Lord Petyr Baelish cannot be trusted. The man also known as Littlefinger said so himself. In a rare act of charity, he warned Lord Eddard Stark against the perils of trusting him as early as season one. By not heeding this basic advice, Stark found his head rotting on a spike. This wasn’t the first or the last time someone who trusted Littlefinger found themselves dead.
One of the most politically agile players in Game of Thrones, Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen) has never been a stickler for loyalty. It lies nowhere. Every time we see him, Littlefinger is spinning lies, creating webs for those in his path to fall in, and taking advantage of the general misery that surrounds him.
Littlefinger plays the long game. He doesn’t find himself in the trivial and petty scrapes that most of the other Game of Thrones characters are constantly wrestling with. He is the one who lays the plan, puts it in action, and watches as lives are ravaged, houses fall into chaos, and families end up in ruin.
When we first see him, Littlefinger is the Master of Coin, or the chief treasurer, for King Robert Baratheon. He also runs the biggest brothel in the kingdom, which he uses to accumulate wealth and manage his wide network of spies. His upward journey is littered with compromised morals, dubious ethics and treacherous deals.
But he didn’t start out that way. Petyr Baelish was the ward of Lord Hoster Tully, father of Catelyn, Lysa and Edmure Tully of Riverrun. He lived, fought, learnt and dreamed like one of them. When Catelyn, the love of his life, rejected him for Brandon Stark, Petyr decided he would never be controlled by social hierarchy again.
You can argue that Petyr Baelish did it all for love and is the true tragic hero of the series. But his constant lack of remorse or shame and his pathological egocentricity make it hard to believe that there is empathy underneath his chilling indifference. He has several deaths and misdemeanours to his credit, including killing his wife after she has served her purpose and getting Sansa Stark married to the psychopathic Ramsay Bolton. He has also left King’s Landing in debt.
An important thing to note is that when those affected by the chaos look for a perpetrator, no one is ever looking at Littlefinger. He wrecks and causing havoc in the lives of whoever he meets, but so far the only person who has been able to identify him as the centre of the anarchy is Lord Varys. Luckily for Littlefinger, Varys is far away in Meereen.
Littlefinger won’t be competing with Ramsay Bolton in the new season, however. In an interview about his return to the screen this week, Aidan Gillen stated that this season is all about “atonement” for his character. Littlefinger does care about Sansa in a creepy “unfulfilled teenage fantasy” way. The actor claims that Littlefinger has no idea of what goes on inside the closed doors and barred gates of Ramsay Bolton’s kingdoms Dreadfort and Winterfell and hence had no idea what he was pushing Sansa into. I’d suggest you take his words with a huge portion of doubt – no good ever comes to those who trust Lord Baelish.