Game Of Thrones: Every Main Character Ending, Ranked

Not everyone agrees that the final season of "Game of Thrones" is an absolute stinker — and by that, I mean some of my esteemed colleagues here at /Film think it's not so bad — but there's no denying that some of the show's characters fared better than others. Throughout eight seasons and ten years of the massively popular HBO fantasy series based on George R.R. Martin's novel series "A Song of Ice and Fire," it's also safe to say that said characters endure a lot of trauma, from losing loved ones to facing violent assaults ... so does anyone really get a happy ending in Westeros?

Yes and no. Obviously, there's not enough time to rank every single character's ending here. Some people, like Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel) and Ser Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen), don't make it to the series finale "The Iron Throne," so their endings aren't chronicled here (though it's important to say that their endings both sort of suck), and unfortunately, a whole gang of supporting characters will be confined to the same ranking slot to save time, energy, and brain cells. With that in mind, here are all of the major character endings on "Game of Thrones," from the worst of the worst to ... well, ones that aren't quite as tragic or stupid.

Daenerys Targaryen, as played by Emilia Clarke, immediately became such an iconic and beloved television character when "Game of Thrones" premiered in 2011 that — and I'm not joking about this, because I would never! — people started naming their daughters "Daenerys" and "Khaleesi". If I had to guess, I'd say that after "The Iron Throne" aired, some of those parents had slight misgivings about that choice.

To be fair, Daenerys gets done dirty throughout pretty much all of the eighth and final season of "Game of Thrones," thanks to the show's writers and showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Yes, our girl was always sort of bloodthirsty and preferred to settle arguments with dragonfire and death rather than reason, but throughout the rest of the series, she kills evil men in the name of justice, like slavers. In the penultimate episode "The Bells," Daenerys is recovering from some personal tragedies but heads into battle anyway, and when King's Landing rings the bells to surrender to her and her armies, she makes a snap decision to level the city with her last dragon, Drogon, and murder a ton of innocent people in cold blood.

Understandably horrified by this, Daenerys' Hand of the Queen, Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), and her nephew/lover, Jon Snow (Kit Harington), decide Daenerys has gotta go, and after Tyrion quits his job, Jon confronts his girlfriend/aunt near the Iron Throne and fatally stabs her, ostensibly for the good of the realm. "Game of Thrones" has an iffy track record with female characters, so it's sort of a bummer to watch Daenerys get killed by her lover if you're taking this all at face value, but to add insult to injury, Drogon melts the Iron Throne with dragonfire (someone's been studying symbolism!) and flies away with her body. Also, not for nothing, Daenerys doesn't even get to sit on the pointy chair she's been fighting for all this time. Come on.

Let's cycle through a handful of supporting players who make it to the last episode of "Game of Thrones" and see where they ended up. Unfortunately for all of them, they all get pretty dumb endings, so let's just go ahead and kick things off with Grey Worm, the leader of Daenerys' Unsullied army played by Jacob Anderson. Before Missandei's death, she and Grey Worm were lovers who dreamed of sailing to her home country of Naath together, so after having a silly little stand-off with Jon Snow after he commits outright regicide, Grey Worm lets the whole issue go and heads to Naath with some Unsullieds. This makes very little sense, but okay.

Davos Seaworth, portrayed by Liam Cunningham and one of the show's best supporting characters, does very little in the series finale, which is a shame because Davos is so great. He, along with Jon, tries to stop Grey Worm from killing a handful of Lannister prisoners, and later, he's seen at the Small Council table alongside Tyrion and a handful of other people. He is, apparently, the master of ships, which is honestly the only thing that makes any sense here, considering his history as a sailor.

I saved Bronn (Jerome Flynn) for last, because every single thing Bronn says and does in the last season of "Game of Thrones" is so unbelievably stupid and nonsensical that I still can't believe anyone let the writers get away with this. Earlier in season 8, Bronn shows up while Tyrion and his older brother Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) are hanging out by candlelight and threatens both men, who are his friends, with a crossbow because their sister Cersei (Lena Headey) paid him to do so. Tyrion promises him the lordship of Highgarden, which he is not in a position to even offer at the time, and the issue is dropped until we see Bronn at the Small Council named as the Lord of Highgarden and the Master of Coin. Very early in the series, Bronn does not know what a loan is or how it works, but sure. Make him Master of Coin. Who cares?

Throughout "Game of Thrones," Lena Headey, a preternaturally talented performer, made Cersei Lannister into one of the best and most dynamic TV villains in the history of the medium. It's too bad that, for the entire final season of the show, she stands around looking out of a window drinking wine and pouting in the direction of a camera. Cersei does very little in season 8 except "exist," "be evil" (I guess), and "be pregnant" (which may or may not even be true because she's pregnant forever and it never physically manifests or come to anything), but it still really sucks that her death is so ... dull.

