Side characters aren't supposed to hijack the protagonist's spotlight and hold the main story hostage. They're supposed to stay confined to the background, like the good little human-shaped white noise makers they are.
Well, for whatever reason, it...
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IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged that being a side character in someone else's story sucks. You're dragged to places you hate, in clothes that scratch and accentuate your ass in ways that make it look like its an asteroid that's crashed to Earth. All the while your bumbling mother insists on setting you up with every eligible yuppy with a couple pounds to his name.
As if that wasn't bad enough, you're sober. Like unbearably sober for the whole thing, throat as dry as the Sahara, even though the room is full of servers swanning through the aristocratic crowds with trays of champagne.
Alcohol's meant to be consumed, people, preferably, by me.
But never mind that. There's more to get off my chest. There's the sitting; good authors never mention how much sitting their characters do between each scene. It's not relevant to the plot, nor does it spawn new developments or define character arcs, so its often cut during the many, many revision stages. But if you're inside a story, living in the spaces between the pages? There's an assload of sitting.
Sitting around the breakfast table while sisters squawk about ribbons. You sit in the salon, or parlor, solar (?). Whatever the period appropriate term is for 'place where you fucking sit.' Like at breakfasts, you sit at dinners too. And before bed. And in the afternoon when there's nothing to do except sit and keep your hands busy with rich-people crafting - knitting, painting, embroidery, or cross-stitching.
On Sundays, you get to sit in drafty churches. So now you're both cold and seated while some dispassionate old pastor crones on about Hell and your eventual arrival there. By evening, which comes at 4pm every damn day because outside it's dark, so inside it's dark, and candles, well, candles don't really hold a candle to electricity, (Come on, Ed. Buddy. Hurry up. Stop torturing those elephants and get to inventing), you're stuck in front of a fire.
The dry heat frizzes your hair and makes pools of sweat swell under your pits, and you stink because deodorant isn't yet a thing, and you find yourself staring into the flames thinking about tossing yourself in, if only you had the mental fortitude to commit. Like my exe Brian broadcasted to the entirety of his Twitter sphere, Jessa Slyvane has a severe case of commitment phobia. That's not wholly true; I just didn't want to commit to him, a workaholic with a stick up his ass, size XL, but that's neither here nor there.
While you're condemned to sitting, the story unfolds around the main character. And they get everything - of course, it's written that way. They're the prettiest, cleverest, and most loved. The world revolves around them because without them, there is no story, which has led me to some very dark fantasies about lovely Lizzie B accidentally getting hit by a carriage.
But so long as the main protagonist exists, the story continues, and you're left to exist in their orbit. Correction - sit in their orbit. They get the loyalist friends, go on all the adventures. Have the admiration of an entire town at their beck and call. And, of course, they get the love interest.
