Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish discussion

I can't really get too excited by him myself. He was fascinating early doors - his scheming and conniving did more than anyone else to sow chaos and strife throughout the land, all (imo) in the cause of furthering himself as high up the food chain as possible. I don't think he works for anyone else such as the IB, or a higher cause like Republicanism. At this point in the game, however, whatever lordships he can accrue is largely meaningless in the face of the existential threat of the Others. Like Daenerys with her designs on the Iron Throne, his ambitions are hollow; unlike Daenerys he has no dragons and thus nothing further to offer. All the remains now is for Sansa to break free of him and serve him justice.

I think he still has a role to play regardless of his plans. He has the Vale army and a great deal of food stored up which will prove instrumental in surviving the probable Long Night 2.0.

The first one is a bit overdone in trying to make a saint of Baelish that is true.  It just casts Baelish in a slightly different light than most people think of him. We don't know how much time there was between Lysa's raping of Baelish and Cat's engagement to Stark. Perhaps Baelish was trying to do the honorable thing like Robb Stark did with Jeyne. It was ok for Robb since he was a King, not ok for Baelish because he wasn't anyone important.

I agree Joff was the one behind Bran's assassination attempt. Much like how I think he decided to kill Eddard on his own.

Tyrion didn't let Baelish get away with it, Baelish was simply too well connected to do anything about it at that time. Besides Tyrion was more interested in getting back at Cersei and protecting Shae. Too busy to notice Baelish and Varys playing him like a fiddle. The dagger was plot of convience and Joff was getting him back for the lie about marrying Myrcella to Robert Arryn. Which would have allowed Baelish to accelerate a few of his plans.

Not sure why he is so fascinated with Cat. Marrying him Lysa would be basically the same thing, yet he always wanted Cat. I think he was a romantic youth until he had reality beaten into him by Brandon Stark. Ironically I pictured him as a male version of Sansa until the duel.

Well, it had to be at least a couple of weeks. No one mentions Cat having been engaged to Brandon at the time and even if they announced it the very next day, it would have taken sometime before Brandon would make it to RR. So, basically it wasn't the next day.
As for it being something like what Robb did, I am not sure I would agree. We know very little about Jeyne and all we know we know from Cat's point of view and she thinks very poorly of her. All other things aside, she seems to be a "damsel in distress" kind of girl: shy, fragile, simple. Cat is none of those things. People have different opinion of Cat, but one thing everyone agrees is that she is very independent, strong, and outspoken. Cat herself even thinks that she was raised to be like this (like an heir). So, I am not sure what LF was doing, but what ever it was, it was not for Cat.

Oh I forgot to comment on this. I am not sure about this, so hear me out.
By the time Joff kills Ned, Ned has already be nullified as a threat. He has confessed to treason and his daughter is with Lannisters. We know for a fact that keeping a family member as a hostage was a standard way of controlling unruly subjects, so keeping Sansa as a hostage would have worked just fine. We also know for a fact that Ned and Cat truly loved their kids (not like Balon), so they would have behaved, especially if marrying Sansa to a Lannister would have happened anyways. So, basically Starks are already defeated, there is no good reason for Joff to want Ned dead.
LF though, based on what he says about chaos being a ladder, wants war. Starks raised the North against the crown for Ned, not for the girls. Killing Ned deprived them of their cause. We see as the story progresses that Robb's campaign suffers greatly after Ned's death and they no longer have a real reason. This makes it much more difficult to expect the riverland lords to stay put while their lands are being pillaged. We also know that Northern lords did not consider Sansa and Arya enough reason for the war. This lead to many of their mistakes: calling Robb the KitN, asking for help from IB, Cat freeing Jaime, Robb executing the Karstark. The only person to have ever profited from this was LF.

Yeah, see, that does not make sense to me. NO ONE is that well connected. Tyrion did well enough after he was appointed as master of coin. So while there is this belief that LF was irreplaceable, he wasn't. LF did get away with much because of Robert's reign and his irresponsibility, otherwise he wasn't doing that great of a job.
Tyrion paid him back with mockery for a near death experience. Seriously, how are they comparable?

Yeah, I am stumped about this too. But I would say this that we actually do not know this. During the course he has only acted two times that can be said to be genuine:
- Duel with Brandon for Cat,
- First time he meets Sansa and touches her hair and is creepy and all.
While he says he loves Cat cumltiple times, his actions do not necessarily support this. Let me try to explain his two actions without the need for genuine Love:

