I really hope they find a way to make that segment of the story interesting. As it stands, I'm bracing for the worst.
I'm sure they will be really struggling how to make a region/storyine full of hot, scantilly clad, sexually liberated women (and a few men) appealing to the HBO viewers...
I'm wondering if they'll send the Hound to Braavos with Arya to keep him around? Or even team him up with Tyrion in place of Jorah?
Why do fans think they will make these kind of absurd, pointless changes that would completely fuck up characters and their entire storyline? I don't even know where to begin with all the reasons why this is a terrible idea. Maybe not the worst and most absurd fan idea of this kind I've seen in this fandom (that honor belongs to "Yara will take the place of Jeyne Poole") but it's the second worst, or shares that place with "Oberyn will survive the duel and play Quentyn's role".
Not to mention, why? For heaven's sake,
why? Why would anyone think that they'll do anything else with Sandor than what the books have, i.e. have him badly wounded (already half done now) and have Arya leave him, going to Braavos to study to be a Faceless Man, while his fate remains ambiguous for the time being. If he has no further role to play in the series (which I don't believe at all), they could even kill him, but since I think he does, he'll just be absent for a while, chilling somewhere, not necessarily at the Quiet Isle (I can see them changing that) but at some other place that's conveniently in/very close to the Vale, until the time comes when his story picks up again.
Gee, calm down, I didn't insult your mother, I wondered about a possible change they might make to a fictional character in a TV adaptation of a book.
They've admitted that they've expanded Bronn's role because he's a fan-fave. They've kept Theon onscreen while he's off page in the books (albeit that he's having much the same thing happen to him). They swapped Gendry for Edric Storm and look like they might develop a new sub-plot with Stannis' daughter.
I just wonder if they might do something similar with The Hound. He's very popular with the audience, in particular with his team-up with Arya. He kinda wanders off page in the books and, his apparent cameo as the gravedigger aside, that's it. I'm just wondering - not thinking, not saying it will happen, just wondering - if the writers of the TV show might worry that audiences will find this a little anticlimactic. And Sandor did say to Arya that he might go across the sea and become a sellsword. So I just wondered - if that's okay with you - if that was setting up a possible storyline. I'm quite happy to be proven wrong and I've nothing particularly invested in this theory but I don't see the harm in speculating.
The difference is that Bronn practicing with Jaime instead of Ilyn Payne (a change that was necessary due to the fact that Wilko Johnson could not come back, what with battling with terminal cancer [he recently announced he was having an operation to remove it) didn't violate the character arc of any of the major characters, including Bronn himself (if you count him as a major character, at least in the show). He's ended up in the exact place where he was at the end of ASOS, and they even introduced Lollys some 2-3 seasons later than one would have expected, in order to have him marry her just as he does in the books.
What you're suggesting would mean completely rewriting both Sandor's and Arya's (or Jorah's) arcs, basically writing AU fanfiction. The whole point of Arya's storyline in Braavos is that she leaves Sandor and goes there, all alone, to train to be a Faceless Man assassin, which means letting go of everything connected to your former life, forgetting who you are and being "no one", having a different face and identity in every assignment. (Arya still keeps Needle, but hides it.) She feels empty inside, "a hole where her heart is" (something that Maisie has talked about in interviews for season 4 but that we haven't actually seen much of).
The whole point of Jorah's arc in ADWD is that he desperately tries to get back into Dany's favor by kidnapping Tyrion and hoping Dany would appreciate when he gave a Lannister to her - he is, once again, trying to win a woman at any cost; and, then after dragging Tyrion in chains, he ends up in slavery himself - a huge irony since the crime that made him an exile, and that he has never expressed remorse for, was selling some poor poachers into slavery (in order to get money to buy his wife nice things and try to buy her love). And why on Earth would anyone want to to put another character in Jorah's role (someone who would have no reason to travel to hand Tyrion to Dany, anyway)? What would they do with Jorah then? Has Iain Glen announced that he can't do the show anymore?
The whole point of Sandor's arc is that he arrives at the moment when he can't do on being what he's been for so long, "The Hound" persona must "die".
Furthermore, your idea that they have to come up with a storyline that's not in the books in order to keep him on the show depends on the possibility that he actually has no storyline in future books. He doesn't actually wander off the pages - Arya leaves him to die, then we hear a lot about him throughout AFFC while he is believed to be committing horrible crimes (which Rorge is actually committing wearing his helmet) until we learn that "the Hound is dead" and "Sandor Clegane is at rest" in a chapter that's almost entirely devoted to people talking about his life and his fate, with Brienne (and some readers) getting convinced that Sandor is dead, and with a few strong hints that he's really there on the Quiet Isle as a gravedigger. He has barely appeared but he's been talked about a lot, by Brienne, Jaime, the Elder Brother, Cersei... Furthermore, Sansa thinks about him in pretty much every chapter and keeps fantasizing about him; and there's also Bran's dream from AGOT that seems to foreshadow Sandor and Jaime having a big role in the girls' future in opposition to a terrifying giant with nothing but blood inside his helmet. There is too much foreshadowing of him having an important role in the future for him to just remain on the QI as a silent monk. Plus, I think the fact that his horse Stranger (who "shares his former master's nature") is still wild and bites everyone who tries to geld him, is a hint that he won't stay there as a silent monk all his life. I'm sure that we will see him again, but we don't know how changed he will be as a person.
In the books, he's at the Quiet Isle, at the border of the Riverlands and the Vale. In the show, he and Arya are going to the Vale and he may end up wounded there; I don't know if he will end up in QI or some equivalent of it, but he will be more or less at the same place, or even somewhere inside the Vale. Whatever the show does with the characters along the way, they almost always eventually get them to the same place where they're meant to be. We've seen that with Shae, Bronn, Tyrion, Sansa and Dontos, Bran etc.
