531 – Sidekick Protagonists

The Mythcreant Podcast

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Heroes think they’re a big deal, but we all know the sidekicks are the real story. They do all the unglamorous but essential work to keep the team running. Whether it’s arranging getaway horses or being captured for dramatic effect, sidekicks do it all. But what happens when the sidekick wants to also be the hero? Let’s find out.

Show Notes

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.

[intro music]

Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny.

Chris: I’m Chris.

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Bunny: And I have been doing some hard reflecting on this podcast, and I realized that even though I am leading this episode, I am a newcomer to the show. Chris and Oren have been doing it for over a decade now because they’re old, and this means I must be the sidekick. So. That makes things awkward for me. I must be stealing the spotlight from you both.

Oren: Or alternatively, you might be the hot new hero who comes in. We, the established characters, become your sidekicks. [sarcastic] Audiences love it when that happens. They will absolutely love this new hero. It’s a sure win.

Bunny: [sarcastic] Oh yeah. Audiences love when you pull an UNO reverse card on their beloved main characters.

Chris: Maybe Bunny is the relatable underdog who’s not getting enough agency.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Those darn experienced characters are hanging around solving all the problems.

Bunny: Yeah, you’re doling out wisdom from your ivory tower, but I’m down here with my feet on the ground with the common people. I understand the masses in a way you never will!

Oren: There’s some salt in the earth, maybe. Very different from salt of the sea and salt of the air, mind you.

Bunny: Yeah, well it’s all types that you can rub in your wound when you get one. So today we’re talking about sidekicks, but specifically sidekicks that are protagonists, which is a little unusual, right? ‘Cause that’s not usually the role the sidekick claims. It’s in the name.

Oren: My hot, spicy take is that for a sidekick protagonist, is a protagonist who has the aesthetics of a sidekick, but is not actually a sidekick, narratively speaking, in the same way that most villain protagonists are like Dr. Horrible, in that they dress like villains and talk like villains, but don’t actually do villain stuff.

Bunny: Hmm.

Chris: Yeah, I guess what do we mean by sidekick? Because if we’re saying by sidekick, that’s by definition not the main character, right, then, yeah, we’re just talking about aesthetics, but if we talk about sidekick as in, they are helping a more powerful character, then I think you can do more than aesthetics.

Oren: Well, right. I mean that the helping a more powerful character is essentially an aesthetic in this situation. Assuming you wanna do the story successfully, right, because your protagonist is gonna have to be the most important person. That doesn’t mean they have to have the highest rank, but it means they have to be the most important to solving the problems. Otherwise, your story will suffer.

Chris: But, what are the problems?

Oren: Right, exactly.

Chris: Because I think that this can be a matter of scope, right? So you can have, you know, big world ending problems that your sidekick’s boss is taking care of, that exist, but your story is simply focused on the problems that the sidekick is doing, right? So I would personally think that’s more than aesthetic, but I guess it depends on, again, what are we calling aesthetic in this instance?

Oren: Well, the reason I consider it an aesthetic is that sure, technically speaking, one of my examples is you could have a character who is the accountant for a superhero, they do all of the superhero’s accounting, but if your story is about finding supervillain fraud, they become the main character. And sure, they technically are still a sidekick for a hero, but in this particular narrative that we are telling, they are the one taking charge and doing stuff.

Chris: Right. So it is like a villain protagonist in that when we say protagonist, that’s what we mean.

Oren: And they don’t do the actions that typically define a sidekick, which is that they play second fiddle to whoever they’re helping, right, for the story.

Chris: Right. I mean, if we’re talking about story mechanics, sure, right? They need to be the most central to the story. That’s what makes them the protagonist. But if we talk about them being an assistant and that’s their role in the world, yeah, I mean, again, now we’re just futzing over the definition.

