100 days of enemy recs: 67. Bert/Ernie

[melannen]

Look if we're doing all of my fannish history here we've gotta start somewhere!

Bert and Ernie are actually possibly the best example we've had on here so far of the classic "odd couple" trope, which is one of the purest expressions of enemyship! One of them's messy, one of them's neat. One of them's quiet, one of them's loud. One of them's repressed, one of them's emotional. One of them goes to bed early, one of them gets up late. One of them's annoying, one of them's annoyed. And they were roommates!!!

And Sesame Street took it on themselves to carefully teach generations of children that if you are roommates with someone who gets on your nerves, it definitely means that actually you like them a lot and you are perfect together!

There is a sad shortage of actually good fic for this pairing, for some reason people tend to write a lot of deliberate badfic as if it's not a real canon pairing in a real fandom, so here is a vid to start us off.

• What's the Distinction? (1599 words) by MortalAnonymous
  Chapters: 2/2
  Fandom: Sesame Street (TV)
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Bert/Ernie (Sesame Street)
  Additional Tags: Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net
  
  Ernie learns about different kinds of love.

Comments

[hannah]

There's also that one cover for The New Yorker that celebrated the pairing.

[melannen]

This one? It's so cozy and adorable.

I also loved the relatively recent set of stories about how at least some of the muppeteers are definitely deliberately queercoding them. I would not bet against them actually coming out on-show in my lifetime.

[hannah]

I just remembered the comic bert and ernie go to ikea is a thing, too.

[melannen]

Oh yes, that one is very good and perfectly in-canon! I should have put that in the recs post.

[kore]

Not to mention

[kore]

When that cover came out I did a fistpump YES!!! I still remember my mother trying to convince me they were brothers. I was just like "Why would you live with your brother?"

[melannen]

As a show aimed at toddlers - which also has a six-year-old emancipated minor living alone on the street - they are definitely meant as a lesson in "how to get along with your siblings".

But at no point in the show are they identified as siblings! And there's no reason they couldn't be, if the show wanted to make it very clear they were!

[kore]

They did not look that related to me! (because me and my sisters greatly resemble my dad and each other, to the point where when some people met me and my mother together they assumed we were adopted fucking LOL)

As a kid growing up in 70s Northern California there were plenty of family "uncles" and men who lived with other "friends" and we made regular trips into San Francisco, so I guess I thought of them as kind of queer-coded in a way even before I really knew what queerness was. It's interesting what little kids will half-understand and pick up on.

[melannen]

There are plenty of siblings who aren't related to each other! (Especially since Sesame Street was aimed particularly at the sort of kids who might have unstable birth families.)

But yeah even if they aren't gay, a model for tiny kids (and homophobic parents) of "sometimes two people live together all their lives just because they like each other a lot" was really important. Nothing in Sesame Street was ever aimed at just one audience or to teach just one thing.

[kore]

Yes! It was so multifaceted. And didn't talk down to kids, and also had "grownup" jokes (which the kids got and enjoyed).