In RR: They played at kissing, but he played with both girls, not just Cat, both. Now here both girls thought that he was more interested in Cat. Cat was the older one, the smarter one, and maybe the prettier one. But interestingly enough, the only reason for us to agree with them is the duel with Brandon. Now interestingly, we know for a fact that Cat liked Brandon so much that she thanked his father for such a fine choice. Her feelings for Brandon was still a source of friction between her and Ned and she keeps comparing them 15years into a very happy marriage. So, if Sansa is any indication of her mom's behaviour, she must have been very transparent about her regards for Brandon. Now, at the this time LF had already slept with Lysa and while we, as modern people would call it raped by Lysa, in a patriarchal society like Westeroes, it would have been either raped Lysa or soiled Lysa. Since Cat liked Brandon so much it can hardly be said that he thought she was in love with him, but dueling Brandon, something can could have never ended well, did accomplish both girls pity him.
Cat married someone else and went away, but he did try to play on it when he sent a letter to her but she burned it unopened. Still her guilt over this made her play into LF's hands later.
Lysa, on the other hand, doubles down. The duel in combination with Lysa's confession, made Hoster believe that he wasn't the culprit (given that he did go unscathed from soiling a higher born girl). It also made Lysa very insecure, so she tried all her life to "make" LF like her: almost all of his future success came from opportunities Lysa provided for him.
Interestingly, in KL he says that he "had Cat's maidenhead". This cannot be a loving action (ruining Cat's reputation cannot be good for Cat) but it accomplishes so much: it puts people off of his and Lysa's affair (if there is any), can be an inside joke between him and Lysa and make Lysa feel even more insecure given that he thought it was Cat the first time they had sex.
Interestingly enough, he does not need to have real regards for Cat for Lysa to think so. If he is aloof around her, she will always think that. We know that he plays that card often enough, we read it from Sansa's point of view: reassure her that if he did not want her, he would have never married her, but then spend all of his time away from her and flirt with Cat's daughter.
Almost all of the other times he has "professed" to have loved Cat has been to manipulate either Cat or Sansa. So, they are neither here nor there.

In Hand's Tourney: I have to confess that I actually believed it to be an honest interaction. But I can easily see it as being something else. He did see Sansa after he had seen real Cat, so this interaction has always bothered me. Also, Sansa had been in KL for a while when this happened and since she is a very social girl, I find it difficult to believe that he had never seen her from afar. The only thing I can think of is for him trying to manipulate Ned. Ned's trust of LF was solely based on Cat's trust of him because she said he had genuine regards for her. This could have helped.

I will say this that while I think the duel would have worked perfectly in manipulating everyone, he was so young when it all happened. At the same time, he was older than Jon and Robb at the beginning of the story, so he wasn't "that" young (he was 15, right?).


I have to disagree with this too. I can easily believe this about the Hound, Jaime, even Robert B. But LF
is a really bad human being: he does human trafficking, he manages brothels and apparently his methods of training girls is not gentle (based on Jeyne P's body) and all the tings he did to other POV characters of the book. I am not sure how a single duel with a guy, that had the right of it by the way, can do that to anyone.

and I was trying to dispute his belief based on the fact that all the players in the story lived in the same place and had tongues. So, it is not far fetched to assume that while he was under that impression the night of the rape, there is no good reason to believe that it wouldn't have cleared up later. (before the duel)

I agree with you, it probably cannot unless he confesses to it right out. I wasn't trying to say that he did that necessarily, but to provide a consistent framework for his motivations.

This I do not agree with. Baelish led Ned to believe that Lannisters killed both Robert and Jon (arryn), men he loved as a brother and a father. At the point of proposal, Cat had already seized Tyrion and the Lannisters had attacked RL. He then expected Ned to choose Renly, a man Ned did not like or respect, over Stannis, a very respectable commander and rightful heir. He also made it clear that Renly knew about the incest but did not care. This is not a genuine business proposal with Ned, he had to say no.

I don't disagree with you at all. But since LF does not have a military power of his own, for him to deal with a military power he has to manipulate others into using theirs. A big part of Robb's forces dissolved on their own before a major battle. This helped Lannisters to retain enough forces both to be worthy allies to Tyrels and deal with Stannis in blackwater.
I was just trying to illustrate that is was NOT about the Starks. Starks were just a tool, and he already had an advantage with them because of Cat.

I do not disagree nor do I agree. I was just saying that his real feelings for Cat is irrelevant to all that follows. All that happened could have still happened whether or not he actually liked Cat.

But they didn't say that to him, he soiled a girl and tried to kill the other girl's betrothed. I thing you downplay the impact of all of this. Brandon was the son of a great house, we saw how much that alliance helped the riverlands when westerlands attacked them in our story. That was a very serious business negotiation, something that not only would change the life of Hoster's family, it would provide so much assurance for all his subjects. LF tried to kill that deal!
As for Lysa, you keep using the word rape and I agree with you. But we are in our world where women have agency and thus are held responsible for their actions. In that society, it would have always been the man's fault, and that is regardless of his social status. The only thing his social status did was that it made him worthless to marry the girl. They did not exactly cherish him (why would they after all this?!) but they also did not harm him, they tended to him and sent him back home. Obviously they did not try to stop his advancements too, otherwise their son-in-law would not have given him a chance.
I am not trying to belittle his pain, I am just saying that his actions were very serious and they treated him exactly as any other young boy, they made sure he lived and sent him back home. It wasn't their fault that his home sucked.

It depends what you really mean by this. He doesn't HAVE to be powerful, he chooses to be powerful for a very high cost. He chose to start a very long and devastating war to be this powerful, many many people died as a result of it. He also chose to treat women who were lower than him in class very poorly and profit from them. And probably more.
I think I just do not subscribe to the idea that it is OK for people to do what it takes to be rich and powerful. So that really limits my sympathy towards him.

Yup I have watched them. I didn't think about adding them since I figured everyone here had watched all of PJ's theories. I will say he is one of the few to really take note of Baelish messing up the Florents, another move which weakens Stannis. Also shows he was helping House Tyrell earlier on. He makes some interesting connections them jumps to some odd conclusions.