I’m not really sure where else to put this, so I’m gonna put it here as anything related to ETs anymore will ultimately come back to Arcade mode, but… I think I may have figured it out about the H3 ETs.
Most of us know by now that ETs have always been kinda quasi-canon; that feel that they’re taking place at the same time as the main campaign missions (which makes no sense), or took place in the same locations at earlier times (which also doesn’t make sense but is more workable than the previous theory). For example, the Paris ETs took place earlier than the Showstopper mission, at other Sanguine fashion shows put on and Dalia had other auctions take place during them, so Paris ETs were attending similar events years before the ones from the main story, and we are just supposed to ignore identical dialogue and such as a gameplay mechanic left in by the devs for technical reasons. Most of us get that now, I think.
However, the ETs of H3 have been different because the locations in H3 are more plot-dependent than other locations have been, and it’s very unlikely due to that plot that 47 had already visited the Scepter in Dubai, the night club in Berlin, and the wine party in Mendoza years earlier at similar events, and flatly impossible for him to have gone to Dartmoor any previous times, let alone two, or have two ET assignments simultaneously, or even after the main mission, because of how the story unfolds. So how do we reconcile these seven ETs with the others that can more or less be considered to have actually happened? The answer lies in the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seasons of Sin that each ET came with.
47 was hallucinating the escalations of the 7DS and imagining them in the most recent locations he’d been in because that’s when his life began to unwind, what with the loss of Grey, the ICA turning against him, him having to end his professional career by wiping them out in return, and Diana seemingly turning against him in Mendoza. So that’s why he hallucinated those settings, and his feelings of guilt caused him to hallucinate the sins he’s guilty of. And the H3 ETs correspond to those same sins. So, the answer is that 47 really did kill the H3 ETs at some point in his career, but they’re coming to his mind now because he’s the one who associated their behaviors with the sins he’s thinking about, and he’s hallucinating that he’s killing them on the maps that he had been to recently that are in his mind.
If true, this means in particular that he did kill the Collector and the Procurers, but it was not at Thornbridge Manor; he killed those guys in some other mansions that were filled with artwork and recently had a funeral for one of its residents, but his mind is supplementing the Dartmoor map in its place, and he’s filling in the gaps by imagining the ETs interacting with people they didn’t interact with, but in the way they would had they met those same people, like Jack Roe talking to the Carlisles. The Ascensionist was likely killed in a different skyscraper, the Liability at a different nightclub, the Iconoclast and Heartbreaker at different wine parties, and the Rage in a different Chinese city, likely Hong Kong or Shanghai.
This would allow the ETs for H3, like the 7DS themselves, to be canon events that are taking place in 47’s mind, but based on real targets that he killed at some point in the past. And to throw one more in for good measure, this could also explain the Undying Returns without ignoring Vidal’s comment in Mendoza and without ruining 47’s record of never failing a contract. He did kill Mark Faba and he stayed dead, but the UR ET is just taking place during these nightmares 47 is having between Mendoza and Carpathian Mountains, and it would make sense 47 might dream a target with a reputation for never staying dead would come back even after he took him down, but if it’s just a dream, 47’s record stays intact but the ET is still part of the canon.
This is all a stretch, I know, but the nature of the 7DS and how they connects it to the story allows this to work. All the H3 targets could be in the ICA database, and we’re just experiencing the events in different locations than they were.