Bunny: It’s sandwich discourse. At the bottom, it’s always sandwich discourse. I think that there are ways to do it that are more aesthetic than others. Like if [they] are the sidekick to a detective, but the main story is not a mystery or the mystery is a subplot, and the main story is about something else, then yeah, they’re a sidekick in the sense that they’re working for someone more powerful with more sway. But it’s an aesthetic because that’s not the primary part of the story that we’re concerned with.

Chris: Yeah. I would consider it an aesthetic if we have something where, for instance, you technically have a hero, but the hero is actually incompetent and is just taking credit, and your main character looks like a sidekick, right, and everybody thinks that they’re a sidekick, but because the hero is incompetent, the sidekick has to always arrange for the hero to win. And so they’re actually doing the lion’s share of the work. That’s kind of what I would call aesthetic, ’cause at that point, the sidekick is also, in the world, takes place in filling the role of the hero, right, in that they’re the one actually saving the day. The hero has actually a very small role and is basically being babysitted by the sidekick.

But you could still dress your sidekick in a sidekick outfit, right, make your hero look heroic, that kind of thing. It’s, you know, similar to in how Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog, we have a hero who is a villain and a villain who’s a hero. And the difference is that, you know, the person who is the actual antagonist in the story–well, he may look like a hero. He actually does villainous things.

Bunny: Yeah.

Oren: Well, I could restate my argument that even the superhero accounting scenario, that character will still not be acting like a sidekick, but I think that’s a moot point right now. I think we more or less agree on the important part.

Bunny: Yeah, and I think it’s true that when you think of like, who is a sidekick? Someone like Robin, right? The classic sidekick. You don’t expect them to have a big interior life, right? Like it is kind of a person that exists to support the hero, and if you just literally took that and tried to make him the main character, you’d really struggle, right? As Robin is currently written in, like classic Batman, you know, Robin doesn’t exist so much without Batman, it would be hard to tell a story with him as the protagonist.

So in that sense, your classic protagonist, your, you know, chubby comic relief running along after the big brawny hero or whatever, yeah, that probably wouldn’t work as a protagonist, but we cloak them up in various ways, some of which are more aesthetic than other, to get them to work as protagonists, and I think it might be helpful to define a little bit what role typical sidekicks, non-protagonist sidekicks usually serve. These are characters like, well, like Robin, but also like Short Round from Indiana Jones and Sam from Lord of the Rings. These might all be considered sidekicks. They’re usually companions.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, it’s certainly easier to tell in the superhero genre, right?

Bunny: Right.

Oren: Superheroes, that’s like an official job.

Bunny: Right, you’ve got your hero and then you’ve got like their mini me, essentially.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: I mean, I think accompanying the hero for high stakes conflicts, right, and actually being with them there is a thing that the sidekick typically does if they’re not a protagonist. And then also providing assistance and often [the] case [is] they’re doing the work that’s less exciting, but it still facilitates the story, ’cause now we don’t have to explain how we got these horses to like jump on and ride it off into the sunset, ’cause the sidekick went and did that off screen, right? So that way we don’t have to be like, okay, wait, the hero wants to flee real quick. Drat. They have to stop, go to the stable and get some horses, right? And so they do things that are less exciting, but facilitate the story in that way, in explaining how something could be done.

Oren: Who arranged these travel tickets?

Bunny: The secretary. They’re the secretary to the story.

Chris: Honestly, that would be fun to have a main character, your protagonist, who did logistics for the action hero. The problems they solve is like, oh no, the hero’s gonna need to jump on a horse and ride into the sunset at this time. Oh no, I don’t have a horse yet. I need to get the horse there in time.

Oren: Yeah, and I mean, you know, based on how you portrayed it, that could be, you know, various levels of comedic, right? It could be something as over the top as well, I need them to have a dramatic exit. It’s important that they get one of those. I need to make sure their cape is properly–I don’t know what you do to a cape to make it billow, but that, you know, whatever that is, it’s like, I need to make sure there’s no cat hair on the cape.

