Game of Thrones’ Sandor Clegane and the Importance of Saying Thank You

The final season of Game of Thrones was divisive. Some people loved it, some people hated it, and many mourned the end of an era. I mourned the end of Sandor Clegane. The Hound on screen was vastly different from the one in the book, and I will go ahead and step into heated territory by saying it was a change that I am personally glad for. I have not read all the books yet, but I am able to appreciate the two characters separately.

Like many, I found The Hound intriguing in the earliest seasons of the show but wasn’t particularly invested in him. That came later, when he snatched Arya away from The Brotherhood. It was during their journey together that The Hound went from being a character I enjoyed to being a character that I loved.

Like Arya, my entire life changed at a young age, and I found myself removed from everyone I had known and forced to take on a different identity. I was not taken by force as she was, nor was I running from people who had beheaded my father and imprisoned my sister. My reasons were much different, and yet I still felt something familiar in her journey.

The first time that I saw “Ron,” I was sitting in a car as it drove up a difficult dirt road to the property I was living on. He watched in silence as the vehicle passed his land. His whole body was still except for his steely eyes following us. He wasn’t big like The Hound. He was lean and grizzled with a long rust-colored beard, a trucker hat on top of his head, and an ever-present knife on his belt. He was dirty, but everyone who lived out there was.

That was one of the very few car rides I had been allowed on during my time in the mountains. Not many people had met me, and I would disappear when anyone approached. Ron’s group didn’t ask too many questions. Everyone out there seemed to have secrets. Knowing that they had their own reasons for steering clear of the law was probably why the people I was living with decided to stash me with them.

Ron didn’t want me there. My presence could only bring trouble. Despite his objections, his “old lady” had agreed to take me in, so there I was. I was given another name and I was to call them Mom and Dad. My long blonde hair was cut to my shoulders and dyed a darker shade. They fed me and gave me socks and boots. I slept in their tiny motorhome on a table that folded down to a bed.

Ron didn’t treat me like a fragile kid. He spoke to me like a person. Sometimes the things he said weren’t nice, but hurt feelings were a luxury I couldn’t afford. Over time, his gruffness and obvious annoyance at my presence gave way to something else. He became my protector.

I lived in those mountains for two years and a large chunk of that time was spent with him. He was right for worrying that I’d bring trouble, because I did. When he was kicked out of the group, he ended up in a small cabin on his own. One day, I was dropped off there while he was away. He came back to find me waiting inside. He wasn’t happy about it, but he wasn’t going to toss me out either.

Ron wasn’t a warrior like Sandor, and there wasn’t a price on his head, but he had a warrant out for his arrest, and he was armed. He didn’t teach me how to fight or give me lessons on where the heart is, but he did make sure I knew how to pull a trigger and that I knew where the shovel was kept.

More than a couple times, he walked out into danger for me, willing to risk himself to keep me safe. And once, he was the danger. Like The Hound, he took comfort in alcohol and getting drunk was something he did as often as he could. When I first started living with Ron, I was a lost girl all alone, but then one day, a piece of my past came looking for me and I welcomed him with open arms. Ron hated my boyfriend and the feeling was mutual. One night in a drunken rage, they fought. My boyfriend rushed me out of the cabin and out into the snow, saying we had to run. As we did, a bullet whizzed past my head. It had been Ron who had pulled the trigger. It wasn’t me he was trying to hit.

After sleeping in an abandoned car that night, I gave Ron some time to sober up the next morning, and then headed back to the cabin. I called him an asshole, and he sat there and took it. He didn’t like it, but he knew it was deserved.

Ron was my protector, but he was not what most would consider a good man. He was an alcoholic with a temper, and he could be violent. He was never violent with me though. He could have been, and some from the old group suspected he would be, and yet he wasn’t. We had our moments, but I was never scared of him.

I was 16 when I left the mountains. It was time for me to go and we both knew it. It was an awkward good-bye. We had seen each other in dark moments, and we knew each other’s secrets. We saw each other for who we were and there was this feeling of acceptance there. When I called him “Dad,” I meant it. Our experience had bonded us. We never spoke the words aloud, but we didn’t need to. We knew we loved each other. It was a love without expectation.

