Another thought about the sidekick status. I recall this comment by Eliezer, where he says, in part:

If you know yourself for an NPC and that you cannot start such a project yourself, you ought to throw money at anyone launching a new project whose probability of saving the world is not known to be this small.

I could be misreading it, but if you replace "money" with "effort", he basically describes the sideckick role as "NPC". Which rubbed me the wrong way even then. I certainly would not describe you or Brienne as NPCs, no way. I wonder if it's just an unfortunate choice of words.