Or if you wanted, that could probably be a little more serious. If you have a slightly grittier story and your protagonist is, I don’t know, the sidekick of a monster hunter, doing all the things of like, making sure we have enough food to get from point A to point B ’cause the Monster Hunter really only does the monster killing. Like, that just exhausts them. They don’t have any energy for anything else. And at that point it’s a similar idea, but it’s more serious. So I think both of those are great options.

Chris: Generally, again, it is tricky to have the hero and the sidekick always together if the sidekick is your protagonist.

Oren: True.

Chris: So to try to give the sidekick agency and make it so they are actually at the center of the story and solving problems, which is the trick here, obviously we can change the problems the story’s about, so it’s about the sidekick, for instance, retrieving the horses so the hero can run off into the sunset.

But you need to have your sidekick take care of something solo, usually, in order to pull this off. It’s just, ‘cause you have to come up with a separate thing for the sidekick to do when they’re right next to a hero that is beefier than them and [a] more capable fighter, that’s just gonna be a lot harder and more demanding. Giving them a unique role or skillset is usually really, really helpful for any situation like this when they’re not as powerful, just making them more specialized.

Bunny: Right. I mean, I feel like one of the most obvious ways to do this, and this is again, one of the sort of aesthetic ways to do it, is just that the “sidekick,” quote unquote, acts more like a partner and that they have a skillset that the hero doesn’t have.

In the monster hunter example, that’s, you know, classic brains and brawn pairing, or in The Mimicking of Known Successes, Pleiti is our quote unquote “sidekick,” but she brings scholarly expertise to our quote unquote “classic hero,” Detective Mossa.

Oren: Yeah, that one is interesting because we’re getting into the Watson era, right, of the sidekick. And when you’re doing that sort of thing, when you’re making the sidekick more of a partner, at that point you are depending on recognizable tropes. Otherwise, readers will just be like, oh, well that’s a co-protagonist, right? You know, are they even a sidekick if they’re sharing 50% of the work? And the way that you make that happen is you use something that everyone’s like, oh, that’s a sidekick, ’cause that character is like Watson. We all know Watson is a sidekick thanks to cultural memory.

Bunny: Right, I mean, on the definition as I was trying to come up with how do we define a sidekick protagonist? The definition I came up with is a protagonist who’s the sidekick to a character with the most classic hero traits.

So in a mystery story, the classic hero traits would go to the detective, right? But then we have Pleiti, who’s the scholar, right? She’s not the classic detective. The classic detective is Mossa. So we read her as more of a sidekick. We have quote unquote “classic hero,” and then our protagonist is the one beside that.

Oren: The Tainted Cup is another Sherlock style story that I think we’ve all read recently. Or wait, Bunny. Have you read it yet?

Bunny: Oh, yes, yes. I finished it and I think we all quite liked it too.

Oren: Yes. Okay. Yeah, we all liked it a lot, and at the beginning it does what I’ve started calling the Sherlock Oracle model of Sherlock retellings, where the Holmes character is just a real weirdo and hides out in their room reading the mystery bones as it were and then delivering the occasional bit of insight from on high. Well Din, our actual protagonist who is clearly like a Watson type figure, goes around doing the hard work of gathering all the information.

Chris: I mean, I do think that Din does feel like a sidekick, partly just because in that world, the Sherlock is his boss, and so he has to report back to her, she tells him what to do, and I think that keeps his kind of sidekick, we can call it an aesthetic or not, but he honestly does have a lot of detective traits himself.

Oren: True.

Chris: His superpower is to remember everything, which is definitely an important detective power. He’s great at questioning people and finding out, you know, discrepancies. Again, he has a lot of detective traits. It’s just that he has a boss and she [has] even more detective insight points.

Bunny: Yeah. She’s the one who doles out the revelations, which I think is the very Sherlock thing to do. Like when we have our big confrontation scenes, Din is there to supply information as well. But she’s the one being like, “And this twist. And this twist. And just one more question for you. Did you say this?”

