Why is the Sidekick the Most Difficult Character to Create?
Whatever fiction genre you write, you’re faced with assembling a cast of characters who will bring life to your story and engage your readers.
Some are relatively easy: your protagonist is generally a likable, pleasant, intelligent, quirky person. Your antagonist gives readers a reason to distrust them. If you’re writing a mystery, your red herrings can be a lot of fun to assemble. But the sidekick? That gets a little tricky.
Yet the sidekick has a role unique in fiction: they exist primarily as a foil to another character — i.e., the protagonist — although, historically, sidekicks have served multiple purposes as literary devices. Ancient Greek drama always included a protagonist, an antagonist, and a chorus; it’s the chorus that served as the protagonist’s sidekick, providing ongoing commentary on the protagonist’s thoughts and actions, bringing additional information to the discourse,
Different genres address the role differently. In superhero fiction, sidekicks reflect the superhero’s inner thoughts and help prompt the plot’s action by helping the hero on their mission (in early superhero fiction, sidekicks didn’t have a lot to their backstory outside of how they met the superhero; they were pretty much one-dimensional). Mystery fiction often uses the sidekick to help the sleuth…
