Deletion of Ernie (Sesame Street)

Comment: The character is clearly notable, and even the nominator and keep votes acknowledge that, which means the AFD is the wrong venue for this discussion. A '''Merge''' discussion should be held in the talk pages instead, where a discussion can be held and a  can be reached about whether a merge or redirect is appropriate. That discussion should take place ''outside'' of a deletion discussion, so I would suggest this AFD be speedily ended and the Merge discussion templates be added to the pages instead
Stance: keep
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Consensus (WP:CONSENSUS)

Comment: per  and potentially bad publicity for Wikipedia. I don't care if there's no sources primarily about him, I don't want to see Oprah or Christine Teigen blasting us for destroying a beloved childhood character
Stance: keep
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Ignore all rules (WP:IAR)

Comment: to Bert and Ernie.  I agree that having two separate articles on each individual is a needless  from the article on the duo, as nearly all reliable sources discuss them as a group.  However, both articles would be logical redirects to the main article.  That would also leave the history intact in case anything needs to be merged, though neither article is especially well-sourced, so I'm not sure how much potential merging content there might be
Stance: merge
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Splitting (WP:SPLIT)

Comment: with Bert and Ernie. As others have noted, the pair is most notable as a duo, not on their own. Anecdotal evidence for this comes from reading their separate articles, which mentions their partner in almost every paragraph. The standalone articles seem to bend over backwards to find unique things about them, for, it seems to me, the express purpose of   creating retaining a . Case in point is :Category:Sesame Street Muppet characters, where the subjects must appear needlessly twice. Merging is necessary in order to replace the good content that was unnecessarily spun off. A similar problem exists with the Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse articles, where a  (''not'' Afd - that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Tom_Cat happened already) to Tom and Jerry (characters) discussion should be opened. A good example to follow in all of this is Tyke (character) which redirects to Spike and Tyke (characters), (the "character" in the above 2 cases is only necessary due to the existence of the ''Tom and Jerry'' and ''Spike and Tyke'' series, which does not apply here). Abbott and Costello were also most notable as a duo, but deserve their separate articles because they were ''people'' who had real lives outside of their act, while here we are talking about puppets and cartoon characters, endearing as they may be
Stance: merge
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Content forking (WP:REDUNDANTFORK||WP:MERGE)

Comment: and potentially merge relevant Bert and Ernie content into this (or Bert) article to resolve  problem. Agree with
Stance: keep
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Merging (WP:OVERLAP)