the more i rewatch the show the more i think littlefinger is the only character who actually understood the game everyone else thought they were playing
everyone else in westeros is playing the game they were handed. ned plays honor. cersei plays bloodline. robb plays war. stannis plays law. dany plays prophecy. every single one of them inherits a worldview and then dies inside it.
baelish is the only one who looked at the board and asked what the actual rules were. not the rules everyone agreed to pretend existed. the real ones. and the real rule he figured out is that westeros is not a meritocracy or a monarchy or a feudal system, its an information market, and whoever has the most asymmetric information wins. so he went and got the job nobody wanted because nobody important reads ledgers, and suddenly he knew where every coin in the realm moved. he bought brothels because men tell whores things they wouldnt tell their maesters. he made himself indispensable to people who thought they were using him.
and the thing people miss about proximity through invisibility is how long he played it. he was Master of Coin for years while everyone treated him like a useful clerk. varys knew. varys absolutely knew. but even varys couldnt figure out what baelish actually wanted because baelish never told anyone, including himself probably, until it was too late to stop him. the chaos is a ladder monologue gets memed to death but its genuinely one of the cleanest villain thesis statements in modern tv. he tells varys exactly what hes doing and varys still cant catch him because knowing the method isnt the same as knowing the next move.
people call him a schemer like its a dirty word. he was a systems thinker in a show full of people who thought loudly and died honorably. i know which one i find more interesting.
did a whole breakdown on the baelish playbook - the invisibility piece, the chaos currency piece, the parallel alliance piece and the exact reason it couldnt last