Furthermore, some of this stuff is just lazy. I couldn't help but laugh at the "great games!" being held in Meereen, which Dany was to bear witness to. We arrive at it and it literally looks like some setup in a guy's backyard.
Those weren't the Great Games. They were supposed to be some low-rent games that were held sort of as "qualifiers" at more low-rent locations prior to the Great Games. That's essentially what Dany's husband said at the beginning of that scene. Sort of like spring training for pit fighters.
I did like the whole change (from the books) that got Tyrion, Danys, and Jorah all in the same place without a 1000 pages of dicking around.
I wonder if the general viewer finds the high sparrow a sympathetic figure and are rooting for him. "You are the few, we are the many" #occupyWesteros
Exactly, just like the books. Actually, kind of classic Martin in that he mixed (or maybe ignored) the usual tropes of "right wing-religious nuts" with "left wing radical egalitarianism", into something that defies direct comparison to modern events, and defies the expectations (of at least some) as a whole. It's Westeros, not the 21st century western world with all its baggage.
@MalTalm made the claim that the High Sparrow had been twisted in last weeks' episode into more of a
right-wing figure so as to appeal to an American audience. I personally did not see last week's episode the same way at all, but here's his point:
The church acting as a power serving the far right seems to be done solely to appease the American fanbase as it's how Americans expect a religious entity to act. Yet in the books, the movement comes from the far left, which makes far more sense given the circumstances of the people in Flea Bottom, but the showrunners apparently didn't trust the viewers to understand how an extreme leftist movement could become violent. (See: Bolshevik revolution)
This week's episode made it pretty clear that the showrunners were
not changing the story "solely to appease the American fanbase", and that they
weren't untrusting of the viewers regarding an "extreme leftist movement." In the books, the High Sparrow was both a religious zealot
and an egalitarian crusader.
I mention this because it illustrates what I see as a trap of trying to view either the series or the books through some modern social/political framework, whether it be feminism, progressivism, conservatism, etc.. Once you start viewing the series with our modern biases/perspectives, it's easy to either 1) see things that just aren't there, 2) misperceive what Martin is trying to do, or 3) become angry because either GRRM or the showrunners didn't do what they were "supposed" to do to comport with the expectations of ideologically-motivated viewers.
This has been going on with ASOIAF since the late
90's, with all sorts of message board theories and arguments focusing (very often) on feminist themes, especially regarding Sansa. While I don't see anything wrong with looking at a story and drawing analogies from particular situations to make a larger point, I think that approach goes off the rails when it starts making predictions about what will (and should) happen.
There's a veritable army out there convinced that Sansa Stark and Sandor Clegane are one of the great romantic storylines of the last century.
I shit you not.
