Thread by @chachch_changes

I Hate That It Looks Like Cleganebowl is Going to Happen: A Thread In ??? Parts

Some things to start off on:
1) Obviously, this is based on my own OPINIONS from the books
2) I do not have the books in front of me atm
3) This thread is mostly about the Hound aka Sandor Clegane, but is a microcosm of why the show is so fucking squirrely and not good

SO, okay. Cleganebowl is a good meme/fun batshit ASOIAF theory, it's been fun screaming G E T H Y P E, posting pictures of chickens etc. I'm not gonna act like I don't do it all the time. But it looks like the show is going in the direction where it's actually going to happen.

AND I DON'T ACTUALLY WANT IT OH NO

For those who aren't aware, Cleganebowl is the idea that the Hound and the Mountain are gonna fight to death at some point, and that it will be badass and that worlds will be SHAKEN by the supreme EPICNESS of it.

Most of the theory behind it is based in the idea that it would be fun to see two epics fighters kicking each other's ass and hopefully the Hound getting some final sweet revenge on his brother, The Mountain, for deforming him/killing their family/being a giant asshole

But to me, this happening as the resolution to Sandor Clegane's arc makes zero sense, and also just seems to be based in a really, really shallow reading of the character and some of the larger thematic elements of ASOIAF.

(One more note: if this is where GRRM actually intended to go with them and D&D aren't just doing it for shits and giggles, I will buy myself a t-shirt that reads "pendantic asshole" and call it a day)

So, okay. I think one of the reasons I (and maybe others?) enjoy the ASOIAF series isn't because it's shocking or breaks fantasy clichés or whatever, but because I love how the overarching theme of it is about cycles and the breaking of them. Almost all of the POV characters and

a lot of the secondary and tertiary characters have arcs that are tethered to this idea of cycles--whether it's Dany being the breaker of chains, of the Azor Ahai Reborn Prophecy, of the rigid and violent bones of Westeros unraveling after hundreds of years

Characters are always engaged in it. Even the setting and landscape are entrenched. The Free Cities in Essos were only free cities when the Valyrian Freehold met with cataclysmic doom and empire fell. And it's something I keep in mind in my readings, this mirror history

ANYWAY.

I hate that I'm gonna say this, because it's used as a bad faith excuse for a lot of the violence against women/characters of color in the books and ESPECIALLY the show, but let's just take it that Westeros is loosely based on feudal Europe--in particular that it's ruled

by a pretty strict, patriachal (please don't @ me, i'm using this in the most literal sense), hierarchal society. A very ordered one with some changes in power at the present, but still with an ebb and flow.

Most of ASOIAF/GoT is characters reacting to this reality.

So why the Hound? If you've followed me on Twitter, you know I fucking LOVE this giant piece of shit character, and it seems pretty silly given that he's a secondary character in a cast of hundreds. But if we're talking in circles (literal), I enjoy him so much because

GRRM says a lot through this chRcter about the cyclical of violence, toxic masculinity, and what it does to a person when that is what a life is built on.

At the start of the novels, the Hound is one of the biggest LIVING in-universe bad asses in the book.

Like, outside of the Mountain and Jaime Lannister, ya don't want to pick a fight with him. He's big, he's deadly, he's pragmatic, and he doesn't seem to have much in the way of scruples or a filter. He's a big, foul mouthed war machine.

And that's how Ned sees him, and how we are introduced to him, and given how much of a read Ned really had on the situation, not the end to that character.

Holy fuck I'm still doing this.

Anyway, a short summary of the Hound: His older brother, The Mountain, jammed his face into some fire at the age of 7(?) and is implied to have killed their father and sister at some point as well. Gregor is rewarded with knighthood not much later

The Hound bounces, terrified of his brother, and as someone from a titled house in the Westerlands, swears fealty to House Lannister and fights with them in Robert's Rebellion. He's roughly 12? at that point. Flash forward 15 years, he gets upgraded to personal bodyguard yadayada

Anyway. After Ned, the only character we really see interacting with him is Sansa, who, feel how you want about her, isn't a character of action. She's an observer and an empath, not so much a doer. She's also... 12-13? That age again.

