Peasants abolutely kept their own animals, and the lord had their own as well.

And yes, peasants quite often kept dogs. 

That’s better than nothing, I guess. 

In the books, dragonglass has no special properties when it comes to wights – Sam tries to use his dragonglass dagger on the zombiefied Small Paul (pour one out) and the dagger does nothing.

Other than fire, total dismemberment is the only other method known to work. Basically if you damage the thing so badly that it cannot move, it’ll die (again).

Edit:

While I understand the show simplifying things, I do feel something was lost in the change b/c it seems to me that the white walkers created the wights in part because they don’t share their weaknesses to dragonglass (and presumably to valyrian steel too?), so they can send them in as arrow fodder while staying safe themselves.

Hell yes. 

Volantis tries to conquer the Free Cities? Tyrosh, Pentos, Lyr, Myr, and Braavos unite to stop them.

Lys, Myr, and Tyrosh merge into the Kingdom of the Three Daughters? Pentos, Braavos, and Lorath ally to smash them. 

And so on. 

Not that useless – the cloud of ravens were crucially important intel. 

In the books, he’s clearly doing a lot more to shape events. Thus, the ravens in Stannis’ study in TWOW.

No. A manor is an economic unit of agricultural production; a fiefdom consists of multiple manors. The manor is run by the manorial court, which is usually located in the manor house of the lord of the manor (begin to see why peasants weren’t always fond of the manorial courts?). 

A castle is a defensive fortification.

Time:

The desert-greening stuff I wrote about would take a long time to work (especially with premodern technology), although you have to keep in mind we’re talking about space as well as time. Irrigating the Water Gardens is a lot easier than trying to transform acres and acres, let alone miles and miles,of desert. So you could build outwards from initial investments (similar to how existing irrigation spread outwards from the shores of the Greenblood), but that means it’ll take longer to cover more and more of Dorne.

Marriages:

Well, chiefly, House Dayne and its Torrentine River are critical to accomplishing anything in the west of Dorne, but you’ll also need to get alongside the Qorgyles and the Ullers as well.  

See Duskendale, Defiance of. 

See here, here, and here. 

It’s not that you can’t get urban growth without charters; as I point out in the third link, there’s plenty of historical examples where the settlement preceded the charter (indeed, it was the most common way it happened). Maidenpool, Duskendale, all these places are functioning urban centers, even if they don’t have charters. 

However, without a charter, your settlement has major limitations when it comes to trade and commerce vis-a-vis competing settlements. And if less commerce is coming through your town, there’s less need for labor in the industrial and service sectors that serve that commerce, which is going to slow down population growth. Hence why we don’t see settlements without charters the size of a King’s Landing or a Lannisport or an Oldtown. 

They could potentially, but they lack a lot of the advantages that Lys and Tyrosh had – Lys and Tyrosh were set up as colonies by a rich metropole, so that means an outside power was putting in physical and human capital to set them up; they have what should be a rich hinterland; and of course, they have a first-mover advantage when it comes to trade. 

So the Stepstones would be starting from scratch with little physical or human capital, they don’t have an agricultural hinterland to feed a growing population unless they want to jump into the fight for the Disputed Lands, and they’d face very stiff competition from Tyr and Lys and Myr, who aren’t about to let a bunch of pirates into the market.