SeanC

That headline doesn’t really jibe with the actual poll results, I don’t think. Not that I think the finale was universally loathed or anything.

GRRM was asked about this and said that Robert was visiting at the time, I believe, not living in the Vale fulltime. Apparently the writers were considering having Jorah survive, which implicitly suggests that whatever ending details GRRM gave them did not extend very far beyond the top tier of characters, if at all.

None of the character development either of them is going through is in the direction of making them more suitable for each other. The mentions of the marriage in the books are more or less exclusively in the context of it being a plot point in Sansa’s story that she can’t easily marry somebody else. Sansa’s mentions of Tyrion in the show post-KL were in a much more positive light. There is no basis for thinking the audience would consider Tyrion too old for Sansa. Indeed, there’s strong evidence of the opposite, because Sansa/Tyrion had strong audience support even in Season 3 when the character was supposed to be 14 (and a hostage).

Merely alluding to them being married isn’t the same thing as boosting the relationship. The Tyrion/Sansa relationship in the books is unworkable, and, when they’re together, almost entirely toxic. Sansa notes he’s nicer than the other Lannisters but finds him physically repulsive (very markedly different from how she comes to think about, say, the disfigured Hound) and has no emotional connection to him. Tyrion has some sympathy for her, but he doesn’t understand her at all. The books don’t whitewash that the two are fundamentally not on the same side, and their personalities are not compatible. The show, while removing Tyrion’s overt and inappropriate sexual interest (we never get TV Tyrion thinking about how attractive he finds a twelve-year-old), makes it a much warmer, friendlier, and more respectful relationship pretty much from the get-go. And the writers regularly had the two characters speak positively about each other to third parties and created moments like the hand kiss in 803, which have nothing remotely equivalent in the extant text. It would have been easy to make the relationship overtly romantic based on what was already established. Which is why it’s definitely not happening in the books. The idea of it being dropped due to the rape backlash doesn’t make much sense either; Sansa finding real love would have been very, very easy to sell as empowering, and the writers as of Season 8 were still bumbling into writing lines that sound like Sansa is attributing her character growth to being raped and abused.

The writers of the show more or less admitted that the Sept explosion was something they came up with themselves. I don't think it's going to have any book equivalent, at least in terms of Cersei's plans. The wildfire explosion will be saved for the actual destruction of King's Landing. While this isn't something I feel confident in ruling out alternatives, I think the most likely outcome is that Littlefinger never makes it out of the Vale in the books. He's Sansa's to defeat, and the show, ironically, was a good demonstration of how introducing too many other major characters into the plot tends to impede the central dynamic between those characters. The Vale has been constructed as an ideal, overall neutral stage for this political drama to play out.

I found it extremely naive if anybody thought that Liza Minnelli suddenly turning up on Broadway wouldn't be all over town the night of the first performance.

That I doubt, because if Sansa/Tyrion was a thing in GRRM's endgame, that would definitely be in the show -- D&D clearly love the idea of that pairing, it's one of the more obvious areas where (especially in the early seasons when you could more obviously compare the show to extant source material) their preferences/instincts could visibly be seen tugging in an opposite direction to what GRRM was writing. The biggest of these conflicts in taste, though, was (very inconveniently, as we now know) GRRM making Bran a central character versus D&D clearly not caring about Bran much at all.

Purely talking about the show, since TV Sansa seems to be all about the Stark dynasty, I'd expect her to eventually marry some sperm donor to pop out a few heirs and otherwise ignore the guy as much as possible. When talking about Bran getting the throne, his inability to produce heirs was a concern to her. Tyrion, who knows? There's a bunch of other minor Lannisters out there, presumably, if need be. As far as main character endgames, I'll categorically state that I think D&D completely rewrote the Cersei/Jaime stuff apart from them both dying at the end. The endings for the remaining six original POVs, I expect the broad strokes are accurate, albeit with elaborations or some alterations. Bran being king is locked in, to me, because D&D quite obviously never cared at all about Bran as a character and there's no way they would have come up with that ending by themselves. The Six Kingdoms/North split, as presented in the show, is total nonsense. I don't know if that's a show-only elaboration, and, say, in the books it will be Sansa as Lady with Bran as King, or if GRRM has some surely more detailed and elaborate method of arriving at the same result. I briefly wondered the writers wanted the "Queen in the North" stuff as a shield against Dany going full-villain along with Cersei, but on reflection they've never shown the degree of awareness to warrant such a pre-emptive action; so probably not.

Yara also seems to have forgotten that she cut a deal to make the Iron Islands independent back in Season 6.

Sansa at least understands that a monarch needs to have a cool chair and got herself one to sit in, rather than that ugly, plain setup that the show has been using for the Winterfell great hall in previous seasons.

Brienne seriously wrote that Jaime "took Riverrun from the Tully rebels"? I'm pretty sure Catelyn is going to come back to life just to kill her. We'll get Lady Stoneheart after all!

I have no idea why Bran would become king of everywhere except the North.

That was so, so very dumb. Any claim this series had to be about a drama about politics and power went out the window about fourteen different times there. And that’s without going into the incredible hit-job on Jon’s character. That he needed Tyrion to slow-walk him through all the reasons he had to kill Daenerys even after she massacred an entire city is...I don't even know. I wish that, after the prolonged argument with Tyrion, he had emerged from the cell to find that Arya had already killed Daenerys while he was moping. I did laugh at Tyrion giving his speech about the end of hereditary rule meaning the breaking of the wheel, followed immediately by Sansa declaring that the North was going to secede. Sansa's plot powers are so strong she can even defeat the overarching moral of the show.

Don’t return for what? GOT is over. It would be impossible to judge how many people were just dropping HBO on that basis and how many were doing it as some kind of protest. Which I don’t really believe would ever be a widespread phenomenon, anyway — HBO’s coming attractions either interest you or they don’t. Nobody who’s a Barry fan is going to deny themselves Barry because of dissatisfaction with a wholly unrelated show.

The USFSA has nothing to do with whether Stars on Ice gets shown on TV. That's between SOI and the networks.