blog

I said a while back, “Wait’ll I tell you about the Hound,” and here we are weeks later and I haven’t done it.

Grievous oversight. Must correct.

Okay, so if you’ve followed my adventures with the Rory McCann fansite for long enough, you have seen me address this already, though I’m pretty sure I shitcanned that post when I started the blog over. You probably won’t mind reading my theory again. For the rest of you? This will probably blow your mind. When I first thought of it, no one in the fandom seemed to be talking about it, so far as I was able to ascertain. I would be surprised if they have since picked it up. I have this whole aura around me that prevents people listening to me. Well, fine. I don’t mind keeping it all to myself. Fuck all y’all.

But I do need to put it out into the internet again with a date stamp on it, just so you can see I said it and when. Haha.

All right. Pull up a chair. To sit in. Not to hit me with. You good? Okay.

Now, this is going to be about the books, not about the TV show. Several elements I’ll mention here never made it into Game of Thrones. Keep up.

So. We all know about the scene during the Battle of the Blackwater when Sansa goes back to her chambers and it turns out Sandor Clegane is there. The Hound is, in fact, massively drunk and has been lying on her bed, possibly in a drunken half-stupor, waiting for her to come back. We find out in A Storm of Swords in his final fevered rant to Arya, just as she’s about to abandon him, that he had been planning to rape Sansa but for whatever reason, he changed his mind. The actual sequence of events: he grabbed Sansa, he put a knife to her throat, and he ordered her to sing him a song. She complied, he started to cry, he stepped away from her and ripped off his Kingsguard cloak, and then he left her alone in the room.

With me so far?

Okay, so. In a later book we have a scene where Sansa is remembering the Hound from the night of the Blackwater battle, and specifically “remembers” him kissing her. Fans caught on to this quickly and pulled George R. R. Martin up about it, to which Martin replied that Sansa was an “unreliable narrator.” But it didn’t make any sense to me that Sansa would just convince herself the Hound kissed her, and while she strove to be unfailingly polite and to cover her tracks so the Lannisters wouldn’t murder her, she didn’t strike me as someone who lied for fun, either to others or to herself. So what was going on here?

After observing the other Stark kids with their direwolves, it hit me.

If you only saw the show, you didn’t get to appreciate the strength of the warg connection between the Stark kids and their direwolves. These kids were literally reading their direwolves’ minds. Actually, child and wolf talked with one another, sometimes across great distances — Nymeria, for instance, found Arya’s dead mother and Arya witnessed the find from hundreds of miles away. In her sleep. Even Jon/Aegon — even though we find out in the show that he’s a Targaryen (and Martin backs this up), even though as a Targaryen he can warg a dragon, we see he can also warg a direwolf, as he does Ghost. (Another nod to the “song of ice and fire”???) Human and wolf can sense one another’s emotions, see the world as the other party sees it, and all of this long distance.

Remember how I said Sandor told Arya in their last conversation that he had wanted to rape Sansa? He also stated that he regretted not doing so. “I should have fucked her bloody… before leaving her for that dwarf.” (In the books, Sandor despises Tyrion. He is quite upset to learn that Tyrion has wed the “little bird.”)

So here’s a scenario for you. We know that in that last conversation with Arya, Sandor was trying to rile her up into killing him. What if he hadn’t actually wanted to rape Sansa? What if… he actually loves her?

What if he was consumed, after the Blackwater, with the wish that he’d kissed her?

What if Sansa was picking that up long distance? Because think about it. When you really want to do something, you envision yourself doing it usually, right? If that’s what Sansa picked up, it would have been like she was experiencing the kiss.

“What Sansa picked up?” you’re asking. “Why would Sansa pick anything up from the Hound?”

Because… Sansa warged him.

Remember, Sandor first took an interest in Sansa AFTER Lord Stark executed her direwolf, Lady. And this happened around the same time the other Stark kids (and Jon/Aegon) began forming a psychic connection to their wolves. Sansa’s to Lady must have just been developing when Robert passed sentence on Lady. So… would Sansa have needed to redirect it?

It wouldn’t have been on purpose. And it wouldn’t have been strong at first. And Sansa wouldn’t have known she was doing it, because she didn’t believe in wargs. Sandor must have felt as if he were developing feelings for her and of course he couldn’t figure out why. But if it’s gotten to the point she’s “seeing” him wishing he’d kissed her, and misinterpreting it as her own memory?

And, I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s a bit in the books about the wildlings having a taboo against wargs riding people. If Sansa ends up Queen in the North in the books the way she did in the show… I dunno, what do you think? D’you think there might be an itsy-bitsy little complication should the wildlings find out what’s happened with her and Sandor?

Could be all sorts of interesting.

So, yeah. My take on “SanSan” is that there is no SanSan. It’s just Sandor feeling a psychic bond he doesn’t understand and Sansa mistaking someone else’s thoughts for her own memories. Wait and see.

