Some interesting facts about Hank you might have missed (Detroit: Become Human)
DBH is full of little details that help understand the characters’ background and their motivations, details which can go entirely amiss if the player isn’t paying enough attention to their surroundings.
You have to play several times over to notice bits and pieces of information scattered everywhere and be able to reconstruct the characters’ background by patiently piecing them together. If you’re thorough enough, you can even uncover whole chunks of the characters’ past which they refuse to talk about (something VERY frequent in Hank’s case…and equally frustrating).
Here are a few details about the life of Hank Anderson, the lieutenant who is chosen to help Connor with his investigation, along with some interpretations of my own about his mysterious past based on the evidence we find in the game:
[SPOILERS AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED]
The park where Hank goes to drink after the Eden Club mission is a playground for children. If you pay attention, you’ll see the place is full of recreational equipments, like a swingset, a toy house and a merry-go-round. He says the place has a nice view and mentions going there a lot before something happened. This is where he used to bring his son Cole to play before his death.
What hurts most about this scene is how a human notices the photo of Hank’s dead son on his kitchen table, then the fact Hank drove to a playground and immediately associates them both, while an android (Connor) is unable to see the correlation between them. This is why Connor asks before what?. He’s clueless to the overwhelming evidence around him of Hank thinking about his son in that moment and choosing to revisit the playground.
Hank used to be part of a multi-department unit called the Red Ice Task Force which successfully busted a ring of drug dealers that sold red ice in Detroit. He has a photo of his unit on his desk, and you can even see the notes he left on each of them, where some nicknames were scribbled and associated to each of their faces. Some of them are fond nicknames, others, not so much:
The nicknames (from right to left):
Prick & Asskisser - the two male policemen in the far right
Nice girl - the smiling policewoman in front of Prick and Asskisser
Asshole - the smiling policeman on the front
Real police - the policewoman in the back, behind Asshole
A good cop - the policeman in the back, right next to her
??? - policeman on his left
Not seen since 2019. Owes me some $ - last policeman, in the far left
Hank worked in the Red Ice Task Force two years before the birth of his son Cole. Cole was born in 2029, as seen in the photo below.
Hank also lost his son in 2035, only three years before the events of DBH, as seen in Cole’s picture below.
The reason why Hank feels so disenchanted is because he worked hard to end the traffic of red ice in the city only to lose his son to a doctor who was a drug addict. This made him feel like his work was ultimately worthless and even guiltier about losing his son, since despite his efforts, there was nothing he could do to save him. The day Cole died, he learned he was fighting a losing battle. So he just gave up. On life. On his job as a good police officer. On everything.
Hank plays Russian roulette because deep down, he doesn’t want to die. Something keeps him from offing himself once and for all. He’s afraid of death. Proof of that is how scared he becomes when he is holding for dear life on the ledge right at top of that building during our chase for the deviant Rupert (where you must choose between saving Hank and keep chasing the android). Hank was so scared of the prospect of dying he punches Connor in the face and yells at him due to the android’s refusal to save him. Therefore, Hank might have suicidal tendencies, but he’s not truly suicidal. If he truly wished to die, then all he needed to do was to let go from that ledge or fully load his gun next time he’s at home and shoot himself. And he knows that.
His sense of guilt and helplessness for his son’s death is what makes him so protective of Connor. He’s aware Connor is just an android. And yet prevents him from facing potentially fatal situations. Hank just can’t cope well with death and will project his fatherly feelings for Cole onto Connor. This is why he commits suicide if he witnesses Connor’s death over and over. But this is also the reason why he warms up to Connor throughout the game. He inevitably associates the android with Cole despite himself.
Hank shoots you if he’s hostile after Connor repeats over and over again that he’s just a machine, unable to have real emotions. Hank’s actions have two root causes:
1) The doctor who was high on red ice was emotionally dysfunctional. He used drugs to cope with his personal problems, a behaviour that seemed normal in Detroit given the socioeconomic hardship the city was going through (thirty percent rate of unemployment). We also see how androids are progressively replacing humans in every line of work. Remember when Hank complained how people are replacing normal relationships with humans for androids (Eden Club mission)? This seems to be a big issue in Detroit. Along with the huge unemployment rate, it indicates a depersonalisation of human interaction. That is to say, a tendency for humans to avoid contact with each other and replace real interaction either with an android or with drug abuse, something which Hank not only disapproves, but finds disturbing.
2) In the very first scene of the game, we see the mother despair when she learns they sent an android instead of a real human to save her daughter. Hank’s son didn’t survive because an android was sent to save him. Or at least that’s how Hank sees it. Much like that mother, he believes Cole would be alive if a human doctor had been there for Cole, another consequence of the ongoing depersonalisation process, as Hank sees it.
This is why it’s so important for Connor to restore Hank’s faith in the possibility of there still being real human interaction left in this world. Of there being people who CARE about something. And if Connor fails to do so, repeatedly telling Hank he’s just a machine, this will trigger Hank to the point he’ll relive the day - or night - his son died because the hospital assigned a machine, something less than a human - an android - to save his son. Hank feels wronged, betrayed by mankind, by the very people he swore to protect as a police officer. Despite his efforts to save the city, they let him down. The fact that nobody cared enough to save Cole is what killed him inside and later triggered his suicidal tendencies. Human indifference took away the most important thing in his life.
Thoughout the game, Hank is watching you, trying to figure out what sort of person Connor is. This is why he questions your decisions after every mission. Remember his dialog with Connor where he asks why didn’t he shoot Chloe at Kamski’s place? That’s when he begins to wonder if androids aren’t more than just programmed machines and capable of free will…and even empathy.
Unless Connor’s actions succeed in restoring Hank’s hope in humanity, he sees no light at the end of the tunnel. And what could give a disillusioned, mourning father more hope than an android being able to feel and empathise with both humans and androids, to the point he rebels against his program and spares his targets, regardless of his mission?
There might be more on Hank, so this post will be edited in the future as I notice more details with each gameplay.
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