How did Game of Thrones end?

Why does the realm end up with Bran as king?

The choice answers the question the series spent eight seasons asking, which is what becomes of a realm that never stops fighting over who inherits a chair. By the end the chair itself is gone, and the surviving lords pick a king from among themselves. However the moment is judged, it is a structural point: the crown now passes by selection rather than by blood, which is exactly the principle that the wars of the earlier seasons were fought to deny.

Whether Bran is a satisfying answer is one of the most argued parts of the ending, and the facts on this page show why. He spends the closing seasons as a watcher rather than a player, so his elevation reads to many viewers as a conclusion the plot arrives at rather than one a character fights for. The series frames it as reform after a ruinous succession war; its critics read the same outcome as the story stepping around its own central question.

Why does Daenerys fall, and why is Jon the one who kills her?

The ending treats Daenerys's fate as something the series had been building toward, though how well it built is fiercely disputed. Across the seasons she settles with fire the questions that politics could not, first abroad and then in Westeros, and each time the show lets her conviction that she is freeing people run ahead of the cost. The destruction she brings to King's Landing in the penultimate episode is where the series says that conviction has itself become the danger.

Jon is the one person able to stop her who also loves her, which is why the story gives the act to him, and it is where the reveal of his parentage pays off. The rival claim he refused to press would have set them against each other in any case; instead he acts on his judgement of what the realm needs. The cost is immediate. Grey Worm and the Unsullied want justice, the lords want peace, and exile to the Night's Watch is the compromise that answers both.

Why does the North leave the Seven Kingdoms?

Sansa asks for independence and the new king grants it, and the request has a long history behind it. The Starks ruled the North as kings in their own right before the Targaryens came, and they were made Wardens of the North only after the Conquest. During the series its lords crown a King in the North of their own once more, and after years in which the South brought the North war and broken faith, a separate crown is where the Northern storyline had been pointing since the start.

It also explains why Sansa, rather than Jon, wears that crown. She spends the later seasons learning statecraft from the most dangerous teachers in the realm and running Winterfell in practice, so by the end she is the Stark best placed to hold the North, while Jon has no standing the new order will accept. Six kingdoms under an elected king and a seventh under its own queen is the settlement the series closes on.

How does the ending depart from what the novels set up?

The honest answer is that no reader can know yet. The series overtook the published novels in its sixth season, and its last three seasons tell a story whose book version is unpublished as of the date this page was last checked. What can be compared is the setup. The novels tell their story through the private thoughts of their point-of-view characters, which a camera cannot show directly, so motives the finale had to establish quickly may be argued at length in print.

That gap shapes how the finale is read. Viewers who liked it see outcomes the books had been seeding for years, such as a Stark-ruled North and the end of the Targaryen claim. Viewers who did not see the right destinations reached too fast in a final season of only six episodes, against ten in each of the first six. Both readings rest on the same set of facts, which is why the argument has never settled.