Etta Candy Is Your New Fave DCEU Sidekick

The affectionate buzz surrounding Wonder Woman has grown, following the official trailer release earlier this week. It's hard not to feel excited at the unabashed celebration of a female warrior and superhero on film, especially given that it's the final days of the 2016 election, and most importantly, Wonder Woman is having a very significant impact on pop culture this year. While I would hope that you, like me, have viewed the new trailer no less than 1,000 times in one sitting — because yes, you owe it that much — there's one part of the Wonder Woman trailer you might've missed: Etta Candy. That's right. Fans are not talking enough about the inclusion of Etta (played by Lucy Davis) and I'm here to say it's a must.

In short, Etta is as much of a badass as the woman she is a sidekick to, Wonder Woman. And unlike the movie's main star, Etta is a regular gal, raised in the real world and very much a mortal. She is one of the original characters created by Wonder Woman's own creator, William Moulton Marston, and is a powerful woman in her own right. As for her background, Etta Candy teams up with Wonder Woman after assisting in the WWII war effort. She is a skilled fighter, quick-witted, intelligent, and in every way just as agile and able as Wonder Woman.

Perhaps Etta's most noticeable feature, though, is the one that has been reinterpreted time and again (often to very poor effect): her weight. She got her name because she loves to indulge her sweet tooth. Often drawn in the Wonder Woman comics as a short, plump woman, she embraces her size, and as far as the original version is concerned, doesn't give a damn about her weight.

What makes Etta so great on the page (and this is further evidenced in the Wonder Woman trailer) is that she does not feel inferior to Wonder Woman. She's seen in the trailer making a few jokes and responding positively to WW's rejection of traditional female roles. Could she be the best sidekick in the DCEU? At the very least, when it comes to having a woman fill the sidekick role in a superhero film, it's nice to see that it will be taken by a character who is different from the heroine, but just as feminist and capable.

It will be refreshing to have a female sidekick get her time in the sun outside of the usual rom-com set-up — a genre that prizes portrayals female friendship — and allow a more traditional masculine relationship in the superhero genre to get examined in a different way. Male sidekicks are allowed to be short, fat, tall, thin, wise-cracking, deadly-serious, and so forth. It's a role that gets a super feminine flourish in rom-coms, but women are hardly ever repurposed into sidekicks in the superhero genre. Wonder Woman's Etta Candy will be breaking down those barriers just by showing up. Fans may not have seen Etta's full performance yet, but something tells me it's going to be as iconic as her Amazonian BFF's.

Images: Warner Bros. Pictures/YouTube