The season finale reveals a few new twists in his scheme, and clears up at least one old mystery. So every week, The Verge will be diving into a scene or event from the latest installment of the series and explain how we got here.
But before that, he seemed to be playing a long game with a shifting focus. In one of the most satisfying moments in an episode full of satisfying moments, Sansa — who has been manipulated, lied to, and betrayed by Baelish for years now — finally turns the table on him and exposes his schemes to the world. Some of them, we already knew about. Others were new reveals. But even more impressive is taking all of them together — because from a more zoomed-out perspective, Littlefinger has essentially been behind almost every major event in the entire show.
Lysa believed Littlefinger was in love with her, and agreed to help him in his machinations because of that. And given that Cersei Lannister was married to the then-current king, Robert Baratheon, Littlefinger in essence managed to turn three of the major houses — Stark, Lannister, and Baratheon — against each other. Those events caused the War of the Five Kings, and most of the later events of the show. The Seven Kingdoms entering a five-way war is perfect for Baelish, who took the chance to head to the Vale, marry Lysa Arryn, then kill her, placing himself as lord of the Vale, with Sansa Stark as his ward.
But the big question hovering over the show is, why would Baelish do all this? It seems there are two answers. The first is a deeply misplaced, misguided attempt at love. For most of his life, Littlefinger was in love with Catelyn Stark. Most of his efforts can be traced to acquiring power, and using that power to contrive circumstances where in some twisted version of events, he could be with her.
The antagonism is made obvious throughout the pilot season in many complementary ways. Similarly, Cersei appears with an intricate hairstyle at the Winterfell feast S01E01 and Jaime Lannister is presented as a Prince Charming type knight, whereas Lady Stark and the Stark girls wear their hair down and Ned seems to have greasy hair. In addition, the Starks are presented as spending much time outside, as hard-working, when Jaime Lannister appears inside, in the majestic Iron Throne room, absorbed by the mysteries of politics.
It was not an initially conscious creative decision from the showrunners. Even when the depicted story would realistically have taken place in a different linguistic setting, the language s are replaced by the base language of narration; in my case, English.
Still, a central task of narration in any texts with linguistic replacement is to prevent the reader or viewer from assuming that […] the characters would really have spoken English […], especially if mistaken assumptions about the sociolinguistic setting can result in serious misunderstandings of the narrative. As Bleichenbacher 36 explains:. In theory, evocation could appear on any level of linguistic analysis, but phonology L2 accents and lexis code-switches into the other language for certain words or phrases are clearly its preferred sites.
While one could easily assume that non-rhoticity has always been a characteristic of English in England, that is not the case at all. We shall therefore focus here on the major differences between the varieties spoken in the North of England and SSBE, or in other words, contrast the pan-Northern with the pan-Southern phonological and phonetic characteristics. Wells 48 argues in favour of the following definition:. Within it we can distinguish, as we move away from London and towards the Scottish border, i the midlands, ii the middle north, and iii the far north.
Historically, both features are innovations which arose in the South of England during the seventeenth century Watt 56 argues that these monophthongs are usually considered as modern Northern variants by Northern speakers, which explains the gradual disappearance of local Northern variants — that are limited to a small geographical area — in favour of the supralocal ones.
Other works suggest, however, that not all Northern varieties behave in the same way in that respect, as some varieties seem to show no indication of levelling towards these pan-Northern monophthongs, like Manchester for instance He does, however, have an opposition between foot and strut , as the comparison of the following phrases makes clear: so, very lucky 80 ; a little cult , niche show 81 ; and took the picture Contrary to Sean Bean and Richard Madden, he uses, in his native accent, clear diphthongs for goat and face : the audition for Jon Snow 96 , no , no , no 97 ; this girl I was sort of dating at the time, and it was late at night 98 , it weighs a ton He also exhibits bath -broadening: anyone will ask , in the cast In the role of Jon Snow, the most striking Northern features adopted are probably his vowel of strut there are five pups , when you wake up and his use of monophthongs in goat no , you do not know , no one knows , though the actor also uses a shorter vowel in bath words compared to real life to seat a bastard in their midst She also has diphthongs in face and goat great mates ; let it flow , which is not a feature of Northern Ireland, though these variants may be found in varieties from the South of Ireland and obviously, in SSBE.