The show has Petyr give Sansa the Hound's backstory, but in the book it comes straight, unfiltered from the Hound while he's drunk and escorting Sansa alone. And he... uh... cries while he tells her, and then immediately threatens to kill her if she ever tells anyone this very

personal raison d'etre: why he hates knights, why the world is shit. From Sansa's POV, the world is still great, knights are heroes (this is her circle). And despite his uncouthness, Sansa immediately starts to see him as... well, fucked up and sad.

Like, a TEENAGER can see this. But Sansa tries to not let it challenge her worldview, even after Ned's death and Joff's monstrousness. Most of Sansa's plot in the second book is basically her and the Hound fighting about the world and whether it is inherently good or bad.

And by the time Stannis's ships attack Blackwater, the big badass turns away because everything is engulfed in his trauma button, fire. he tries to do the good thing and take Sansa with him, but ends up getting violent and mean to her when she refuses.

And Sansa somehow sense that what he needs is ... mercy. And in front of him, she sings to the Mother to let him know peace. And this shames him so much that he bounces. Sansa, for the rest of the books, wonders about him constantly and whether or not the Mother heard her prayer

(I'm not touching the UnKiss. GOOGLE IT.)

The next time we see him is in Arya's eyes, when the Brotherhood has captured him. And it wasn't in a big fight. (pls correct if misremembering). it's because his dumb ass was so drunk that he was basically pissing around the woods

Like imagine this ~ badass ~ having left his ~ badass ~ job is in such a state that he can't fucking function and leaves himself in a highly vulnerable position. And this is a thing that happens a lot in the Arya and Hound adventures in Book 3.

When he first kidnaps Arya, she does what she really only can do: taunt the shit out of him. And nothing seems to get to him except when she brings up Micah, the butcher boy he killed at the very beginning. Hmm, that. Pair that with the fact that he literally can't shut up about

Sansa and how he ~ tried to save her ~ and how him returning Arya to the Starks will be ~ noble ~, it's a weird light that he wants Arya to see him in. Anyway. After the Red Wedding happens and spoils that plan, there's a large chunk of the book in which they just aimlessly

wander the riverlands, and the Hound spends a lot of it drinking himself sick and literally doing nothing. (This does not make for good TV). And Arya, A TEENAGE GIRL, sees it for what it is: sad and pathetic. Like really fucking sad. And as much as she hates him, she

(un?)consciously always comes back to this. ANYWAY. They show up at the Inn of the Crossroads (NGL, this scene was super fun in the show) and the Hound finds out that Sansa was married off to Tyrion and disappeared, and then Arya notes him get sloppy drunk.

To the point when that a fight breaks out, he kills all of the Lannister dudes, but is so sloppy that he gets a dumb ass cut on his fucking leg. It gets infected, he can't continue on, and Arya leaves him a crying mess, saying every awful thing he can about himself because he

wants out of his misery. his life is shit, and the most he has to show for one of violence forged in this idea of getting revenge is hanging around two teenage girls and doing an ok thing. And then he's left for dead.

And my read of all of this is not of a cool, foul mouthed badass. it's a very sad and damaged human being who, when pitted against the arcs of the two POV characters he spends a lot of time around, becomes really, really interesting.

Sansa is the idealist, the dreamer, a believer in this cycle of chivalry and romance--she's plunged into the horror of King's Landing the same age the Hound started killing for the Lannisters as a means to escape the brother that killed his idealism.

And while this cynicism rubs off on Sansa in a huge way through her arc, her appeal to mercy and gentleness sticks with him in his. The idea that he might not be completely awful and capable of more;

Arya, meanwhile, is also roughly the same age he was, and also heading down the path of becoming a death machine; she's just too young to see that her need for revenge, however noble it might be, is just as fruitless as the Hound's to kill his brother.

