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Jiro comments on The Importance of Sidekicks - Less Wrong
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Something else to remember: The Lord of the Rings took around six months. And considering that hobbits live longer than humans, by human standards it's more like 4 months. In other words, heroes and sidekicks in pieces of fiction do not use up all their life or pawn their future in order to be heroes or sidekicks. Perhaps if they get unlucky (Frodo was injured), but that's only a chance.
Even superheroes, who seem to be an exception to this, are saved by the genre conceits that 1) for some strange reason, if you're not specifically obsessed like Batman, being a superhero doesn't completely preclude a normal life, and 2) although the timescale of comic books means we don't see it much, superheroes eventually stop being superheroes, and starting a family is one of the biggest reasons for one to stop.
Even if heroes and sidekicks existed in the real world, dedicating your life to Eliezer's cause is a lot more extreme than being a hero or a sidekick, and should be thought of with appropriately greater skepticism.
Aren't you cherry-picking, even from the single work of fiction you mention? Sure, Frodo and Samwise didn't dedicate their lives to be heroes. But Gandalf and Aragorn did.
And your superhero genre conceits don't seem to match what I've read. It's a near-universal trope of superhero comics that heroes can't lead normal lives and that when they do, they're inevitably reminded of the inherent dangers, e.g. perfect hostages in the form of their loved ones. And it's also another near-universal trope whereby the retired hero is called back into service in The Hour of Dire Need.
I agree that one should be more skeptical of dedicating one's life to Eliezer's cause than a character typically depicted in superhero comics might be given the prospect of super-powers. But let's not forget that Hero is a trope with Real Life examples and dedicating one's life to something is a pretty common occurrence.
In my experience, a lot of people seem to expect that you've dedicated your life to something, as if plain, ordinary human beings who just want to be human beings are not even fantasy novel NPCs but just failing to follow the social rules of real life. I think this might have something to do with the pretensions to Great Purpose of the white-collar professional classes, but I still don't really get it.
This bugs me a whole lot, because despite quite like LW-ian type stuff related to math, statistics, science, machine learning, blah blah blah, it all looks more than a little crazy from the outside, and I also just can't wrap my head around dedicating a whole life to a thing, as if things are allowed to be bigger and more important than people.
-- Rincewind, summarizing my feelings on the subject of causes, including those I genuinely support.
Gandalf, yes -- he does say that that the point of his existence was to be the counter to to Sauron -- but Aragorn, no. He was a ranger before and became a king after, with just six months of heroism in between.
Gandalf's essentially an angel, so I'm not sure concepts like dedicating one's life to something conventionally apply to him. But "ranger", for Aragorn, seems to cover an awful lot of heroism -- and I wouldn't be surprised if "king" did as well.
Being a hero in epic fantasy is often less about what you do and more about what you are. Lord of the Rings handles that in an interesting way, by arranging events such that the fate of the world hinges on the actions of characters who're decidedly unheroic by genre standards -- antiheroes in the classical, not the grimdark, sense of the word -- but it plays the mantle-of-destiny thing more or less straight if we're talking about anyone who isn't a hobbit.
Well, a Maia, and while I think his life was dedicated to a particular cause, there are enough hints that it's not Gandalf himself who did the dedicating :-/ Though he certainly seemed to be perfectly fine with that.
I don't think so -- the hobbits are not "anti", they are unexpected heroes, but pretty straight heroes otherwise.
Also, Gandalf is a Maiar, a supernatural being. He's not a human, or a human stand-in such as a hobbit.
If I build a battle robot and the robot goes to battle, is it a hero?
Are angels heroes?
"Normal life" is a relative term. I can think of few superheroes who are in a situation analogous to what was described by emr above with respect to Eliezer's consort. There are certainly individual obstacles that superheroes face that normal people don't, but the overall effect of these obstacles on the superhero's life is limited, even if they loom large in an individual story.
The smartassed answer would be "decades of anime say yes", but the real answer is that this is the kind of thing we could argue about for hours without making progress, because the word's broad enough to encompass several mutually contradictory meanings.
This thread is happening in the context of a larger discussion about heroic responsibility, however, and I think "sidekick" here is most productively framed against that concept. Heroic responsibility means shouldering all the ills of the world; a sidekick's responsibility is doing whatever the hero needs done so that they can more effectively get to the heroing. These approaches are rare in media; even Frodo and Samwise, the examples of the OP, only count in a kind of loose, metaphorical sense. But that doesn't really matter, because we're not doing media analysis here, we're doing motivational psychology.
I'm not yet convinced that this is the healthiest or most productive way to conceptualize heroism or sidekickkery, at least for most people (you could insert a long-winded digression about Fate/stay night here, but it wouldn't mean much to people that haven't played the game). It beats arguing semantics, though, so let's stick with it for now.
In which sense is Gandalf similar to a battle robot in the way that, say, Aragorn is not?
Besides, if you think of Maiar as battle robots, not only Gandalf is not a hero, but Sauron is not a villain either.