One of the character flaws Basil Hawkins has is his lack of faith. By this I mean everything he believes in and his actions are based on the probability of their success and not just faith in whether they will turn out well.
This is why he bailed on the Kid Alliance once kaido showed up, because Kid’s probability of success must have gone down TREMENDOUSLY. And this is why his fighting style is so passive since he can literally tell how likely it is for him to die in any single encounter and so he doesn’t even have to feel very anxious or anything.
The problem with his method of living and deciding things is that there’s rarely a 0% or 100% probability of anything. This means it’s almost never assured he’s making the right choice since he never gets an absolute answer. In fact the only time ever in the series that we’ve seen him even slightly agitated was when he was wondering how Luffy’s death wasn’t an absolute 100% at any point in the Marineford war. This implies that even though he does follow probability, he still wants to deal with absolutes, 0% or 100%, and yet thats nearly impossible.
An example of how this flaw would work is he probably had a good percentage for the Kid Alliance at first. Let’s say the alliance had a 60% chance of succeeding and that’s what led Hawkins to join. The issue comes in the 40% chance of failure. The fact that the alliance wasn’t 100% guaranteed to succeed is what leads to Kaido occupying that 40% chance of failure and dismantling them immediately.
The redeeming thing about Hawkin’s character though is that he does take failure like a champ. Whenever he has a bad draw or anything, he doesn’t complain about fate being cruel or whatever, he just draws another card so at least he does take failure relatively well.
Therefore Hawkins as a character believes in fate and decides his actions and the value of others based on the probability of success in their fate. On the other hand, as a person who always gauges things on probability, the best outcome he could always wish for is pure certainty, a 100% guarantee of success or failure for any action he takes. This is because any time it’s not certain, which is nearly always, the uncertainty can always win out. He can take action with a 96% chance of success and still the 4% chance of failure could be the actual outcome that wins. Luckily, Hawkins doesn’t sweat losing to fate that much.
That’s the break down of Hawkins’ character so far and now I’ll speculate on how it’s going to progress.
As I mentioned at the start, Hawkins’ flaw is that he lacks faith. Faith being a somewhat blind trust in an outcome despite its probability of success. For Hawkins to grow as a character he basically has to either see a predicton of a situation that’s unlikely and choose the unlikely outcome or just do something without checking its probability of success.
An example would be he saw Luffy’s chance of being alive in Wano in a month as 19% and for him to grow, he would have to for some reason choose to support Luffy anyway despite the cards telling him how unlikely a good outcome it would be to support him.
In fact this is what I believe will happen and it will be even more dire as Luffy’s chances will go down even lower the next time Hawkins checks to like 6% and then 3% and then 2% and then 1% chance and Hawkins will still have to choose Luffy even then and finally Hawkins will stop checking the cards. At that point when the cards are about to reach that Certainty that Hawkins always wanted, a pure 100% or 0%, Hawkins will NOT check the cards again and will rely simply on Faith.
That’s a full character arc with growth and conflict and rounding out a 3 dimensional character. The only thing missing is that REASON why he would support Luffy the first time. I’m gonna assume that this will be connected to his backstory when we get it and Luffy will have done something to resonate with something from his backstory that puts him on Luffy’s side for the first time. The rest of the times he picks Luffy even though the cards say it’s a bad idea will be him having to build his resolve to ignore probability and develop actual faith in the end.
Finally after this character arc, Hawkins will DIE. Now let me go through how and why this will happen.
Thematically it’s consistent that Hawkins whose power is to more or less cheat death by transferring it to others, would be redeemed by Dying for others. It’s both poetic and cathartic. Similarly given his character arc is finding faith, it’s fitting that in the end he is proven right that Luffy does end up winning despite how low the chance was. Although we know sacrifice is needed in order to test fate so much and Hawkins has sacrificed everyone else besides himself in order to ensure certain outcomes and his last gamble would require his own life to show his faith can win out. This is the WHY Hawkins will die.
The how it will happen is even more speculative. I believe Hawkins will use his Power up card that he mentioned before on 10 members of the alliance to boost their power but this card will have a condition to it it. This condition was subtly mentioned in the chapter he brought it up but it flew under the radar. The condition will be that Hawkins can ONLY use the power up card on a person when he has made a voodoo of the person. This condition was hidden in the nature of the conversation of that scene. Hawkins TELLS HIS MEN that he can power them up, but remember he’s talking to people he has voodoo dolls of, so the condition is hidden in the context.
This will be the crux of the situation, 10 people who Hawkins has made voodoo dolls of will have power ups from him but any damage done to Hawkins will be transfered to them instead. When the enemies learn how the power works, it will be shown that this plan is a liability as Hawkins will be taking damage and transfering it to everyone else and the power ups they got will no longer be a good enough trade for the damage Hawkins is transfering to them when the enemy has Hawkins cornered.
At that point, Hawkins will have to make the decision to lose the voodoo dolls and remove the power ups and leave himself with no lives left while in front of the enemy and he’ll just have to have FAITH everyone will survive and win while he actually fights for the first time WITHOUT RELYING ON ANY LIVES SINCE THIS TIME HE CARES ABOUT THE LIVES HE HAD MORE THAN HIS OWN. In the end Hawkins will survive this encounter fatally injured but will hold on until he sees that Luffy won and pass away.
*Theory by ImmaIvanoM
