Place your bets, people! For those unfamiliar with 47’s past history of keeping pets:
In the novel “Hitman: Enemy Within”, 47 keeps two pets in his childhood at the asylum: First a laboratory rabbit he kept for two years, then a mouse for about a month. It should be noted some of Enemy Within was directly retconned by the Birth of the Hitman comic, as Ort-Meyer used his memory erasing serum to make 47 think Subject 6 was a childhood bully instead of a friend (which causes the flashbacks in Enemy Within to not necessarily reflect his real past) but it could be presumed his pets were genuine memories.
In Blood Money, 47 has a canary. He kills it in the cutscene directly before Requiem, due to him worrying that its chirps would give away his position.
So, do you think the Hideout will have a pet 47 keeps, and if so, what animal? There is no prize for guessing correctly, except getting to say “I told you so” when the map comes out.
I’m guessing if he does have some pets, they’ll be the same birds (don’t know what species) at Williams’ villa on Haven Island. Then again, if we’re talking about legacy animals, 47 did keep a small drove of pigs back in his gardening/farming days at Gontranno church. Dogs have also infamously been a thing in this series for a few games, as well as frogs and fish in cages/tanks in the W.O.A trilogy. I reckon they’ll have at least 1 cool aquarium set-up, a bit like in Reynard’s hideout in New Zealand.
Sorry to deviate here, but to be clear, all of Enemy Within was retconned out of canon by the 2016 game. EW takes place before the events of Contracts and Blood Money, and has 47 state that he has never seen Diana before, and has at times pondered what she looked like. The ICA training stage of H2016 makes that a flat impossibility, unless he thinks he was assigned to a different, same-sounding Diana for those first 5 years.
Anyway, I don’t think he’ll have a pet. I think he’s likely learned to leave Diana as the only close tie to himself to avoid eventual loss of connection. He’d probably only keep some birds around to alert if anyone is approaching his hideout, but there’s better technology to do that, and if someone cuts the power to that, that’s an alert right there, so even that is likely not gonna be the case. Making friends with woodland creatures in the wild… eh, maybe.
Enemy Within did introduce number 6, however, with the whole flashback sequence 47 has to his childhood, describing him as 47’s nemesis, and showing that he was the first person 47 killed. Obviously, this isn’t true, and Birth of the Hitman explains this by directly mentioning the story whilst 47 is having his memory wiped. Enemy Within does have a place within the Hitman continuity, and I believe the whole 47 meeting Diana thing at the start was quite sloppy and forced, compared to how 47 and Diana supposedly first met in Birth of the Hitman. It never sat right for 47 to have met Diana in person at least three times and receive audio communications from her within the facility, then have her impersonally message him and not actually talk to him for 2 years until Silent Assassin. I know the mainline games are canon, but it’s just a worse way to introduce 47 and Diana’s relationship, far less austere and professional then the earlier games let on.
Anyways, I think 47 should get a chameleon, it would be perfect for him.
Perhaps, but it’s what happened. I don’t like it either, but while the comic provides a way out for 6, the game itself erases EW’s canonicity, rendering what the comic was trying to accomplish with that scene moot. Great as it is, EW probably should have always been left out of the picture.
Anyway, a chameleon actually sounds like a good idea. Not only appropriate, but likely a longer lifespan than a mouse or rabbit or canary. Reptiles tend to thrive longer. Now that I think of it, 47 aging slower and being a patient ambush predator who is “cold blooded” would make exotic reptile pets like snakes, Gila monsters, and even alligators decent pets choices for him.
