do you even read comic books?

secondly: again by necessity of the genre conventions, the hero is encouraging or at least allowing the sidekick to sacrifice having a normal childhood. particularly as comics head into the modern era, this is not just missing school activities for vigilante reasons, impacts to relationships with peers, or having poor sleep, but also a bodily sacrifice - the sidekick is at significant risk of physical harm by nature of being a sidekick fighting crimes.

this is of course necessary for them to have agency and be a figure that real life children can see as empowering, which is the point of a sidekick. but you end up with either the hero being blase and ignorant of this danger (which comes off as them not considering the child's safety to be important), or the text trying to acknowledge the danger and have the hero justify it. often this is written as the hero knowing there is significant risk, but that it's okay because the child wants it, or because they would just do it without the hero's help, or simply that the hero selfishly wants the company. the sidekick is mature and adult-like when convenient, and childlike and in need of guidance when that's convenient, and the story bends around the adult to justify all this. the needs of the story render the needs of the child unimportant. you don't have to work hard to translate these into justifications a perpetrator might have for CSA.

thirdly, sidekicks can fill similar narrative roles to love interests for the hero. direct parallels are often made in text between these characters. both love interests and sidekicks are, in many stories, ultimately props for the hero character. sidekicks are liable to be held hostage and threatened to get to the hero, prone to jealousy when the hero has a new love interest, and enmeshment is almost certainly present. again, these parallels make it easy to read the hero as having a romantic or sexual interest in the sidekick, too.

then there's the secret identity. not all sidekicks have one! but the ones who don't tend to be the ones where the hero has political power of some sort in a fantastical culture (e.g. Garth, Donna). again this is because of how the genre works - if the sidekick lives within mainstream US culture, it would obviously be a huge risk for their identity to be known. but, well, you then end up with an intense secret being kept between an adult and a child, typically with the adult convincing the child to keep it by telling them it would be dangerous for anyone else to know. and this secret shapes the child's identity and it concerns something illegal and no one else would understand... sounds very molested to me idk about you....

it can look slightly different depending on the hero/sidekick pair. if the sidekick lives with the hero then the secret may be shared with other household members (e.g. Alfred knowing about Batman and Robin) - this ends up looking like household incestuous abuse, where household members not directly involved nevertheless look the other way, or voice vague disapproval but never interfere. when they live seperately, this instead looks like the child lying to their parents and trusted adults in their life to maintain the secret. i am forever thinking about the time Wally, at behest of his aunt's boyfriend Barry, lies to his parents about going to see his friends so that he can instead go to a motel outside town to see Ralph Dibny, a man he has never met before, for vigilantism purposes. like!!! it is usually a very straightforward swap of 'vigilantism is a metaphor for sexual abuse' and then no further reading into it needs to be done to make it work. and the sidekick will typically be hiding their secret from their school peers, perhaps dwelling on how seperate and alienated from them it makes them feel, too.

none of this is even really getting deep into the way the hero and sidekick actually feel about each other, either! the sidekick is almost always very very intensely attached to the hero. the metatextual reason for this is that the hero is their literal reason to exist - few sidekicks can go off on their own and hold up a comic line on their lonesome. whether the hero feels equally intensely can vary, but the end result tends to be something that resembles either mutual codependency or trauma bonding.

in conclusion: the nature of the sidekick makes them eminently molestable. but you must not stop there! think about the specific hero/sidekick dynamic and the truths of how this sidekick is getting molested will be revealed to you. does the sidekick feel negatively about missing out on normal life? how do other people see them? does the hero feel any guilt over them, or not? dig into the relationship and they are all a little bit different. i like to hold them up to each other to compare and contrast. that's where the fun is! 🥰