The bickering between The Hound and Arya took me back to that time in my life and touched a place in my heart that I had closed off long ago. I found myself hanging on their every interaction and waiting desperately for the moment when Arya would stop hating him.

When his big fight with Brienne came, I had no loyalty to girl power whatsoever. From the moment she gave that smirk and spouted “And that’s what you’re doing? Watching over her?” I wanted him to take her down.

When Arya found The Hound bloodied and dying, I waited with bated breath for her to offer him some sliver of caring or acknowledgement. When his voice broke a little as he begged her to kill him, a piece of my heart broke too. I had once loved how cold Arya could be, but when she left him there without so much as a word of thanks, I was no longer rooting for her. I was angry at her and angry at myself. We had both left so much unsaid.

The day I left the mountains, Ron and I hugged. I don’t recall if we’d ever even touched before that. It was brief and we both seemed unsure of the right way to go about it. As soon as it was done, I hurried off. We never saw each other again, but we did write. We both moved a lot and would sometimes have to track the other down. We could go years between letters, but the connection was there. I always started my letters to him with “Dear Dad” and he started all his letters to me with “Dear Little One.”

When Ron was in the hospital dying, friends of his contacted me because he had told them I was his daughter. It was me who told the hospital to take him off life support. I knew he wouldn’t want to depend on machines. One of his friends held the phone to his ear as I sobbed and tried to find the words to tell him how much he had meant to me. He died as I spoke to him. A few days later, I got a letter in the mail. It was short. He said he was sick and really needed to talk to me. We never got that chance and I’ll always wonder what it was that he wanted to say. I hated Arya for walking away.

When The Hound came back in season 6, I was elated. I never believed he was dead. Seeing him have his own story, away from the Stark daughters and the Lannisters, changed the way that I viewed him. I hung on every moment of his irritation, anger, and vulnerability. I ached for all the pain I could see the character was carrying. I stopped seeing him as The Hound, or as some girl’s protector. I started to see him as his own person, as Sandor, as a man. Now in my late thirties, I realized I was closer in age to him than to Arya. I came to the uncomfortable conclusion that I had developed a massive crush on the younger Clegane brother. It didn’t matter to me at all that he was a big, disgusting brute who had lived his life doing terrible things. I saw him for who he was trying to be, and I wanted someone to be good to him. I wanted him to have some moment of comfort.

Arya and The Hound was not the first relationship on screen to bring back memories of Ron and me. Mattie and Rooster from True Grit was probably the first. I’ve been a fan of Jeff Bridges ever since. Even Eleven and Hopper on Stranger things have hit emotional notes for me with their relationship. Yet this was the first time, I moved beyond seeing a character in a father figure role and appreciated him as an individual. I stopped seeing Sandor as an extension of the girl he had helped and was able to appreciate him as the man he was. I was firmly hooked on Sandor Clegane. Brutal, broken, and beautiful. I wanted it all.

When the final season came, I was nervous. I worried that there might be a bit of grossness in his reunion with Sansa that would ruin him for me. In the books, the characters are a lot closer in age and there are definite feelings there, but on the show, it would have had a big ick factor to it. I was relieved that the writers didn’t go there. It was his reunion with Arya, however, that was the big one for me. I cared about them seeing each other far more than I cared about any other characters being brought together. I felt let down at their first meeting, but my hope for more was revived when she sought him out the night before the big battle with the Night King. When Arya said he had never fought for anything but himself, and he corrected her with, “I fought for you, didn’t I?” I melted.

When he thought there was no reason left to fight, she was suddenly there. When she was overwhelmed and trying to survive more than she could handle on her own, he appeared. They got through that dark time because of each other. After the battle was over, they rode off side by side with a quiet understanding.

As they stood with the world crumbling around them and he reached out to take her tiny head in his huge hand, I remembered that hug with Ron. I knew it was the end for them. I sat spellbound as the moment I had spent seasons waiting for finally happened. Arya called him by his name, validating him as a human being. She spoke the words that I will always regret having never said to Ron.

“Thank you.”

After one last look at each other, Sandor went off to fulfill his destiny in an epic piece of fan service. It wasn’t necessary but there was too much hype propelling it forward to prevent it from happening. When Sandor fell into the flames, I cried. I also laughed.

Ron had been cremated too.