Chris: Which in my opinion was unfortunately one of the weak points of the book. I thought it was a great book, but at the end there, she does basically take over the story and Din is essentially pushed aside, which is not what you want. That’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid here. Though I do think that perhaps, she could have kept all of those revelations as long as Din also had enough to do, right. And so if we found more things for him to do, I don’t think it would’ve been a problem for her to then exposit the answer to the mystery as much.

The problem is that that was really the only thing that happened in that ending sequence except for one tiny little thing that he did. And that wasn’t a good balance.

Oren: Yeah, I was a little worried about that. To be clear, I still love the book.

Chris: Yeah.

Oren: I just thought that particular thing was showing the difficulty of this strategy, ’cause it’s really tempting to have the classic hero type character take over if they have the traits that would make them a classic hero, depending on genre.

Chris: Yeah, and for most of the book it doesn’t have this issue. It’s only for that ending sequence and you know, you’re a little prepared for it because she is Sherlock. At the same time, I would’ve liked to see a little more from Din there.

Bunny: Tainted Cup also avoids the issue of your sidekick protagonist not having enough agency because Ana does not go outside, right? She does, but only blindfolded. She needs to be guided around. She gets overstimulated super easily, so she usually just holes herself up in a room and reads a lot, and so Din is the one who gathers evidence on her behalf. He gets into scrapes and scuffles.

Chris: And it also explains why he is doing things alone, right. She doesn’t go out so she doesn’t go with him.

Bunny: Yeah. Right. And so there’s plenty of tension there. And then all of his observations, he does make his own little deductions and speculations and the reader who’s witnessing everything that he witnesses can also do that, which also kind of works just because I think that’s one reason that we see a lot of Watsonian viewpoints is that we don’t wanna see the inside of Sherlock’s head. We still want there to be a big reveal.

Oren: Well, I mean, that’s definitely the reason Doyle did it originally. Nowadays we’ve kind of realized that’s not a good enough reason to justify an entire viewpoint, so we have to do other things with him. And also Watson is a fairly beloved character now. So if you made a modern version of Sherlock and Watson and treated Watson the way most of the original books do, people would not like that. You’d be like, why are you being so mean to Watson?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, again, this is why there’s something to fix in Sherlock Holmes stories is because you want to make your viewpoint character and the main character the same person, please. Please, please, please. The problem is that people just sympathize with the viewpoint character. It’s very intimate and you get to know them, and so people get attached to them. And then having somebody else be the main character essentially means that the person people feel is the main character is constantly shown up by this obnoxious, you know, side character stealing their spotlight and you know, looking cool at the main character’s expense. That’s what it feels like. So that’s why, again, they just have to be the same character.

Oren: My absolute most “do not do this” example is The Justice of Kings, which is another Sherlock retelling in a vaguely Roman Empire-esque fantasy setting. Kind of weird that I’ve read two of those in the last six months, because it’s also The Tainted Cup, but Tainted Cup is way more interesting. So in Justice of Kings, we have our Sherlock character. Then he has a Watson character who does the things that Watson does, like the physical legwork. And then that’s not our viewpoint character, though. Our viewpoint character is a third character who hangs out with them. A Watson’s Watson, if you will.

Chris: Oh my gosh. Such a bad idea.

Oren: And in theory, she is supposed to be the investigator’s apprentice, but I didn’t see her doing any apprenticing. She has, I think, one idea that helps them at one point and she needed other people to interpret it. She just was, “Oh wow. That’s kind of a weird coincidence.” And then other people were like, “You’re right. That is a weird coincidence.” And then they figured out what it meant.

Chris: Oh my gosh.

Oren: And she just spends the entire story watching them do stuff until for no reason in character, they send her off to spy on the bad guys, which she’s obviously not prepared or qualified for, and she immediately gets captured and then spends several chapters captured.

