‘King of the Hill’ Fan Realizes That Cotton Showed Serious Signs of Self-Harm

Everyone knows that Cotton Hill killed fiddy men in World War II, but despite the efforts of a certain pump jockey, he nearly shot down fiddy-one.

In the entire King of the Hill canon, there is no single character who contains more multitudes, contradictions and complexities than the mercurial Cotton. He despises his loyal and responsible son Hank, yet he showers affection upon Hank’s own heir Bobby. He hates Japan and “The Tojos” for the loss of his shins, yet he loved a Japanese woman and sired a child in the Land of the Rising Sun. Cotton is stubborn, sensitive, self-aggrandizing, and, as one especially astute King of the Hill superfan recently noticed, self-destructive to the highest degree.

Earlier this week, user ronaldrios from the King of the Hill subreddit wrote a dissertation on Cotton’s near brush with harakiri in a thread titled, “TIL Cotton Was Gonna Kill Himself.”

ronaldrios’ thesis hinges on a scene from the King of the Hill Season Five episode “When the Cotton Comes Marching Home,” a storyline that delivered a scathing satire on how America treats its veterans. In the episode, Hank discovers that Cotton is living at the VFW after running out of money, and is struggling to support his son Good Hank and his wife Didi. After numerous additional financial setbacks, some disgraces to his military career and a disastrous attempt to re-join the workforce, Cotton retreats to the VFW with his son and his gun as Hank fears his father will commit suicide in order to secure a life insurance payout for his preferred progeny.

While Hank rushes over to save his father from suicide, Cotton dresses up in his uniform and puts a single round in his revolver, but he’s interrupted by Didi forcing childcare duty on him so that she can do some laundry. When Hank arrives on the scene, he finds his father and his half-brother having a bit of a baby’s first target practice, and he breathes a sigh of relief. “I always thought how cute (for Cotton) that he wanted to make GH having his first shot. That this was his plan all along. He got one bullet to give his son one little shot,” ronaldrios writes. “In his eyes, harmless using ear protection.” 

However, as ronaldrios recently realized, the truth of Cotton’s mental state when Hank hears that he bummed a bullet off of Dale lies in the scene leading up to the reveal. “He holds the gun before the baby’s in the scene. He hides the weapon when Tilly shows up. It’s against his will to babysit GH,” ronaldrios points out. “Once he’s doing (it), he decides to use the bullet to give GH his first try at a gun.”

“And I mean, duh. The dialogue with Hank, they definitely don’t talk about suicide but you know that’s what they’re both thinking. ‘I dodged suicide and that’s it,’” ronaldrios writes, pointing out that this subtext may already be obvious for more observant viewers. “This is not news for a lotta fans. But I think that someone out there might have not noticed it, like it happened to me.”

Clearly, ronaldrios wasn’t alone, as the thread accrued thousands of upvotes on the way to being one of the top posts on the subreddit. And, speaking as a fellow King of the Hill fan who missed this now-obvious detail, this makes more sense than the switcheroo I once thought was canon — Cotton being desperate enough to kill himself makes more thematic sense given the episode’s message on the state of veterans' affairs, and his favorite son saving him from suicide fits within his selective affections. 

Plus, it’s so Cotton to save his death for the moment when it will piss off Hank’s Wife the most.