The High Septon
The corpulent, well-fed head of the Faith of the Seven in King's Landing, more at home at a feast than in a fast.
A soul born at King's Landing, sworn to The Faith of the Seven.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
On the screen. Torn apart by the mob (S2┬ÀE6)
He blessed Joffrey's procession on the day the starving city finally broke. The mob tore the crystal-crowned old man limb from limb in the streets, and the riot swallowed the rest of the afternoon.
On the page. Killed in the bread riots (ACOK, ch. 41)
When the mob broke over Joffrey's procession in the starving city, they pulled the fat High Septon apart in the street ÔÇö the man who spoke for the Seven torn seven ways, his crystal crown lost in the gutters.
The mob takes him apart with its hands. On the day Princess Myrcella sails for Dorne, the royal party processes back through a city that has been starving all winter while the court feasts ÔÇö and when the crowd's misery finds its voice, dung and curses turn in a heartbeat to riot. The High Septon, borne along in his litter in full regalia, is the crowd's first and most symbolic harvest: the man who spoke for the gods while the gods' children starved is pulled from his litter and torn limb from limb in the street, his crystal crown vanishing into the same gutters his flock lived in. The books add the grace note that he is literally pulled to pieces ÔÇö the Faith later recovers the crown but not, in any assembled sense, the Septon ÔÇö and both tellings stage the death as the city's verdict rather than any schemer's plot: of all the story's murdered institutions, he is the one killed purely by his own congregation. The riot that consumes him nearly takes Sansa Stark too, and announces the truth the capital's rulers spend the rest of the saga relearning ÔÇö the smallfolk are not scenery.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
The books run through High Septons faster and more pointedly than the show. The fat one of the riot is succeeded, at Tyrion's brisk arrangement, by a pliable old man raised for his loyalty to the throne ÔÇö and when that successor dies suddenly in the night, the novels drop dark hints that Cersei had him smothered for knowing too much, a murder the show never touches; only then do the Most Devout, pressured by the sparrow movement flooding the city, elect the barefoot radical. The show compresses the succession to a single cut ÔÇö jeweled hypocrite to High Sparrow ÔÇö trading the books' study of institutional decay for velocity. Both tellings agree on the founding irony: the Faith's collapse into revolution is not caused by its enemies but catered by its own princes, and the fat man in crystal is the caterer-in-chief.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.