While Game of Thrones has a lot of memorable quotes, the most iconic line in the series came from Aidan Gillen’s Littlefinger early in the HBO hit’s eight-season run. While HBO’s Game of Thrones has been replaced as the greatest fantasy show of all time by Prime Video’s Critical Role series The Legend of Vox Machina, the cultural impact of the show might never be matched. At the height of the show’s powers, HBO’s adaptation of author George RR. Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire was a force to be reckoned with.

Even compared to cable competitors of its era, like The Walking Dead and Ryan Murphy’s FX anthology series American Horror Story, Game of Thrones was instrumental in reshaping the norms of small screen censorship in the early 2010s. Scenes like Oberyn Martell’s death at the hands of the Mountain or the massacre at the Red Wedding would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier, and sent shock waves through the TV landscape that are still felt over a decade later.

That said, Game of Thrones was about much more than introducing new levels of graphic violence and explicit content to TV screens. The show’s ambition was almost unprecedented, and still hasn’t been outdone by its spinoffs, House of the Dragon or the lighter, more playful A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. At the time of its production, Game of Thrones season 1 was the most expensive single season of TV ever made. Years later, Littlefinger’s greatest line in the series proves the HBO show needed this massive scale to tell its most important story.

Littlefinger’s Most Iconic Game of Thrones Line Encapsulated The Show’s Entire Story

Like Martin’s source novels, Game of Thrones was never a character study so much as it was a sprawling, Dickensian odyssey charting dozens of characters across a vast array of social, geographical, and class divisions. Taking its structural inspiration from HBO’s earlier crime drama masterpiece The Wire, the first seasons of Game of Thrones adopted a polyphonic storytelling approach that shifted perspectives multiple times every episode.

There was a staggering number of characters to follow and subplots to keep up with, but that was not a design flaw. Rather, it was a feature of the show’s viewpoint, one epitomized in Littlefinger’s legendary speech about chaos. Until this point in the series, Littlefinger and Varys have seemed like surprisingly similar characters. Both wield a lot of soft power in the king’s court, using gossip, rumors, and other indirect means to rise from humble beginnings and become major power brokers.

However, despite their shared tactics, their aims couldn’t be more different. In season 3, episode 6, “The Climb,” Littlefinger and Varys argue about the nature of chaos as the two discuss the future of the realm in the Red Keep. Littlefinger’s vitriolic, cynical response to Varys’s fear of Westeros becoming a pitiful “Pit” of political chaos underlines his entire ethos.

Per Littlefinger, ”Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, and they refuse. They cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.” For Littlefinger, aiming for a stable, successful state is a fool’s errand, since chaos is the motor that powers Westeros.

Littlefinger’s Haunting Quote Highlights The Best of Game of Thrones

The monologue is chilling and Gillen’s delivery marks a high point in his celebrated performance as Littlefinger precisely because this speech captures the entire appeal of Game of Thrones as a series. In many major sci-fi and fantasy franchises, from Star Wars to Dungeons and Dragons, there are existential battles between good and evil where the stakes are clear and the morality at play is even clearer.

In Game of Thrones, every side of every conflict has its corrupt elements and its innocent victims. The decadent, corrupt King’s Landing is full of innocent civilians, and even the seemingly virtuous Daenerys ends up slaughtering them indiscriminately when she attacks the city. In Game of Thrones, chaos can be a nightmare or a tool depending on the character, and this keeps the show’s story impossible to predict.

Release Date

2011 – 2019-00-00

Showrunner

David Benioff, D.B. Weiss

Directors

David Nutter, Alan Taylor, D.B. Weiss, David Benioff