Crossing people off her list doesn't make her any happier, even if her list is made of awful people--it only leads her further into strangeness, a lack of humanity. A noble intention lost to violent ends.

So this is the Hound: someone who seems to have been the very extreme conclusion of what a Westerosi man needs to be to survive: (strong, stoic, unfeeling, cruel) is ultimately a sad, drunk man, with no one who loved him, left to die in his own blood in an inglorious death.

A lot of characters are motivated by revenge/violence in ASOIAF, and in this one secondary character, we see just how miserable it makes you. How easy it is to retreat into a persona (The Hound) and to lose humanity. (see lady stoneheart as well)

With the show eclipsing the books, we now take it as a known that the Hound is alive. Where the books are, GRRM only hinted about it in passing when Brienne passes a septry on the Quiet Isle and meets a Septon who mentions having met Sandor Clegane.

The Septry has his horse (The Stranger, a blasphemous name for a pet, given that it's basically the god of death, wow what an edgelord u r Sandor) and the Septon says that "The Hound is dead. Sandor Clegane is at peace."

But there's also like a giant, shrouded, limping monk digging graves of the many, many bodies that wash up to the septry as a result of the violence in Westeros and ok, come on, it's 100% Sandor Clegane. And it's 100% a poetic justice for a man who dealt death to now

have to deal with the remnants of it.

I don't know what GRRM was planning on doing after this, since this gravedigger nor the Quiet Isle are ever mentioned again. I won't lie that I want him to UwU be Sansa's sworn shield when she's Lady of Winterfell. (Pls.)

But regardless of whether this was set-up for something bigger or just GRRM giving us a nice, subtle end to Sandor's story, I don't think there is anything satisfying to having Cleganebowl at this point.

Apart from the fact that the Mountain is dead and now a zombie (lol these books), that ~ The Hound is Dead ~ is clearly a metaphor for the violent side of his personality being relinquished. that is over. the only way i could maybe justify something like Cleganebowl happening is

that zombie Mountain actively threatens someone he has a meaningful relationship too.

All this is to say that, except for when the Hound means something to the POV characters, I don't know what the fuck D&D pull from his character.

That he's big? That he's sarcastic? That he swears (and he is foul-mouthed in the book, but nowhere near to the extent that the show portrays him as)? I have nothing against Rory McCann, who I think is great in the part (please come to Philadelphia, I <3 U senpai)

That he can be a tool to level up Arya and have fun hijinx while gleaning nothing of the fact that he is helping her down the same path he went down as a child?

The show actively doesn't give a shit about his relationship to Sansa, and it pains me, because the two of them are actively breaking each other's cycles and I think it's cool that being emotionally strong and empathetic is a way to heal

But the show only gives a shit about Sansa as far as they can brutalize her or make her a mini-Littlefinger without doing the homework. Which is another rant.

So, except in some rare moments of writing in the show, the Hound is reduced to what he is at the outset of the books: mean, foul mouthed, crude, and ??? probably just going to kill his brother for no real reason besides the fans love the idea and so much of the showrunning

since they caught up with book material seems to be based on fan-service and weird shit that sounds bad ass? He'll also probably die and get mercy from Arya or something without having ever really changed, whatever.

Sure, make him say cunt 800 times and rub it in Sansa's face that she's was brutalized. Whatever. So badass. Eat some chicken. Don't question the circle of violence, toxic masculinity, and pain.

In conclusion:

Thanks for reading. I just think that Sandor Clegane’s arc is immensely fascinating and cool and super undeserved by the show, like a lot of other things. Apologies for typos, repetitive wording, etc. If I’m misremembering something, lmk. Bless u GRRM for giving me my burnt bae.

One last addendum: i'm not gonna act like a part of the fandom tends to woobie away some of the more insidious actions he has in the books, but i think the show does it too in an attempt to make him likable without having to dig into why he's an interesting character? OK DONE.

@Nellachronism was this spicy enough?