So let’s review all the potential ‘Winners’ of the game and potential occupants of the Iron Throne, and why each is an inherently unsatisfying result of 10 years of television.
Bran: The worst of all prospective Kings. He is completely detached from the workings of living men, outside of the two arbitrary plot points set up in S8: He was the penultimate target of the Night King in the North, and had to tell Sansa/Arya about Jon’s heritage because I guess Jon didn’t want to be the one to say it. His training as a lord ceased soon as he left Winterfell, and one can assume he is uneducated and uninterested in the necessary arts of statecraft. A nearly-mute sage living solely in the past does not make a good king. He would just sit there in his chair with his creep-smile and leave the administration of his kingdom to his advisors, and to show him doing otherwise would be antithesis to the character they’ve built up over the last decade.
Jon: The one with the most ‘right’ to the throne and the most likely candidate, but talk about boring. His status as a Jesus/savior character is completely undermined by the fact that every situation he ended up in was completely beyond his control. The idea of him sitting grim faced and reluctant on the Iron Throne is in keeping with the character, but the idea that the game was ‘won’ by the person would wanted it the least doesn’t have enough time to be explored in the span of the last episode, and least not in a fleshed-out and satisfying way. He stumbled into all of it in the same way his foster dad stumbled into the information and situation that got him beheaded- by following honorable principle, and getting fucked over by it.
Dany: Not that rights of succession have mattered all that much up til this point, but she has no actually claim to the Iron Throne as long as Jon lives. She’s got one dragon and a decimated populace within a mostly-destroyed city, the Pyrrhic victory of a conqueror.... but as promised, it came at the cost of the lives she wanted to rule over. The installation of a Breaker of Chains turned tyrant may be reasonable within the context of the entire story, but to me there is nothing satisfactory about leaving it as a parting shot of her on the throne: ruling through blood and fear, unloved by her subjects. Again there isn’t enough room in one episode to redeem her actions. If they show the populace ‘coming around’ to support her cause it would have to be with slap-dash exposition and time skips that would be forced and empty.
Sansa: No claim to the throne and no practical skills in ruling the Seven Kingdoms, despite the one-off and baseless assertions she’s a badass and ‘the smartest.’ She was literally shuffled about as a pawn for 6 whole seasons, with little agency or ability to navigate her situations other than submitting to them. Rape and molestation, despite the weird emphasis otherwise, does not make you into a ruler...then again, this a universe in which strong Khal dicking turns you into a Khaleesi. It could be argued that she has learned the art of leading people, of only through the establishing shots of her staring down at her people milling about the Winterfell courtyard...but she survived this long through sheer luck and people interceding on her behalf. I would argue that Sansa on the throne is more likely than anything else, if only for D&D’s emphasis on ‘subverting expectations’ in hamhanded ways.
Of course, it doesn’t really come down to who ‘deserves’ the throne. They’ve been clear that the ending will be bittersweet, and with the elimination of the Night King (possibly replaced by Bran?) that probably means there will be no satisfying sum ending. Whoever sits on the throne is not going to be particularly happy about it, and that’s likely to be the bittersweet they’ve been warning us about for years.