Chris: Of course, they damsel her.

Bunny: Oh, that’s frustrating.

Oren: Yeah. It’s so boring. Oh gosh. It’s like, this is not good even when you do it to a side character, but like when you do it to your POV character, it’s like, why would you make me experience this?

Bunny: I mean, here’s the other thing about your typical non protagonist sidekick, is that they’re often threatened or kidnapped so that the hero has something to go after, to provide conflict. Not so good to do that, if they’re the protagonist.

Chris: They can be kidnapped, but then they have to free themself.

Bunny: Right, right. Like it’s another case of, yeah, that happens to sidekicks a lot, but there’s a reason that it goes differently when it happens to protagonists.

Chris: One case study that I think is a pretty good example of having a character that’s not the most powerful character in a group is actually Martha Wells’ Raksura books, and they’re not perfect books. The world building is really problematic. Of course, she didn’t mean any harm, and thankfully all of her more recent books do way better with that. But I do think that these are the books where she does best in managing all of the characters in their roles because the protagonist, Moon, is not the leader or the most powerful fighter of what is a fairly large group.

And so she uses a variety of techniques to put him in the spotlight and I think she does a really good job. He is kind of like middle management, I guess you could say, right, where once you get into a small enough group, he will become the leader and that does help.

Bunny: Moon is: Ask a Manager!

Oren: Some tech disruptor is already planning to eliminate him because you don’t really need middle management, right?

Chris: He is the deep state!

Oren: Just make all of the lower level employees do middle management’s job without any extra money. That’ll work great. What could go wrong?

Chris: He also has unique knowledge from traveling, which gives him kind of a specialized role in some cases. And so sometimes there’ll be, for instance, a big fight and there’s lots of enemies. So, you know, the most powerful fighter will fight the biggest enemy. And then Wells just focuses on what Moon is doing in the fight and who Moon is fighting.

Other times the group will split up, or sometimes the biggest fighter might be injured for a while. Other times he’s off doing something else to give Moon a bigger role. And then sometimes his travel knowledge just comes in really handy and he comes up with ideas that people haven’t thought of before.

So it’s kind of a combination approach that tends to work well, but I do think it’s a really good example of having one main character who is just part of a larger group and has kind of a special position in that group but at the same time, isn’t the leader or the most special person in that group.

Oren: Yeah. I tried to find examples of well-known stories that have sidekick protagonists, as it were. And we already mentioned The Tainted Cup and The Mimicking of Known Success, which happened to be two books that I’ve read recently. I was really hard pressed to find other examples. I know they must be out there, but the only really clear cut one I could find was the anime Case Closed/Detective Conan, depending on where you were, which I remember as being this really short, kind of unnoticeable anime from the nineties, but apparently in Japan is super long running and has like 1500 episodes.

Bunny: Wow. [sarcastic] So you watched all of them, right? For the podcast?

Oren: [sarcastic] Yeah, absolutely. I watched so many, well, ’cause only a few of them were ever translated during the initial run. Like, maybe more of them have been dubbed since. But the premise of that one is that there’s a, you know, super cool Sherlockian type detective, but because of some mysterious chemicals, he gets shrunk down to a child. But like, you know, with a child’s body, right? But he’s still got his super Sherlock brain.

And so to solve mysteries he has to tag along with his dad, who is also a PI, but not very good and solve the cases for him, which is basically the scenario Chris described earlier, and I was like, it’s weird that I couldn’t find more examples of something like this. The other ones are all kind of questionable: Skeleton Crew, the kids kind of act like Jod’s helpers in a couple episodes, but it’s not a perfect match.

Chris: There is kind of the Lower Decks formula. In that case, they’re more isolated or, for instance, there’s one episode of Buffy that’s similar called Zeppo, that’s just about Xander, who is normally a sidekick, is the star of that episode, but it’s very similar to Lower Decks in that the idea is that the more important people are off dealing with a bigger, higher priority issue for a time, leaving that character alone.

