Over eight seasons of Game of Thrones, the Hound has had a slow but meaningful redemption arc, as he’s transitioned from being a violent thug for kings to a hardened loner who’s lost his taste for fighting and then to a man who’s slowly reinvented himself through community work and fighting with Jon Snow in the North — making an effort to create mostly positive change after a lifetime of wreaking mostly destruction.
Where the Hound was once the epitome of alpha male masculinity, he’s gradually softened over time: He developed a fondness for the Stark sisters, Arya in particular, and has steadily processed closely held guilt over his earlier violence and selfish actions. The Battle of Winterfell actually saw him cower for a moment, overwhelmed by his lifelong fear of fire and the reality of just how vast the army of the dead actually was. He is no longer the Hound we met in season one, nor should he be.
On Twitter, book editor Angelina Meehan recently posted a long reflective thread on the Hound’s character arc, and though it’s drawn primarily from his role in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books, it holds true for his character trajectory on the show as well. Meehan argues that his character is a study in how damaging toxic masculinity can be for men like the Hound who are immersed in it and forced to wield it; it ultimately leaves him devastated, weakened, and frankly pathetic, before he steadily builds himself up again as an entirely different kind of man. “The Hound is Dead,” she writes, referencing a metaphor from the books in which the Hound tries to disguise himself as a different man, “is clearly a metaphor for the violent side of his personality being relinquished. [T]hat is over.”
Except that on the show, it clearly wasn’t over.
For Sandor Clegane — a man who gradually rejected the idea of ultraviolence as a way of life — to choose to trek back to King’s Landing purely to seek revenge on his zombified brother at long last might arguably be a step backward in his narrative trajectory. Sure, it offers some potential catharsis, and it definitely ticks an item off the Game of Thrones fan-service bucket list. But is it true to the character?
In the end, that might not even have mattered. The Hound who fought the Mountain in “The Bells” was the character fans first fell in love with, and that’s who they wanted to see go out with a bang — or, in this case, a plunge. And those fans got their wish.