If I read this post correctly, you’re iterating the conventional wisdom that team players are not less important or less necessary than star players even though the status is less glamorous. (They are, perhaps, more interchangeable, but also definitely indispensable on much shorter timescales than star players.) Only you are framing it in terms that make it sound as if this was not generally agreed upon by everyone not suffering from the malignant form of ambition.
Nuance matters. “Sidekick” is not meant to refer to actual humans, but to second grade fictional characters. When applied to a human being it turns into an ugly word. It reduces the character/person being referred to into a prop for another. This works well in storytelling: minor characters are not thinking, feeling beings. It is reasonable and appropriate to treat them as if they existed for the purposes of others. But by bringing these connotations into real life, you end up implicitly reinforcing the contagious and intuitive falsehood that there is always a number one and having any other number means you failed. Life can easily be made to look like this, if simplified into a single story, but it’s not an accurate or helpful way to look at things.
Your use of the word “sidekick” poisons the entire post for me. I have to suspect I’m not getting the general tone quite right. To me, it’s an unhappy post. Not only because other people have consistently and unfairly made you defend being what you are, but because you are still trying to convince yourself that it shouldn’t have to be defended. I hope I’m wrong and “sidekick” does not mean to you what it means to me, and that if you ever felt genuinely inadequate because of this in the past that’s ended now.
In real life Samwise Gamgee would be, by any reasonable standards, a true full-blown hero. At least I can’t see how doing something extraordinary that greatly benefits other people stops being heroic if someone else was also involved and did a little bit more or played a more central or interesting role.
If I read this post correctly, you’re iterating the conventional wisdom that team players are not less important or less necessary than star players even though the status is less glamorous. (They are, perhaps, more interchangeable, but also definitely indispensable on much shorter timescales than star players.) Only you are framing it in terms that make it sound as if this was not generally agreed upon by everyone not suffering from the malignant form of ambition.
Nuance matters. “Sidekick” is not meant to refer to actual humans, but to second grade fictional characters. When applied to a human being it turns into an ugly word. It reduces the character/person being referred to into a prop for another. This works well in storytelling: minor characters are not thinking, feeling beings. It is reasonable and appropriate to treat them as if they existed for the purposes of others. But by bringing these connotations into real life, you end up implicitly reinforcing the contagious and intuitive falsehood that there is always a number one and having any other number means you failed. Life can easily be made to look like this, if simplified into a single story, but it’s not an accurate or helpful way to look at things.
Your use of the word “sidekick” poisons the entire post for me. I have to suspect I’m not getting the general tone quite right. To me, it’s an unhappy post. Not only because other people have consistently and unfairly made you defend being what you are, but because you are still trying to convince yourself that it shouldn’t have to be defended. I hope I’m wrong and “sidekick” does not mean to you what it means to me, and that if you ever felt genuinely inadequate because of this in the past that’s ended now.
In real life Samwise Gamgee would be, by any reasonable standards, a true full-blown hero. At least I can’t see how doing something extraordinary that greatly benefits other people stops being heroic if someone else was also involved and did a little bit more or played a more central or interesting role.