Hey, this realization hit me the other day and I wanted to put it somewhere in case I need to refer to it later.

People continually grouse about season 8 of Game of Thrones, really angry that GRRM made “Jon Snow” into the sixth Aegon Targaryen only for that revelation to go absolutely nowhere.

Well, let’s see, shall we.

“Born in the place of smoke and salt” = Aegon was born in Dorne. I don’t know if Dorne was ever labeled with that epithet, but it definitely fits the description.

“The song of ice and fire” = Aegon carries the bloodlines of both Stark, through his mother Lyanna, and Targaryen through his father Rhaegar. He was also instrumental in helping to end the threat of Ice posed by the Night King and definitively ended the threat of Fire posed by the Mad Queen Daenerys Targaryen.

“The prince who was promised” = Aegon was crowned king as “Jon Snow” by the North, but only because they thought he was an illegitimate Stark. (Ironic, innit, that the “rebellious” North accidentally crowned the true king?) As a Targaryen, he was never crowned. He was the crown prince and that was all. He also refused the Iron Throne, cementing his status as a prince and not a king.

I also think it’s neat the way House Targaryen started with an Aegon and ended with an Aegon.

It was the “prince who was promised” bit that finally caught me. It just landed on me one day like a ton of bricks. “OH OF COURSE.” The thing about prophecies is that we don’t pay attention to how they’re worded and assume that things are going to go a certain way. But sometimes you just have to take the words literally.

And if you think that’s fucked up, wait’ll I tell you about the Hound.

I can’t make any promises, only talk about what I’d like to do, but I’d like to get my brain together very soon and schedule work on each of the things I still want to do with my free time. Big man’s site is one of them. I need to get back to work on bringing all his pics and videos inline with what is now called the “blog.” I like the little headline I put with it, “Not from the desk of Rory McCann,” but I’ll have to think of something else to put there because I need to quit it with the unscripted updates. They will get in the way of HIS actual content and that’s not what I want to do anymore.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to use tags, but I might use tags here and then link to the Rory tag from the big-man site. If it seems self-serving to point people to my website, oh fucking well. When you are paying for my hosting service, you get a say. I will never charge anyone to look at Big Man Chronicles, not even with a Patreon account (there will, in fact, never be a Patreon account connected with it), so… good luck with that. My money my turf my rules my say. The end.

On a slight tangent, because this is still related to the Rory fandom, I accidentally found out (because I was not logged in) that Hound’s Lair was crying about Instagram changes last fall and talking about quitting. Considering I found her via Pinterest not ten minutes ago as I write this, that’s a bit stupid. There are always ways around limiting algorithms. Hell, people find my BMC site through Google searches because I tackle some things the Instagram fan accounts don’t really talk about. If you want it badly enough, you’ll get it; if you’re a quitter, go ‘head, I guess. I wouldn’t be this petty, but a lot of you who know me from BMC know that she and I locked horns five years ago. I was realizing, in fact, just a few minutes ago (as I write this), that she basically blocked me for locking horns with me on MY account. She wasn’t even using the Hound’s Lair account to argue with me, as I recall. So basically I was held to a behavioral standard for her IG when I wasn’t on her IG and didn’t know I was dealing with her. Trapped nice and neat. If you think that’s fair, go on, I guess. I can’t be fucked. So if she really does quit, I’ll be one shedding zero fucking tears about it. Wheaton’s Law applies here.

(Honestly, I remember getting offended because I posted a pic from the GOT premiere in NYC and she came along like “this is so-and-so’s picture”… in retrospect that wasn’t a bad thing to say, but it felt like she was accusing me of stealing it, which of course I was NOT passing it off as my own. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve never so much as set foot in NYC. I certainly in the post did not claim to have taken the photo. Since that argument, people have stolen my screenshots with alarming regularity and I would bet money I won’t have in a million years that she never had one single problem with that. Because she’s got flying monkeys who look in. I know how this shit works. So… just really stupid all around. It should have been a two-second fart and done and forgotten. Would have been, had I had any say in the outcome.)

Getting off the drama, this illustrates something else for me: if you want to be found, get the fuck off social media. Or, be on social media, but don’t let that be your one-trick pony. I see morons all the time claiming that websites and blogs are “obsolete.” Not if you want to keep an online presence, they’re fucking not. Did you notice Facebook and X have websites and that Instagram now allows you to upload photos from a desktop or laptop computer browser? Better wake up. These “services” are making dumber and dumber decisions all the time and I don’t give it another ten years and they’ll be going the way MySpace went: still in existence but no longer relevant. Where do you want to end up when that happens?

Yeah. Good talk. I’m gonna go watch paint dry or something. Got to be a better use of my time than this post was.

(I’m lying. I’ve got no wet paint in my vicinity. But I’ll find something to do.)