Sauru wrote:for me its not a matter of "no one dying" as it is "people not dying in situations where they would surely die". for example tormund should be dead. he never should have made it to the season finale. bronn should be dead and jamie too. grey worm? yeah him and the rest of his army should be dead. over all much of what happened was predictable simple because we now have tv writers calling the shots and they are falling back on what has worked in the past.
That's fair. I still say that routinely offing main characters is also predictable in its own way though, and the deaths should be meaningful. To the credit of the show and the books, I think that's mostly been the case.
I would probably agree in regards to Tormund, because he's more or less served his purpose at this point. Killing him would also make it more difficult for Jon to keep unity with the free folk, which would be a good complication for the narrative to have. As far as Grey Worm is concerned though, I disagree there. They had an easy victory because of Jaime's plan with Casterly Rock. After that, they were stuck waiting for new orders and opportunity, which came when Dany roasted the Lannister army. Unlike Tormund, he wasn't put in a situation where it was highly unlikely that an important character wouldn't die.
There's still a story arc with Jaime defecting from Cersei, so I don't mind that he survived. We also got a really good fakeout there. Bronn...I'm not sure, I could go either way on that one. A big part of his character is that he's a survivor, picking his spots and getting out of scrapes. I think it's important that there's a token somewhat good/neutral character on the bad side, as it preserves the "no side is totally good or bad" aspect. I also come back to the deaths of well-established characters needing to be meaningful and handled correctly. The timing has to be right. At the end of the day, give or take a character like Tormund, I think it just comes down to timing. Perhaps it might be different if the season had the regular ten episodes.
The Season 6 finale proved that even when going beyond the books, D&D are willing to make big changes and kill off major characters. They did the same with Shireen, and Stannis for that matter, because they haven't been killed in the books yet. Book fans complained, but killing them off wasn't outside the nature of the books. I think it's just the way it worked out with Season 7, and while there may be some missed opportunities, I think Season 8 is going to change that.