The Third-Person Narrator: The Dying Art

I’ve been watching Superfriends on MeTV Toons. It’s the show that sparked my interest in the DC Universe and why I became a DC fan, but that doesn’t matter here and I’ve gone over this enough times. I bring it up because whatever faults the show might have had (the science is totally questionable, perhaps you spotted the animation error with Batman at one point) one thing it did well was narration.

The third person narrator is a dying art. I know I’ve written about this before, but that was a long time ago and a refresher is always nice. While prose can’t get away from it, the narrator who isn’t a character in the story is gone from television and movies, video games seem to only use it to tell you the controls or in some biographical section, and even audio has fought against it. Comics seem to have abandoned the narrator altogether, or had the characters do a first person “noir” style recounting, but that always falls into one or both problems with first person as a rule:

• How do you know the stuff you weren’t there for?
• Who the heck are you talking to?

Yes, you can have Captain Kirk gives a captain’s log entry or the Phantom writing in the Chronicles, but that limits what you can tell the audience because they still shouldn’t know what the other characters are saying when they aren’t with you, if they were ever with you at all. Is that guesswork? Are you making stuff up? I’m not against this, but I do want to advocate for the advantages of third person narration and ask why storytellers outside of novels are so afraid of this method of informing the readers and viewers what’s going on.

I’m going to start with this short video from TED-Ed on YouTube, going over the three types of narration, plus another video so everybody’s coming from the same perspective.

In prose every form of narration is considered valid. Which one you use depends on the type of story you’re telling. I want to focus on the third. The next video comes from AutoCrit, going more specifically over the two (three?) types of third person narration.

If you want a deeper dive, there’s an article from AutoCrit’s website that goes into it. I think we have what we need to get into this.

In prose all is game. The point is to tell the reader everything he or she needs to know in order to follow the story. History, lore, what the characters are thinking and feeling, that sort of thing. What about other media, though?

I keep hearing that comics are a “visual medium”, as if it were more like video than prose. In truth, comics are a “hybrid medium”. There’s visual of course, but unless you’re using some kind of audio play adapting it, you’re still reading. Even then the words are on the page to read along with the characters like some kind of picture transcript. It’s a hybrid medium and we need to acknowledge this. I’ve read comics from every period of comics from the Golden Age to whatever they’re calling today’s comic age. I’ve seen narration done right and done wrong. I know I’ve discussed this in more detail, at least on the comics side, defending the use of third person narration versus having the character’s thoughts in caption boxes. This is the writer embracing the “visual” perspective and trying to use only the visual to show what’s happening and trying to be all “noir” style dramatic about narration. It doesn’t always work because of how limiting it is. Who are you talking to, how do you know the parts you aren’t there for, and as a bonus, why are you thinking that way during the moment. That discussion also defends thought balloons.

It is not silly in comics to use narration to fill in gaps for the reader to avoid “as you know” type discussions, or to give us the immediate thoughts through thought balloons, yet too many comic writers seem to think it is. So you get decompressed storytelling when the narration, done right anyway, can speed things up. Sometimes it’s better to do an establishing shot and the text version of “voiceover”, which is when the caption box should have dialog, but sometimes it’s better to have the narrator tell you where the character went to. There’s a reason Superfriends used an omniscient narrator to emulate comics, while the 70s Wonder Woman live action series would use caption boxes in the same way.

Audio is a bit trickier. One of the hazards of audio dramas, as I’ve gone over before, is that characters taking over the narration sounds clunky, as they have to tell you about the killer coming down the one-way alley, or the monster rising from the bog. On the other hand, the outsider narrator can pull you from the scene and remind you it’s not really happening if done wrong. Like with comics, the writer has to make the decision of who gets to say what. Visual media, TV and movies, are where the narrator has really vanished. Superfriends made good use of it, explaining stuff to the audience that would be weird coming from the characters, but it probably does the most immersion breaking since we see and hear them doing stuff. The 1980s Marvel cartoons would have Stan Lee setting up some situation for Spider-Man or the Hulk to deal with, introducing to the audience a villain that the hero has met before but the viewers haven’t, at least in this incarnation. Trying to find a clip of that with the Disney Junior show of a similar name dominating the results proved too difficult but here’s a similar use from Neversoft’s Spider-Man games.

Neversoft was using Smilin’ Stan to make the level overview less boring, but he could get you excited for what’s coming up and filling in info for the audience. That’s another thing the narrator can do in the right kind of story: serve as the hype man. Video games will stop the game long enough to set up lore, especially in fantasy settings, so they don’t shy away from the narrator. If anything they may be the closest outside of prose to having perfected the art of narration, which is sad to remember they also try to avoid one more often than not. I was watching Linkara’s recent Patreon-sponsored review of Metal Gear Solid and Hideo Kojima was so “afraid” of the narrator he even had the characters tell you what buttons to press on the gamepad to make things happening, confusing poor Snake. Then again, Kojima was heavily inspired by movies even if he opted for video games, so that’s easy to believe. Video games trying to be movies is a whole other discussion but I’ve gone over video games as a storytelling tool as well and that’s not super relevant to this discussion.

I like the omniscient narrators. They can add to a story when done right and I like to see them fighting to keep on, but there is a trick to using them correctly. Too many writers, especially in comics, seem to hate using them and it’s too bad. I say bring the narrator back to comics and let the characters live the story while the narrator sets it up and tells the reader what they need to know. Let the narrators narrate. It’s their job.