Recent events in the DCEU release schedule have got us all talking about Henry Cavill’s Superman again, and it’s time to address an elephant in the room that both the Snyder and anti-Snyder cults keep pushing on the rest of us, the idea that there’s a difference between the version of the character in the Zack Snyder Trilogy, and the version of the character we may see going forward.

To be more blunt, they believe there’s a difference between Superman in the black suit, which he wears exclusively in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and Superman in his regular colors, which he wears in Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and the 2017 theatrically released version of Justice League.

The Snyder cultists and the anti-Snyder cultists would like you to think that the next time you see Henry Cavill’s Superman in his regular colors, it means he’s not playing the version of the character we saw in the Zack Snyder Trilogy.

Objectively speaking, they have nothing to prove this, especially since it’s the same actor.

Subjectively speaking, they’re wrong…and they’re pushing a stupid argument. Here’s why:

It has been well documented by Zack Snyder and Henry Cavill in the past that the version of the Trinity, not just Superman, that we see in the Zack Snyder Trilogy, has been deconstructed, so that they could be built back up to the classic interpretations of the heroes that we all know and love from the comics and animated forms. This is certainly the case with Batman, who has gone to that darker place and is openly killing criminals violently in BvS, and it’s the case with Wonder Woman, who “walked away from mankind” in a public sense and didn’t become the hero to the world over the decades after World War I.

In Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Batman’s faith is restored in his resolution to put the Justice League together and bring back Superman, Wonder Woman has re-emerged as a hero to the world with Bruce’s influence since the end of BvS, and Superman completes his deconstruction arc when he returns from the dead to help the Justice League take down Steppenwolf and presumably prepare for an ultimate battle with Darkseid, which may or may not happen on screen in the future.

The point is that Zack Snyder’s Justice League was the end of the deconstruction arc of The Trinity. From this point forward, the versions of the characters that we see on the big screen featuring those actors are not supposed to be the versions we saw growing in the Zack Snyder Trilogy. They have evolved, they are aware of each other, and they are united closer to their classic forms. That was always the plan from Zack Snyder, and Henry Cavill was on board with that.

So the idea that Cavill’s Superman appearing in his classic colors again eliminates continuity with Zack Snyder’s Justice League is stupid, and reeks of an argument that both of the miserable extremist cults want to drag you down with. The Snyder cultists get to whine and complain about how ZSJL is being erased, when it can’t ever be, and the anti-Snyder cultists get to claim victory because the version of Superman they hated is finally “dead,” when he literally and figuratively isn’t as long as Cavill is still playing him.

Unless WBD officially states in some capacity, be it through one of the movies or other official statements, that ZSJL is not canon with the DCEU, it’s at worst a subjective head canon decision, not anything definitive whatsoever. The anti-Snyder cultists that like JL 2017 can live in their whitewashed, toxically driven fantasyland of bad CGI and paper thin dialogue about hope and car keys, and the Snyder cultists can live in their delusional fantasy world that Zack Snyder is coming back tomorrow to take control of DC and make his sequels that are currently 5 years late and counting as far as production is concerned.

If WBD is smart, and the jury is still out on that in a number of ways, they’ll keep that head canon present so both cults will spend money on the DCEU, even when they claim they won’t. There’s only a handful of references from either version of JL that would make one of them canon and not the other one, and given that The Flash movie is more than likely to hit a soft reset button on everything, it’s even more meaningless to declare allegiance to one version of the JL movie or another.

The bottom line with Cavill’s Superman though, is that no matter how you feel about his potential appearances going forward, he was never intended to continue wearing the black suit forever in the DCEU. For one thing, it would confuse the general audience who already doesn’t really know the significance of the black suit in ZSJL, they just saw him find it in the scout ship and put it on. For another thing, it would affect WBD’s general marketing of the character as a whole as generations would surely find a permanently black suit Superman to be visually different from the character they’ve been fans of their whole lives.

And again, Superman’s deconstruction arc that led to him wearing the black suit in ZSJL is OVER. There’s no logistical reason for him to continue wearing the black suit anymore in the DCEU.

So ultimately the choice is yours, subjectively speaking. You can either be rational and accept that Cavill’s Superman was always intended to evolve from his MoS, BvS and ZSJL forms as Zack Snyder originally intended, or you can let either one of the cults pull you into their misery regarding why he’s wearing the suit he was always intended to wear going forward and how it somehow is a middle finger to Zack Snyder that never has, and never will exist…despite all the middle fingers the previous WB regimes did give him.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, that particular black suit doesn’t physically exist. Zack Snyder’s Justice League was filmed with Cavill wearing the classic suit colors and he decided to change it in post-production, which means that if the changes to JL 2017 never happened the way they did and it remained Snyder’s film all the way through, he likely would never have worn the black suit, to begin with.

Just saying.