I was thinking about this after watching an episode of King of the Hill. Hank has a really hard time with emotions, especially expressing them himself. In one episode, Bill asks Hank “Well, don’t you think Peggy is beautiful?” And Hank replies “Of course I do. I just don’t feel the need to say it is all.” And all his friends stare awkwardly. Even for a southern man, Hank has problems.

I think it’s fair to say that all this originated with his dad, Cotton. Every flashback we see that Cotton has pretty much always been awful to Hank and his mother, Tilly. Throwing dishes, yelling at Hank for not being able to shoot (inadvertently making it harder for him to shoot), etc. it seems like Cotton has never liked his family. In the episode with Jimmy Carter, Cotton even exclaims “Everybody hated that baby!”

But...why? Bobby isn’t really traditional in a southern sense (except his uncanny ability to shoot), Hank is always exclaiming how “that boy ain’t right.” and yet Cotton loves him. His problem seems to really only be with Hank and Tilly. The answer is really simple: I think it’s because of Michiko.

We learn that after he was injured in the war, Cotton fell in love with a Japanese nurse. They had a short, but very passionate relationship before Cotton was very suddenly shipped back to America. What he doesn’t know at the time however, is that Michiko is pregnant with Junichiro (who for some reason looks like Hank and Tilly despite not being related to Tilly at all lmao). It seems that in the course of the entire series, Cotton has only really loved Michiko.

So Cotton gets back to America, meets Tilly, and she gets pregnant with Hank. But what if Cotton actually did have plans to go back to Michiko? If Hank wasn’t planned, it would explain why he hates him so much. Cotton getting Tilly pregnant would mean that he’d have a whole new responsibility, he can’t just go off to Japan anymore. He couldn’t immediately go back to Japan because he would need to get a new job and enough time to get enough money to go back. In that time, he meets Tilly, gets her pregnant and now has to stay.

Maybe this was super obvious in the show and I never caught it for some reason. But those are my thoughts. Did I get anything wrong? Any details I missed? What do you think?

TL;DR-Cotton hates Hank because it wasn’t a planned pregnancy. He had plans to go back to Japan for Michiko, but with a sudden new responsibility to his family, he decides he can’t.