it's just a turn to the left, and then a step to the right... and a side-kick.

[buggery]

I was originally going to post this as a comment on Te's meta about sidekicks here, but a) it's kind of long, and 2) I wanted to make it clearer that I'd welcome anyone's thoughts on these sidekick issues.

I'd love to see someone take a good, analytical look at storylines like "Knights Passed" (Gotham Knights #43-45, in which social services belatedly investigates the death of Jason Todd and Bruce's performance as a foster and adoptive father, scripted by Scott Beatty) or the Terry Berg story arc in Green Lantern (as scripted by Judd Winick, though Te and others have more of these issues than I do and can better define which part of the run was pertinent). The former is an example of someone in canon questioning Bruce's role in the three boy-Robins' lives without any acknowledgment of the hero/sidekick role existing, never mind being relevant, and Bruce's, Dick's and Tim's (among others') responses. The latter is a case where Terry is similar to a teen sidekick in many ways, but fulfills that role only with Kyle's civilian identity, not as companion to Green Lantern. Both raise all sorts of issues relevant to this discussion, and that would be true even if it weren't for the social worker's canonically-insinuated suspicions about Bruce's relationships with his Robins and Terry's canonically-acknowledged sexual interest ("crush") on Kyle. Are these exceptions to the rule, or exceptions that prove the rule?

I'd also be interested to see someone look at (the rare) examples of superheroic duos where it's really not a hero-sidekick relationship, but a true partnership of equals: Hawk and Dove, for example, or the animated universe's Static and Gear; cases where the two heroes don't just team up occasionally (the way Hal and Barry or Hal and Ollie used to, or Bruce and Clark do, or pretty much any two heroes can even when they don't know each other especially well) but work together typically and as a matter of course. Why are these sorts of relationships so uncommon? What does that say about them, about the sidekick relationships, about the way sidekick relationships are the norm in the DCU and partnerships-of-equals are not?

Then again, to go back and look at Mia for a moment... Female sidekicks are uncommon to the point of non-existence, yet the same isn't true of female teenaged superheroes. In Gotham alone, Babs, Cass and Steph all began their vigilante careers as teens and without a partner to be the back half of, though they aligned themselves with Batman's aegis to varying degrees at different points. (I think Huntress and Black Canary were both out of their teens when they first costumed up.) Donna and Cassie have more complicated relationships to Diana, in her role as Wonder Woman and otherwise, but bear looking at. AFAIK Cissie was never affiliated with Ollie or the Arrowfamily at all, though her mother might have fantasised otherwise. Even Zatanna wasn't a sidekick to her father Zatara, she just chose to follow in his footsteps rather than working alongside him as a junior partner. And of course, for all its problems of execution, there is Steph's brief career as Robin (or Carrie's, if anybody wants to go there). So what makes sidekicking such a boys' club, even when there are female adult heroes around who could take on junior partners and female teenaged heroes who might benefit from being the junior partner of a more experienced hero?

Er. Yeah, pretty much any of these three areas would be a full meta post of its own (or multiple posts), and not just because of the comment-length limit. And sure, I could write those explorations myself, but honestly, I'm not much of a meta writer. Hell, I'm not much of a meta reader, though in this fandom I've found the meta much more engaging than my previous fandoms' for whatever reason -- part of it's the material, part of it is that people like thete1 and monkeycrackmary and hradzka just write damned fascinating meta. This isn't a demand for more meta, from Te or anyone else -- what dries up interest in doing anything, whether it's fic, meta or something else, than having someone demand it from you as if it's their right? -- but if any of these issues I've raised interests anyone sufficiently to tackle in a future essay, well, I'd be delighted to read it.

Comments

[gloss]

Completely and utterly clueless on the sidekick issue - though I'm fascinated by the existence of fully-fledged teen female superheroes without previous sidekick experience - but a couple things caught my eye. First, this - though in this fandom I've found the meta much more engaging than my previous fandoms' for whatever reason -- part of it's the material, part of it is that people like thete1 and monkeycrackmary and hradzka just write damned fascinating meta - because I'm not even *in* your fandom and I love the meta. And, secondly-but-just-as-importantly - Current music: Seth Green on The Graham Norton Experience - *envies like a green thing!*

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

So what makes sidekicking such a boys' club, even when there are female adult heroes around who could take on junior partners and female teenaged heroes who might benefit from being the junior partner of a more experienced hero?

I read something once about Jane Austen novels. It was like, "You may have noticed that in Jane Austen novels, there are scenes with women interacting with other women, and there are scenes with men and women interacting, but there are no scenes that are just two men talking to each other. Why is that? Because Jane Austen lived in a really gender-segregated society and she had no first-hand experience with how men talk to other men when they're alone, and she didn't want to just make stuff up."

