Can my love interest in my book be a sidekick, and not make my protagonist do dumb things? or would that make it boring and uninteresting? I like Agan Ailsie and I don’t want him to be stupid and rash in his dealings with Breanne Gallagher. Hehe! Does anyone have any opinions?
Great question, Colleen!
Your sidekick can absolutely be the love interest. However, your Sidekick cannot also be the Object of Affection.
Your protagonist can really be romantically interested in any of the secondary characters (even the antagoist!) to develop a romantic subplot.
For one example, in The Matrix, Trinity is Neo’s Sidekick and his romantic love interest, but Morpheus is the Object of Affection (with no romantic interest).
However, you cannot combine the Object of Affection with the Sidekick. It’s important that the Object is not helpful to the protagonist’s goals, they always make things worse. But the Sidekick is practically always helpful to the protagonist’s goals, they always make things better. So you could not combine those secondary character archetypes, it would be impossible for a character to both always make things better and always make things worse.
Even though in many stories the Object of Affection is also the love interest (the damsel in distress), that’s more of a coincidence than a function. We can see some obvious reasons why stories do that, but it doesn’t need to be that way. The Object of Affection and the love interest are separate ideas.
I hope that helps! The Novel Matrix book covers this concept in quite a bit more detail.