So it doesn’t necessarily have the same sidekick feel because the sidekick is off on their own so much that they don’t feel like a sidekick as much anymore, but you kind of have some similarities where they work usually on lower stakes problems, whereas the boss is off doing something else.

Bunny: I’d say that arguably Marta from Knives Out is a sidekick protagonist. Now, this is kind of an interesting one because the story itself is a twist on classic detective stories, and for most of it, Benoit Blanc, who would be the protagonist, he’s the Sherlock type character, right, is kind of a threat to Marta for most of it, because Marta’s trying to cover up for a crime she didn’t commit, essentially, that she knows will be pinned on her.

And so she’s trying to conceal evidence from him, right? And Blanc definitely thinks that she’s his sidekick, right? Like I think he has a line somewhat to that effect and even some places online list him as the protagonist, but he is definitely not the protagonist of the first one. I think they’re just calling him that because he’s the one element that now moves between movies.

Oren: I was super surprised by that because when I first watched Knives Out, I did not realize that anyone’s interest in this franchise was Benoit Blanc. He seemed like a joke. Like “what if Sherlock Holmes was southern and not very good at his job” seems to be the premise. But no, apparently I got that wrong. He’s actually supposed to be a great detective and uh, that’s why he’s the main character of Glass Onion.

Chris: I do think Knives Out is a really interesting example. I do think the problem with that is that is in prose I don’t think it would work as well because again, movies you can kind of say they have a viewpoint character in that the camera is, you know, following somebody around and somebody is portrayed as, you know, more sympathetic than other people, but they don’t have a viewpoint character to the same extent. And with a charismatic actor playing the detective, I think it’s a little easier to kind of transition to Benoit Blanc at the end, doing the unveiling of the mystery instead of Marta. I think it can get away with that a little bit better than, for instance, The Tainted Cup can get away with Sherlock kind of taking over at the end.

Bunny: I’m actually happy that what the Knives Out sequels are doing is completely resetting the scene and only taking Benoit Blanc with them each time. It was a mistake to make him the main character. He shouldn’t be the main character. It was the right choice to not try to continue the first story. I’m so glad they didn’t do that.

Oren: I cannot imagine what a direct sequel to Knives Out would be.

Chris: There would be too many constraints.

Oren: Marta is framed for another crime.

Chris: Yeah. No, they definitely needed to free themselves to make a new story without all the constraints of the same characters for sure.

Bunny: It takes way too long in that movie to meet our actual main character. The good thing about Benoit Blanc is that he can have the aesthetic of the detective and be the sidekick. That’s his strength. But yeah, I’d say Marta is, I think she would fall into the sidekick protagonist pretty well. Mad Max in Fury Road might also be another example That’s definitely more co-protagonists, but I think the story itself is pretty clearly Furiosa’s story more than it is Max’s.

Oren: I would identify them as co-protagonists, but if you call Max a sidekick, certain very unpleasant people get mad, so I’m okay with that.

Bunny: I mean, I think he’s a sidekick. I think he’s a sidekick in that he’s the viewpoint character, but his story is not the main story. But at the same time, I don’t think it would be better if we removed him. So he’s still an important part of the story, but it’s definitely about Furiosa trying to get the wives away from Joe and Max is there to help fight, it’s good.

Oren: Max is there to make you wonder where this movie fits in the continuity of the previous movies, which already had really weird continuity, so who knows?

Bunny: Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. Don’t, just don’t, you know. Don’t worry.

Oren: Yeah, don’t–just do not ask questions.

Bunny: Look at the fire. Isn’t the fire cool? There’s a guy with a guitar.

Oren: Well, I don’t think we’re gonna top guy with guitar and fire, so I think we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.

Chris: If you found this episode helpful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

[outro music]

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.

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