This quote and your ENTIRE post is inaccurate in plotting 47’s record and how “perfect” people think it is. IO has written the character to on numerous occasions have imperfections Lets go through each game one by one and showcase why he and his record isn’t perfect
Codename 47: In the Lee Hong Assassination 47 screws up his initial assassination attempt on Lee Hong! Literally the first major character assassination in the games that we partake in and 47 messes up in a super significant way
Instead Tzun tastes the soup and in the resulting confrontation Lee Hong escapes back to the mansion fortress! In Say Hello to my Little Friend 47’s initial shot intending to kill Ochoa primarily fails, and he causes a major ruckus and requires several more shots before going down. In meet your brother 47 throws all sense of stealth and subtly out the window as he guns down all of the Mr. 48’s and asylum staff. Additionally in the beginning of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin showcases that he went on a major killing spree on his way out as well (so you probably can’t use the contracts version and say he didn’t kill anybody), killing orderly members and SWAT as seen on surveillance. Not very “silent assassin” at all.
Although Contracts is a retelling of a lot of the stories of Codename 47, you fail to see that Contracts intentionally had several elements be wrong in the naming schemes and details of the locations as they were near death hallucinations, things were very heavily misremembered (including major parts including the time of day and weather). So they cannot be relied on as the true version of events, in fact they can be debated heavily as being just the opposite.
In Silent Assassin he does do fairly well on his assassinations, with exception of Basement Killing where he technically kills the wrong target (although I’ll forgive this just like you, as its not even remotely his fault and both brothers become sanctioned targets anyhow); however he also still effectively falls into the trap in St. Petersburg, additionally the whole plot of Silent Assassin he completely fails to rescue Vittorio, it gets to a point where Zavorotko effectively has to REVEAL his involvement to 47 in order to wrap things up.
Then we get to contracts, where the literal entire plot of the events of Contracts is that he screwed up and got shot / almost killed by Albert Fournier after the events of Curtains Down. The implication in the beginning cutscene of Hunter Hunted is that he shoots his way out of the situation too, I understand that the ranking system encourages Silent Assassin for it, however the reality is far more complex than “47 is always perfect and nothing bad ever happens.”. Additionally in The Meat King’s Last Party, he leaves a Butcher that he interrogates as a witness at the beginning of the level and leaves his body in a freezer truck. Now maybe that butcher freezes to death in the back of the truck when we take his clothes and close it, but its still not very “perfect” of him.
Blood Money has Death of a Showman as it’s first level, and the way in which that mission was completed was an absolute shitshow. 47 kills so many nontargets (gangsters, a chemist, and even a completely innocent secretary), and not in clean accidents either. He also leaves 1-2 witnesses as well! Both the gate guard and potentially the woman in the last room with Scoop see his face, and he leaves them alive! We also know that the Bingham job (You Better Watch Out…) went poorly, as it is implied in general Canon, it being an assassination was relatively well known (with Rick Henderson pointing it out) and there were newspaper clippings in Absolution detailing it. 47 also kills several civilians with the glass hottub kill (again showing his methodology can be far from perfect sometimes).
Diana also gets the jump on him before Requiem (hell even Agent Smith surprises him at the end of a Dance with the Devil), showing he ISN’T an invincible god who can’t be touched in any way, he makes mistakes
I Don’t think I need to detail absolution either. 47 kills 4 guards with point shooting in a Personal Contract (as well as possibly one more guard at the beginning of the level). He gets caught TWICE throughout the plot of the game, both by Sanchez and by Sheriff Skurky, he also looses custody of Victoria by getting outsmarted by Lenny and gets caught in an ambush and almost blown up in Attack of the Saints. Absolution IS canon to some extent, and IS an extension of how IO interactive wrote the character to not be fully perfect, whether people like that or not is irrelevant!
47 fails to save Lucas Gray, that is a plot based character failure of 47, period. There’s no reframing it as him “completing his mission to kill the shadow client” that is foolish to say. 47 fails to do something and fails to accomplish his goal here on a fundamental level and it effects him deeply.
He is not perfect, I know a lot of people in the fandom don’t realize that because the mechanics and ranking system encourages stealth and perfection, but there are numerous times where 47 goes off script or things go wrong and 47 has to do something messy. Nontarget kills are ingratiated into several levels that are part of the identity of the series, 47 getting caught has been a plotpoint on numerous occasions and not once has he ever been doing it intentionally, 47 has failed objectives and goals before, he has flaws and IO has written about it and expressed it on numerous occasions (going all the way back to Silent Assassin and Contracts)
