I am continuing to see arguments about canon, text, and subtext circling endlessly because baseline definitions are twisted or ignored. If you are out here saying Destiel isn’t canon, I am begging you to revisit the definition of that word and its use in literary and media analysis. It does not mean what so many people in this fandom appear to think it means. And by twisting this definition, you are erasing the story you claim to want and love more than anything.
Canon: The accepted works in a body of a show, e.g., episodes. The canon is the body of work. The text exists within the canon. In its extrapolated definition, canon is the material that is part of the story in the fictional universe of that story.
Instead people are talking about canon as something open to interpretation and social debate, as the moment when an element of a text becomes undeniably convincing or “proves” something to a vaguely defined wide audience. But what they’re actually talking about are subjective goalposts for what queerness and romance should look like, which don’t have anything to do with what’s being delivered by the text. The fandom soup that’s produced this conflation between canon and personal wishlists has fostered a widespread and pervasive misunderstanding and misuse of lit crit tools and terms like canon, text, and subtext.
Look, I get it, if your introduction to those terms was through fandom you might not even realize they are being thrown around in bad faith or used as placeholders for other concepts. Concepts like “so gay it erases the heteronormative lens” or “meets a level of physical affection I have deemed the threshold for queerness to be valid” or “spoken plainly in dialogue”. But these concepts have little to do with whether something is textual, subtextual, or accepted as part of a work’s canon. And the misuse of these terms has consequences.
While it’s always not the intention, divorcing these terms from their true critical meanings feeds into the delegitimization of the text being analyzed. It takes away the critical baselines to evaluate content from. And when we are talking about queer content this is especially harmful, because it changes baselines and thresholds that are typically not shifted in the same way for heteronormative content. This is unproductive at best, insidious at worst— it creates and reinforces double standards for queer content that hold it to higher and more nebulous benchmarks than what is required for heteronormative content to be considered visible or legitimate. This provably sets back queer representation, and forces it into boxes of visibility that are shaped and policed by the heteronormative lens.
Divorcing these terms from their actual meanings devalues the critical analysis of the text— even when that critical analysis is actually supporting the thing that you set out to prove exists in the first place.
In its attempts to constantly prove without any doubt or argument that a queer ship exists, the Destiel fandom has completely lost sight of the baseline measures it even uses to evaluate that ship. It has thrown out the very evidence and paradigms that “prove” its ship. Fandom has thrown out the actual canon that shows these two are in a romantic relationship and have been building it for quite some time, because it doesn’t meet the new fandom term of “canon” whose meaning bounces between anything from “thing I can shove in an anti’s face” to “what I personally need from the story” to “moment that makes my Republican uncle care about gay people”.
Why. Why do this to yourselves. The content is there, it is a significant part of Supernatural’s canon. Why write odes to it being the most beautiful love story ever told, using countless examples *from the text* to illustrate that, and then turn around in the same breath and lament that it’s not “canon”. You literally just listed THE CANON.
Destiel being canon does not mean settling for crumbs. It is a robust, complex, ridiculously well-developed romance that reflects and enriches both characters’ individual and interpersonal arcs, and at this point in the story is literally the fundamental truth of its mythology and ultimate restructuring of its cosmic order. I beg you to bring me a list of queer romances in popular media with over ten years of content dedicated to their bond and the intricate ways each character’s psychology creates and overcomes the barriers between them, both internal and external. Show me, please.
So what if they don’t? If they do, fantastic, love to see it. But it’s immaterial to whether or not their romance is textual or part of the canon. It already is, by a hundred other standards. Romance does not equal kiss. Kiss does not equal canon.
Destiel being canon does not mean queer content deserves less visibility, whatever that even means. It doesn’t mean queer couples shouldn’t get to kiss, or have loud love declarations, or get busy on the kitchen table. It just means that many romantic relationships (even ones that do, from a critical standpoint, cover the tropes, narrative beats, and structural qualifiers of a romance) look different, and that there is no box a queer person should have to fit in and no checklist they need to cross off in order for their identity or relationships to be considered valid. Especially when those boxes and checklists are being dictated by a heteronormative standard.
Destiel is one story among many— it should not have to be the one to deliver every single thing you have ever wanted to see represented by a queer romance on television. Representation is not a zero-sum game. And a queer relationship being “good” representation or “bad” representation has nothing to do with whether that relationship is part of its story’s canon.
Canon just is. It is there, on your screen.
And we’re in luck, because the canon says it’s a love story. The subtext says it’s a love story. The text says it’s a love story.
Funny how, when you start using those terms according to their actual meanings, the romance between Dean and Castiel becomes part of Supernatural’s canon by definition.
You love it so much, you see how beautiful it is, so please stop denying it to yourself and others. Stop delegitimizing queer content. Stop delegitimizing the tools of analysis that support it.
