The Masters of Slaver's Bay
The slaver aristocracy of the old Ghiscari cities ÔÇö Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen ÔÇö grown fat on the trade in human flesh, and unprepared for what sails into their bay.
The fuller tale
Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen are what remains of the old Ghiscari empire, a civilization Valyria burned to rubble in a war so total that its language survives mostly as slang in the mouths of the slavers who inherited its coastline. What they inherited along with the ruins was an economy built entirely on human bondage ÔÇö Good Masters, Wise Masters, Great Masters, whichever city's honorific applies, ruling on the theory that some people are born to be owned and the arrangement is simply how the world works, a theory none of them have ever had seriously challenged before.
Daenerys Targaryen's march through the bay is less a campaign than a demolition, city by city, of that theory: Astapor's Unsullied bought and freed in the same transaction, Yunkai's slave-soldiers turned loose in the streets, Meereen's pyramids stormed and its slaving aristocracy publicly answerable, for once, to the people whose labor built the city they lived in. Meereen becomes the harpy's city precisely because the masters keep fighting back under that banner even after their formal defeat ÔÇö the Sons of the Harpy waging an insurgency that makes plain how much easier breaking chains is than building whatever comes after.
That difficulty is the region's real subject: Daenerys stays in Meereen far longer than any triumphant liberation narrative would predict, precisely because she takes the responsibility of what follows liberation seriously, reopening the fighting pits as a political compromise, marrying a Meereenese nobleman to stabilize a city on the edge of civil war, discovering that a queen who frees slaves still has to govern the society she freed them into. It is the tale's most sustained argument that revolution and government are different jobs, and that being right about the first does not guarantee competence at the second.
The page and the screen
The books spend considerably more time on Meereen's internal politics than the show, which compresses the region's factional maneuvering and eventually skips it almost entirely. Where the show moves Daenerys toward Westeros relatively quickly, the novels keep her occupied for volumes with Yunkish alliances, Volantene religious politics, and a subplot following Tyrion's own long journey through the slave cities that has no real screen equivalent ÔÇö an entire stretch of the saga's geography and politics the adaptation ultimately chose to leave largely unexplored.
