Some people are annoyed because they think Littlefinger died because he was being uncharacteristically stupid: a brilliant plotter like him would never have tried to turn the Starks against each other. I disagree.
Littlefinger died the classic way for brilliant plotters to die. He did everything perfectly, until the occurrence of a one-in-a-million nightmare scenario whose possibility he had no reason to even take into account, which left him with no good options. Turning the Starks against each other was basically a Hail Mary pass that just didn't connect.
After the Battle of the Bastards, Littlefinger was all set for the next stage of the game, even taking into account Dany and the White Walkers. (As he explicitly said on the show, if the White Walkers killed everybody, it would all be moot anyway, so best to plan on the assumption they won't.) His plan was to gradually turn the Lords of the North against Jon and toward Sansa, such that Sansa would eventually be forced to choose between either betraying Jon with his aid and taking control of the North, or staying loyal to Jon and letting the North fall apart. Since Sansa cares more about the Stark family and the long-term health of the North than she cares about Jon, it's clear which choice she would have made. Given that Littlefinger knew that
- the coalition under Jon was fragile, and could be expected to remain so after the coming wars,
- Sansa had every reason to stay close to him, partly because of their fucked-up intimacy, partly because she owed him a debt of gratitude for saving everyone in the Battle of the Bastards, partly because she didn't really have anyone else other than Jon, and
- Jon was at best a marginally more capable version of Ned,
this was actually a great plan.
The problem was that Sansa's long-lost siblings, whom everyone had thought were dead, reappeared out of nowhere and virtually at the same time. Since this left Sansa less isolated, this was bad. Since it was obvious from the beginning that neither was going to like or trust him (despite his initial attempts to the contrary), this was very bad. Since one turned out to be an oracle and the other a master assassin, this was unbelievably, gobsmackingly bad. Littlefinger panicked (depicted in some of his quickly-supressed reactions in his earlier scenes with Arya and Bran this season), and nobody could blame him.
So what could he do? He couldn't just stick with the original plan and do nothing. Bran and Arya were way too dangerous and unpredictable for that. Possibly he could have handled one or the other alone, but together? It was only a matter of time before Bran learned the dirt on him, if he didn't know it already, and then it was just a word to his sister and that was it. He could hightail it back to the Vale, and in retrospect this was probably his best option. But then he'd have to bring the Knights of the Vale with him, and how could he justify that to Sansa (or for that matter to anyone) with the armies of the dead on the march? The political costs of this choice would be so huge, and it would leave Littlefinger so isolated, that it would amount to abandoning everything he'd worked toward, and Littlefinger was no quitter.
So he had to get rid of at least Arya, and fast. Obviously he couldn't just have her killed: again, master assassin. As Sansa said at the end, turning family against family was basically his m.o.--it was what he knew best, and it was what he was best at. Freaking out, with his back against the wall, of course he'd try that.
Submitted September 01, 2017 at 03:21PM by bagori_nd http://ift.tt/2eMz2KC
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