your bolton meta is great so i have a question for you. it really feels like ramsay's competency seems to sharply decrease from acok to adwd so i've gotta ask, do you think he was high on the bolton's "success" or just got lucky manipulating theon in acok?
i don't think ramsay's debuff from acok to adwd is due to him losing any sort of plot-convenient competency. i think he remains as competent and shrewd in adwd as he was in acok. but the field he's playing on has changed drastically. classic big fish in a little pond becomes a little fish in a big pond situation. NOT!! DISSIMILAR!! to how theon's competencies also fail him when he gets into a situation too big for him to handle. theon and ramsay both stay the same level of smart, they're just both dealing with ever-rising levels of anxiety and uncertainty and also the game they're playing is getting bigger, more complicated, and more difficult.
ramsay is a good manipulator. he reads people well and can exploit their weaknesses. but he isn't a people person. he isn't a good leader. he isn't smarter than his dad. he gets along well with a small handful of people who like being in close proximity to his power, but aside from that he is widely disliked for pretty obvious reasons, like his shitty personality and his serial killing hobby.
rams was a capable and successful loose canon in acok who made strategically bold and rewarding decisions. he was put into a situation where he could make those decisions by dumb luck. by adwd his dumb luck has run totally dry, and he is back to being a miller's son raised with some haphazard and informal training and education far outside the walls of any castle. and he has serious hair trigger anger issues and less than awesome crisis management skills when the crisis is happening to him rather than his perspective dogboy cocksleeve.
all to say that generally people with little to no formal training, life experience, or command background can often acheive positions of significant power and influence, but it's rare for them to keep these positions for long. in the series-spanning question of "you and what army?" acok finds rams with a lot on his side, and adwd finds him with little.
he will die quietly off-page at some point during twow or ados 🥰 i will be shocked if his death gets more than a half sentence mention. forever and for always the worst thing that ever happened to a small group of traumatized people, but less than a footnote of a footnote in the broader lanscape of the wo5k.
