They are strong powerful women, exercising agency! I suppose you wouldn't be happy unless they were all barefoot, pregnant & chained to a stove!

i.e. the strings are showing. But a lot of the same critics wetting themselves with delight and praise for this show, get all sorts of huffy over what they claim are contrivances in other shows like The Walking Dead and Sons of Anarchy.

Even that was handled in a way that I think demonstrates how perverse are the values of the showrunners. It's cool when a powerful bad guy runs desperately to stop the the explosion. It's not cool to have a wounded man crawling desperately toward the fuse and falling just short of his attempt to snuff it out, unless he's supposed to be the hero. But the show has made it clear that it thinks the Sparrows and the whole religious group are evil fanatics, which makes me think they had the whole bit with Lancel's desperation as another bit of cheap sadistic gratification, like Tyrion taunting Theon last week. Rather than show their protagonists actually being better people, or being heroic, they're more into showing them exercising power and rubbing in the dirt the faces of those people who embody what the writers disapprove. Like religion or tradition or successful white men. George Martin might not have been any less liberal or PC than the showrunners, but he stuck to his characters' world view. For example, in an interview, he said one of his motivations in writing the series was in reaction to tropes like the princess running off with the stableboy. As he said "That never fucking happened." Now Martin might not be a marital elitist, he probably has no more real complaints about cross-class marriage than the average contemporary American, but he has his characters stick with THEIR social mores, THEIR customs and traditions and THEIR worldview, rather than imposing ours on a world where it doesn't make sense. Without Christianity and the Anglo-saxon political traditions, a LOT of our values are counter-indicated, and Martin seems to get that, and sticks to what characters in the setting he has created would or should think or believe. Dany never articulates and Christian principles or 18th century political philosophy in her opposition to slavery, she does it because she doesn't like it, and it goes against the customs she was taught.

The showrunners, on the other hand, seem to be using plotlines and characters as a medium for indulging in their own idealized outcomes and satisfying their personal tastes. So they taunt the devout religious penitent by a final tortuous exercise in impotence right before he is killed, and they punish all the characters who dared to acknowledge any legitimacy to religious authority or even feigned repentance for degenerate behavior.