[— Karen Myers —]
Admit it — we’ve all gone shopping for sidekicks for our heroes (or our villains).
I know I have. Thrown some back, too, and kept some others until they got a little… past their prime. You tell yourself there will always be some worthy critters you can get from the shelter who’ve had unknown pasts and just need a good home. And then you find out they were in the shelter in the first place because they bite. Or whine. Or they’re just batshit crazy. Better try and figure that out before you commit to them.
The longer your work, the more your sidekick choices matter, ’cause you’re going to be stuck with them for a while. You buy them, you gotta live with them, cuz you can’t return them or abandon them (readers complain if they just vanish, never to be seen again). Putting them down is more of a last resort — better make that count, if you do it.
And then there’s the “Aw, Mom, can’t we get another one? We have room!” temptation. Once you acquire something exotic, it’s hard to resist the temptation to get more specimens to fill out your set. But if you keep adding sidekicks to every book in your long series, it turns into a memory contest for the reader. And if you dispose of them randomly, well no one wants that. It’s like taking them out to the woods and abandoning them or (as many parents used to say about Easter chicks or carnival prize goldfish) “letting them go live on a farm”.
What tangles have you gotten yourself into (or dodged) with your assortment of sidekicks? How do you pick ’em, how do you keep ’em under control, what do you use ’em for? Do they surprise you? Do they compete with your main character for the readers’ sympathies? Ever take any of them to “the station” (“Yellowstone” reference) for cause?
Mad Genius Club 
15 responses to “Sidekicks”
Don’t know if any of my characters have ever had other characters who qualify as sidekicks.
Lizina’s the closest, I suspect, but can a sidekick really be a mystery to many ways to the main character?
(“The Princess Seeks Her Fortune”)
*sigh* Had them turn out to be enemy spies. Had minor walk-on characters demand I write their whole back story . . . so they could be a proper sidekick. Had them be their (official) boss. Now have a MC who is being claimed by an idiot “Prince” as a sidekick . . . And I have plenty of dogs and horses that probably fit the role. Only had to kill one, so far.
I hear you on the horses and dogs. My space opera had an owlbear who basically changes custody from one handler to another over the course of the duology. Heroine of current WIP is a spoiled but tomboyish rancher’s daughter larping as a fantasy gaucho even though the revolution has forced her to relocate to the Old World. Larping as a gaucho means she has a string of riding horses of matched appearance.
I chose palominos because pretty horsies. But, palominos don’t breed true – you need a red horse (bay or chestnut) bred to a horse with a cream color gene (in the days before gene sequencing, either a palomino or an off-white horse with the coat colors called cremello or perlino). So, she took her late father’s favorite red mare and cremello stallion with her, the dam and sire of her string. She has now spent more time in custody battles over the stallion, between paperwork lost in transit and the stallion taking a shine to the hero, then she has doing anything with the palominos.
This is how I got stuck writing six more books after the first one featuring a multilingual talking turtle with a prosthetic snake-shaped body. Try and explain how that happened for people who didn’t read book 1.
And while keeping it short for all the people who did read the first book.
What’s that? You meant human sidekicks? Different set of problems.
They’re all sidekicks.
Even inanimate objects can qualify (that little carving on the door that everyone rubs for luck when they go by has a story, too, and the main characters can talk to it and speculate about it and ask for help from it or threaten to remove it. And when a bad guy scrapes a finger on it and then dies of the infection, just in the nick of time… then you wonder about just how inanimate it really is, in the greater scheme of things.
We humans can personalize anything, and once that happens the deification/good-luck-charm/oracle effects kick in.
I don’t think Mr. M would like being described as a sidekick. I’m pretty sure he thinks that he’s the main character, and everything involving Thalia and Lensky are just little bits of side drama to the important story about him.
How true! That’s why I don’t let him tell the stories…
What, after all, is a sidekick?
An important character, a subordinate and ally to the hero, someone in it for the same purpose as the hero. . . .
Maybe because I’m an introvert, or because I’m lazy, I try to limit the number of characters I have to deal with. I usually start off with “this is an interesting situation I saw somewhere in pop culture but I want to see a different type of character go through it.”
For Shadow Captain, I wanted to see a good-natured loser get caught up in a sort of interstellar civil war. Why would he want to get involved? The beautiful space princess (not her actual rank) on the rebel side. Why *wouldn’t* he want to get involved? He and someone close to him are indentured servants of a smuggler who doesn’t want to get involved, so basically his boss is holding a hostage to his good behavior. I’m not really into love triangles, so the hostage is a younger sibling, and in some ways a sidekick.
Why does the space princess want to involve this loser? She’s pursuing a maguffin…and in the course of fleshing out the maguffin, we acquire 1). a reason for her to involve the hero, 2). a rebel tailor/spy (love interest to the hero’s younger sibling), 3). a mad scientist looking to sell his invention to the rebels, 4). the mad scientist’s factotum/go-between, 5). some more powerful smugglers, and 6). a group of privateers the bad guys have hired for plausible deniability. But shouldn’t the space princess have second thoughts about involving our loser hero? Here comes her cousin/bodyguard/nepo hire, the Chronic Complainer, to take a dislike to the hero and make (sometimes valid) arguments against involving him.
I was amused by “The Eternal Sidekick” from Michael Moorcock.
I’ve been hearing good things about Moorcock’s multiverse, but I’m not quite sure how to get into it.
I started with Elric. And then it just snowballed.
My main character in my novel series collected a number of sidekicks, and I ended up killing off most of them in the last book. Since then I’ve pretty much avoided them. I do, however, tend to put the same kind of effort into making memorable bosses for my characters, which is a separate but similar character type.
A texting cat, a white mule with a running walk, Familiars. Those are sidekicks who stayed to the side, more or less. Others became major characters. Although, I never quite did figure out who was the sidekick with Rudolph von Habsburg and István Eszterhazy. István was the protagonist, except … Crazy Rudolph.
Buddy shows are like the. *ducks*