a couple thousand years ago, they figured out that certain patterns of notes sounded good together. This ended up being the major and minor scale. For these scales to work, there are 12 notes in an octave. They decided to make the scale that goes ABCDEFG (i.e., no sharps or flats) the A minor scale. So that’s 7 notes, with 5 other notes between them. Those end up being sharps/flats. However, in A minor, the B/C and E/F happen to be next to each other (with no extra note in between), so there is no need to have a sharp between them because there’s no room for one.
The fact it’s B/C and E/F is arbitrary, it could have been between any two notes the same interval apart, but they just decided to build around A minor and go from there.
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