That Batman post got me thinking (and this isn’t a response to the original post, just where my brain went): there is this sort of meme or general understanding that kid sidekicks are prone to dying or at least experiencing horrific, career-ending or derailing trauma in comics, but that’s actually…not true?

Like. Looking at the major sidekick-bearing franchises in DC:

• Donna died, but she was an adult when that happened.
• Bart was an adult when he died.
• Roy died and Connor was shot in the head and left in a coma for years, but they were both adults, and Connor was never a kid sidekick. Lian died as a child, but she wasn’t a sidekick. I don’t think you can count Roy’s addiction as something that happened specifically because Ollie brought him into dangerous situations to fight crime.
• Kara and Kon have both died, but neither were ever really kid sidekicks, and Kara was an adult. Kon is the closest I can think of to a non-Bat kid sidekick who died while still underage, but that wasn’t because Superman brought him into the field. Superman didn’t bring him into the field at all.
• I guess technically maybe Tula? But she died during COIE and so did literally all but one universe, so again, not really something that happened because Aquaman endangered her (a thing he did not do). Garth also died (maybe twice; thanks, continuity errors!), but he was an adult. Koryak maybe died but also maybe was an adult, and definitely was never Arthur’s sidekick.
• Sandy the Golden Boy did suffer a horrific fate because of being Sandman’s sidekick, I’ll give you that one.
• I don’t think you can count Eddie because Blue Devil specifically refused to allow him to be a sidekick because it was too dangerous, and they were distinctly estranged when Eddie died.
• Plenty of young heroes have died in the DCU, temporarily or permanently (Dove, Kole, Risk, Pantha, Golden Eagle, Jericho, it’s a much longer list but you get the point), but none of them were sidekicks.

But then you get to Batman and he’s got 2.5 dead Robins out of 5, which is…not great odds. (I’m counting Steph as the .5 because he absolutely 1000% got her killed but then she got retconned to surviving it.)

Obviously I’m not advocating for child soldiers IRL, but I’m also not advocating for vigilantism IRL. But in terms of “I found this child, and had them do cartwheels in front of men with guns,” it does seem like being a child sidekick is…basically fine, most of the time? There seems to be a higher safety rate than if you are an unattached teen hero, which actually kind of checks out.

Unless, of course, your mentor is Bruce Wayne, in which case…maybe move to Central City?