Jaime, who character-assassinates himself by undoing multiple seasons of a great character arc by abandoning the righteous path and running back to his twin sister and lover at the eleventh hour, leaves Tyrion and all the rest of his allies behind to return to Cersei in King's Landing during "The Bells," finding her in the Red Keep as it crumbles under Daenerys' dragonfire. The two embrace and get crushed by falling rocks together, and Tyrion finds their bodies in the very first moments of "The Iron Throne." This is, to put it lightly, so stupid. Not only could Jaime and Cersei have simply moved like, three feet to the left to have their sexually charged embrace, but what a crappy ending for two powerhouse characters! Just an utter, unbelievable, bitter disappointment.

With all due respect to actor Isaac Hempstead-Wright, his character Bran Stark is such a sideline-sitter for most of "Game of Thrones" that he sits an entire season of the show out entirely (season 5, specifically). After being pushed out of a window by Jaime in the series premiere when Bran, an avid climber, catches Jaime and the then-queen of Westeros (and his sister) in flagrante, Bran goes on a journey of self-discovery, becomes the omniscient Three-Eyed Raven, and basically starts talking like a college sophomore who just took Intro to Philosophy and thinks they're very deep and wise.

If you, like me, thought Bran was mostly just in the series as a convenient plot device who could show us events that happened long before the show's timeline — like, for example, the birth of Jon Snow which reveals he's not a Stark bastard but a legitimate Targaryen — you were proven wildly wrong during "The Iron Throne." After Daenerys' death, a bunch of highborn jamokes gather in King's Landing to pick a new monarch, and Tyrion, who is a political prisoner at this point, grabs the mic and says that the throne should go to Bran because he has "the best story." Not only is this seriously debatable — both of Bran's sisters arguably have cooler and better stories — but Tyrion gives Bran, a guy who previously said he could never hold any title because he's not really a "person" but an all-seeing being, the Iron Throne and the pretty insulting title "Bran the Broken." Making Bran king was probably an example of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss trying to "subvert expectations," but it's too bad they circled all the way back around to "a 'twist' that is just stupid."

At the beginning of "Game of Thrones," Tyrion Lannister is frequently described as one of the smartest people in Westeros, and in those early seasons, that actually is an apt description. As the series approaches its conclusion, though, Tyrion apparently endures some sort of severe brain injury off-camera that makes him into an idiot (I'm being flip, because the truth seems to be that the showrunners just needed him to be a moron so that he didn't stand around pointing out a that a lot of the dumb stuff that happens in these later seasons is, well, dumb). Not only does he endorse a dumb-as-rocks plan to capture a single wight in season 7 to prove to Cersei that they're real — not only will Cersei almost definitely not care (and she eventually doesn't), but capturing a single, solitary wight amidst its brethren and White Walkers is actually impossible to do without dying! — but Tyrion just sort of putters around behind Daenerys in season 8 before he grows a semblance of a spine, quits as her Hand, and encourages Jon to put her down like a genocidal Old Yeller.

Tyrion gets arrested simply for, again, quitting his job — which Daenerys and her Unsullied regard as outright treason — and after her death, he gets to take center stage at the aforementioned meeting of the minds to pick a new monarch for some reason. (Again, he's in jail.) Tyrion picks Bran and receives a promotion from "political prisoner" to "Hand of the King" — which Tyrion regards as a punishment — and is stuck working in government again. Good for him, I guess?!

Brienne of Tarth, the tomboy-turned-knight played by Gwendoline Christie, really gets done dirty at the end of "Game of Thrones" — at least when it comes to Jaime Lannister. The two meet in season 2 of "Game of Thrones" and do not get along at first, to put it lightly, but things take quite the turn when they're both captured by Locke (Noah Taylor) and his men while traveling and that particular bad guy chops Jaime's sword hand off.

Early in Brienne and Jaime's shared plotline, the series does a really phenomenal job of building up the relationship between these two foes who eventually become friends. This is not true for the end of the series. After the two spend the night together in the second episode of season 8, "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" — which refers to the fact that Jaime also knights Brienne officially — Jaime leaves Brienne behind to return to his evil incest twin, and one of the coolest and most formidable women in Westeros, who once bit a guy's ear off in battle, is stuck crying over a man in her bathrobe. At least she survives the Battle of Winterfell and is named the Commander of King Bran Stark's Kingsguard, eventually writing Jaime's story in the White Book in the process ... so there's that.

