Sesame Street Made A (probably unintentional) Song About Amatonormativity

[LifezVictory]

It’s been forever and a day since I’ve visited these forums, but I’m coming back strong.

I was just coming out of the shower and getting dressed when my mind began to wonder, as it does. And I remembered a video I found while browsing TV Tropes. It’s a song from Sesame Street called Five Purple Conkers. It’s about the titular creatures hanging out together in various places, while being killed off one by one. Yeah, you read that right. Who knew a segment of Sesame Street could be so brutal?

Except, it’s not quite as straight forward as that. Normally songs of this nature would keep going until one remained, like some G-rated Hunger Games. But this song stops when there are two Conkers left. They get married, have a baby, and all is well.

Now, look. I’m not so naive to believe that this was intentional, but the more I think about it the more I realize that this is the perfect example of how many allos view relationships. In the song, the three less fortunate Conkers are taken out fairly quickly, with very little fanfare. If you were just listening to the song and didn’t watch the animation, you wouldn’t even know that’s what was happening The singer is very quick to gloss over the carnage. He just says that one swam away,one flew away and one got stuck. Very innocent compared to what actually happened.

However, the narrator is very eager to tell about how the two remaining Conkers were ‘living in harmony,’ and how they and their yellow honker baby ‘loved one another for they were a family.’ And this is the very definition of amatonormativity. Your friends are getting more distant and drifting away from you? Well that doesn’t matter as long as you have a romantic partner and/or children in your life.

[Ekaterina]

Wow, And Then There Were None play version in a nutshell 😂

(If you have no idea what I'm speaking about, ATTWN is one of the most classic Agatha Christie's novels where a group of people get killed one by one following pattern of a nursery rhyme like this one. And in the novel, actually none remains in the end. But then the author had to adapt it into a play... and, guess what, allowed two last victims survive and become a romantic couple. In the novel they had a kind of "chemistry", through more sexual than romantic I'd say. Also, what a coincidence, they were made to be the only innocents in the group which was supposed to be fully made of people guilty in someone's death, and these two in the novel were actually among the worst. 

Dame Agatha didn't hide that much that for stage adaptations of some of her works she was pressured to make not-smartest changes for the public appeal. 

And guess what, until relatively recently in the English-speaking world only the play version was receiving film adaptations) 

Edited February 2 by Ekaterina