She also exhibits an opposition between foot and strut compare cushions and so much However, his accent is clearly rhotic the Mayan calendar , later at the bar , exhibits T-flapping big city and shows no bath -broadening the graduating class His starting point in goat is also much more central, as expected in SSBE your absence has already been noted , go One major feature of his English accent is variable rhoticity.
At times, Coster-Waldau can prove inconsistent within the same phrase: who did Jaime Lannister squire for Other features of his accent include diphthongs in face and goat put the phone down, and instantly called a place and an opposition between foot and strut compare look like and the stunt work , which is expected if he aims for a GA accent in real life. This is a deliberate choice as most of the actors and actresses are native speakers of non-rhotic varieties: both Alexandre Siddig and Indira Varma have SSBE-like non-rhotic accents in real life idiotic dictators , stay your course How can it therefore be both geographically accurate and historically wrong?
In other words, the show is bound to inconsistency as it mostly needs to be anchored at the sociolinguistic level. And based on whose judgement? We shall refer to Sherif here:. When we talk about attitudes, we are talking about what a person has learned in the process of becoming a member of a family, a member of a group, and of society that makes him [ sic ] react to his social world in a consistent and characteristic way, instead of a transitory and haphazard way.
In that sense, reactions to how other people speak create expectations in terms of how people with similar geographical origins or social profiles should be depicted on screen. In turn, seeing certain categories of people systematically represented with specific accents in TV or movie productions reinforces the initial attitudes speakers may have had. It is both taught and learnt in everyday as well as in fictional interactions — which means that linguistic representation feeds linguistic ideology which subsequently feeds the representation again, in a full circle.
Both depictions bear some truths: anything foreign can easily be construed as scary and therefore dangerous or evil, while scientific studies have in fact established that female speakers tend to be linguistically more conservative and use more standard and prestigious forms than male speakers Stereotypes arise from a process of categorization. They introduce simplicity and order where there is complexity and nearly random variation.
They can help us cope only if fuzzy differences between groups are transmuted into clear ones, or new differences created where none exist. On the contrary, SSBE is associated with trickery, sophistication, a lust for power and hypocrisy:. This can also be accounted for in terms of female characters using more standard and prestigious variants. Improve this question.
Luciano 6, 3 3 gold badges 32 32 silver badges 62 62 bronze badges. DForck42 DForck42 Because he's a conniving prick? Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Rand al'Thor 7, 3 3 gold badges 42 42 silver badges 74 74 bronze badges. System Down System Down There are of course other reasons to want Stannis off the throne. Mainly: Stannis is an insane religious extremist who burns people alive. While Joffrey enjoyed killing the innocent as a matter of sport, the bloodthirsty religious inquisition that Stannis could have brought with him would be viewed by many as the greater of two evils.
Indubitably, Beaelish acts according to the Objectivist principle capital O , but it's not hard to see that not-living-under-a-brutal-theocracy would be in most people's self-interest especially bordello owners , regardless of political ambition. Mixing business with pleasure was Littlefinger — Cearon O'Flynn. MarcelTuring Is there evidence that Stannis burned anyone alive at the time of this betrayal? This is where Littlefinger tipped the other way. Stefan Stefan This resulted in turning the City Guard against Ned, instead of in his favour.
Tablemaker Tablemaker Glurth Glurth 1 1 silver badge 3 3 bronze badges. True, but I think it's revealed in the very beginning that he always had a crush on her, even though not directly. Not as creepy as his pursuit of Sansa — Cearon O'Flynn. Stop reading now if you don't want a spoiler: After Baelish marries Lysa Arryn and becomes defacto Lord of the Vale thanks to Cersei , it is revealed that Baelish has been involved with Lysa since the beginning and they poisoned her husband Lord Arryn, Hand of the King together.
Vivian Vivian 51 1 1 silver badge 1 1 bronze badge. Further reasons that impressed me when reading: King Stannis would also have not forgotten being cruelly besieged at Storm's End by Mace Tyrell or the rebellion of the Iron Islands. John 8, 6 6 gold badges 48 48 silver badges 49 49 bronze badges.
Alexander Millar Alexander Millar 41 1 1 bronze badge. Swapnil Swapnil 11 2 2 bronze badges. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Version labels for answers. Related Hot Network Questions. Question feed. Accept all cookies Customize settings.
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