (or borderline nihilist) fantasy come out in recent years; the subversion isn't new and interesting any longer. Plus, the world around us feels like a subversion of the tropes of reality in many ways.
And I think right now in some ways people really need stories where things wrap up tidily. Where the people you've been rooting for win (instead of turning out to be lunatic tyrants in the making), the quests succeed, and you feel like the people who've set out to make a difference actually succeed in doing so.
So—leaving aside the ham-handed way that the show's narrative was forced to this point—I think the ending may have been one better suited for the time the books were conceived, not for right now.
