I think I remember you mentioning that story once! That would be interesting!

The sidekicks especially deserve their own stories since the current cultural hero is generally a bland white guy without much in the way of personality, and all the interesting characters are sidekicks. Let's just start with THEM, shall we?

And I'll admit, all of those criticisms are valid, because if you screw 'em up you just get a badly-written story. But The Hobbit does them well. It's very much a Professional Driver Closed Course way to write.