I have a feeling it's the same thing with most oldschool comic book writers, 99% of whom were men, of course. That's why Superman and Batman and all the other heroes are all about the Daddy Issues and the Male Bonding issues and the Women as (scary, frightening) Other issues. They're writing what they know, and what they *don't* know is how to write convincing quasi-sisterly (say, Kory/Raven or Kory/Donna) or mom/daughter relationships (say, Jesse Quick and Liberty Belle) that feel as real as the quasi-brotherly or father/son relationships of which it seems the entire DCU is made up of.

Not to mention the "Funny Guy, Smart Guy, Strong Guy, Rebel Guy and The Chick" syndrome. It's hard for a female character to have a sidekick if she's really basically just a semi-sidekick of a male hero, or the Ladies' Auxiliary of the male superhero team. (Of course this is improving with the *two* main female characters of JL and Toon Titans, and the more evenly mixed teams like current Titans and Outsiders, yay!)

I'm trying to think of female DC characters who've had their own books... Besides Wonder Woman, all the titles that I'm coming up with have characters who are basically defined by their relationships to men. Batgirl and Supergirl are always going to be oriented towards their male "father figures," Harley Quinn and Catwoman are always going to be oriented towards their male "love interests." It doesn't leave a lot of room for them to have the kind of complex and intimate relationships that we think of when we think of typical sidekick/mentor relationships, like Bruce/Dick or Ollie/Roy.

Even Birds of Prey, which was specifically supposed to be about "Chicks! Being Independent! On their own!" -- they still fall into that trap, like how Barbara and Helena don't interact with each other as people; they kind of triangulate at each other through their mutual Dick issues. *shrug* Eh.

[some-stars.livejournal.com]

mostly what livia said, but also--the young sidekick is a wish-fulfillment, self-insertion figure, even more than the superhero himself. Boys want to be Robin, so Robin has to be a boy.

There's also the issue of a sidekick having to be, well, beside *somebody.* As a superhero character, the complexity of your backstory and supporting cast is determined by how high up the tier you are, and if you are a woman, you're probably not high enough for anyone to even bother *giving* you a sidekick.

I have thoughts, as well, about how the purpose of the sidekick, as people talked about in Te's post, is to be a foil--dramatically, emotionally, etc.--for the hero, and if it were a girl, the only function she could serve would be as erotic-tension foil. (Obviously *I* don't think this, but.) The male writers mentally categorize all relationships into either romantic/sexual, which is male/female, or anything else, which is male/male, because male is the default, and the only reason to make the character female is so the male can sleep with her. So that eliminates female sidekicks to male heroes.

But, uh, those thoughts require more thought, and a whole complicated synthesis with *other* thoughts, and I'm just going to leave that part as an exercise for the reader.

I'm not sure which paragraph above I should attach this part to, so: Men write male characters as people, and woman characters as women. This can work out, although it gets irritating, for a main-character superhero, but the sidekick's main identity is already Sidekick of X. And when making a character female means focusing that character's identity on her womanhood, you can't also focus it on her sidekickiness. (Since why else would you write a female character if not to constantly talk about and think about her gender? If she were just going to go around living life and kicking ass and angsting and being a regular person, you could just make her a man. See above re: default.)

I'm rambling and overly cranky and not making much sense, but I'm clicking Post anyway. I'm pretty sure my *main* point is in the first paragraph, and the rest is a small thought that got magnified beyond all reason. But, yes. Male self-insert fantasy, tailored to their needs, which do not include the having of breasts. At least not that they will admit.

[caiusmajor.livejournal.com]

Black Canary II, incidentally, was 19 at her debut in current canon...not quite, technically, out of her teens, but pretty close. Her position was a bit Anissa's is currently: a daughter carrying on a legacy that her parent DOES NOT want her to take on, who is thus forced to attain a certain amount of maturity and independence before doing so (...did Dinah ever attend college?). Although, since Dinah followed her mother, the legacy was more direct.

Had the JSA still been active when Dinah was a teenager, she could well have wound up a sidekick or junior team member (perhaps resembling Stargirl currently?), since her at least some of her mother's (male) teammates share Dinah I's reluctance to train her daughter[1]. But as it was, she became a founding member of the JLA without mentioning her age to anyone.

More comments possibly to follow. I've been intending to write my own "post-in-lieu-of-comment-to-Te's" but my brain has uncooperative lately.

[1] And then there's the fucked-up pre-Crisis business where Dinah I's personality and memories were implanted into Dinah II, but I really don't wanna go there just now.