Hana Tsu-Vachel

Hana Tsu-Vachel
Fear Effect character
Hana (left) with Rain Qin
First game	Fear Effect (1999)
Created by	John Zuur Platten
Designed by	John Paik and Joan Igawa
Voiced by	Elyse Dinh (Fear Effect) Wendee Lee (Fear Effect 2)

Hana Tsu-Vachel is a player character in the Fear Effect horror video game series for the PlayStation. She was introduced in Fear Effect in 1999 and is most notable and remembered because of her controversial bisexual relationship in the game's 2001 prequel Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix. She was supposed to return in the canceled sequel Fear Effect Inferno for the PlayStation 2.

Hana is a freelancer of French and Chinese descent who was once a teenage prostitute and a member of a vast criminal organization known as the Triad. In fact, the Triad still claim her as their property, and it is in part to earn enough money to buy back her "contract" that she works such high-risk and high-paying assignments. Brash and edgy with a penchant for sarcasm, Hana is as skillful with her tongue as she is with using firearms and piloting vehicles, able to finagle or flirt her way out of many difficult situations but equally capable of solving problems with weapons if need be. In spite of a demonstrated level of sophistication, she is not above using sex as a weapon.

Hana's close partner and male love interest is another mercenary, Glas Royce. In Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix, her friend and lover is Rain Qin, a female hacker with a past shrouded in secrecy who Hana discovered during a mission a few years before the story begins.

"Once and for all, let me set the record straight. Hana is not a lesbian! She likes men...and she likes women. Who she chooses to go to bed with at the end of the day is not a big deal! (...) The only reason I wanted Hana to have a female companion this time around is because it gives me the ability to create an extremely interesting love triangle further down the road."

Retro Helix gained some notoriety for a suggestive advertisement campaign in gaming magazines, hinting at a lesbian relationship between Hana and Rain. Director Stan Liu would go on to state in various interviews that Hana and Rain were not necessarily lesbians, but simply two women who in this particular instance had developed a physical relationship. In fact, the only scene in the game itself that matches the overt sexuality of the steamy ads is one where the two women disrobe on an elevator and embrace specifically to distract the male guards watching them on a security camera - most of the game is actually spent with the duo apart and talking via radio. Liu suggests that human relationships are not so black and white as to be reduced to categories, but often fall into a grey area. According to GameCritics.com, "Publisher Eidos may have played up the girls-gone-wild lesbo angle by having [...] Hana Tsu-Vachel and Rain Qin, straddling each other in their underwear for the print ads, but the actual game wasn't the promiscuous orgy that ads teased."