I'll be the first to admit that, for a while there, I thought that John Bradley's Samwell Tarly was an annoying character whose entire role was being a Samwise Gamgee to Jon Snow's Frodo, so to speak. It's a credit to writing throughout the earlier seasons, as well as Bradley's performance, that Sam Tarly becomes a much more pivotal and likable character than grumps like me could have ever imagined; he ultimately gets a relatively solid ending save for one glaringly irritating thing.

After meeting his future paramour Gilly (Hannah Murray) and her son, whom she eventually names Sam, the couple heads to the Citadel to study to become a Maester; in the process, Sam not only learns how to cure greyscale — saving the life of Jorah Mormont when he's afflicted with the typically terminal illness — but discovers the truth about Jon Snow's parentage.

After sort of fighting in the Battle of Winterfell (and by "sort of," I mean he appears to just fall down and yell a lot), Sam, who is now expecting his second child with Gilly, is named Grand Maester in King Bran's cabinet. (He also makes the ridiculous suggestion that perhaps Westeros could become a democracy during that highborn council meeting and is basically laughed off the stage.) So what's the irritating thing? He closes the series by announcing he wrote a book called "A Song of Ice and Fire," something that personally infuriated me so much that I left the room when it happened in real time.

Arya Stark has so many cool storylines throughout her time on "Game of Thrones." It's a shame that basically none of them ever pay off. Introduced as a headstrong girl who would rather play with swords than don dresses, Arya is forced to strike out on her own after her father Ned Stark (Sean Bean) is beheaded by the impetuous and tyrannical King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) in season 1; with a new short haircut, Arya pretends to be a boy, ultimately teaming up with the secret Baratheon bastard Gendry (Joe Dempsie) and meeting the faceless assassin Jaqen H'ghar (Tom Wlaschiha), who gives her a token inviting her to train with him in the free city of Braavos.

Sure, Arya's Braavos storylines are a little lackluster, but she learns to change faces at will, and if that ability had ever come into play in regards to her kill list — which always included Cersei — a couple characters on this list could have had a cooler ending. (My elevator pitch: Arya kills Jaime, steals his face, and kills Cersei.) Instead, Arya kills the Night King, which is cool but makes no narrative sense, and after her brother becomes king, she leaves on a ship to discover "what's west of Westeros." One would think her omniscient brother could probably just tell her, but whatever. At least she's okay.

Much like his assumed half-sister and actual niece Arya Stark, Jon Snow has a lot of plotlines and narrative threads that could have turned into something cool and interesting under different writers and showrunners. Sadly, he and Arya both end up in relatively unsatisfying spots from a story perspective ... but at the very least, these characters are doing things they ostensibly like. You might think that the fact that Jon, who always believed he was the bastard son of Ned Stark and some random tavern wench, is actually a legitimate Targaryen — specifically, the son of Daenerys' brother Rhaegar and Ned's sister Lyanna — would matter more when "Game of Thrones" wraps everything up, but it actually doesn't! All this information does is make Daenerys mad, and that whole issue is swiftly dealt with when Jon, you know, stabs her to death.

Jon should probably spend forever in a Westerosi prison after killing the region's apparent new monarch, but instead, he's given a different punishment of sorts: He's banished back into the Night's Watch and heads to Castle Black with his faithful direwolf and best buddy Tormund Giantsbane (Kristofer Hivju). This sounds great — Jon is always happiest in the far North — but there's one problem. The Night King is dead, so the Night's Watch doesn't need to exist anymore. It's fine! Jon's happy, and he's with his dog.

It's a low bar, but ultimately, Sansa Stark gets the best ending of any main "Game of Thrones" character. In her early seasons, Sansa comes off as a whiny pre-teen who just wants to marry the not-so-handsome Prince Joffrey; after Joffrey publicly lops her dad's head off and decides that she, too, is a traitor, Sansa wises up fast. By the end of the series, Arya and Tyrion are in agreement that Sansa is one of the smartest people in the entire realm, and while she doesn't always necessarily live up to that reputation (because, again, every person in the series gets dumber to serve the plot by the show's conclusion), Sophie Turner's performance is phenomenal, and it's really hard to root against Sansa.

The reason I've coronated Sansa as the number one spot on this ranked list is due to, well, her literal coronation. After Sansa, now a Northern separatist for reasons that nobody ever fully explains, gets her brother to grant her an independent North when he takes the throne, she's rewarded with a lupine crown and deemed "Queen in the North," letting her finally take control of her homeland. Sansa endures some truly sickening stuff throughout "Game of Thrones," and even if her role as a self-reliant queen doesn't make a whole lot of sense narratively, it's still a pleasure to see her powerful — and, above all, safe back at Winterfell.

"Game of Thrones" is streaming on Max now.