Narrative structure is defined as the structural framework that underlines the order and manner in which a narrative is presented to an audience. It is commonly used in a lot of media platform we read and watch today. Whether it is a novel, film or a radio podcast, everything has a structure that presents itself as a story to the audience.

A conventional or traditional story usually involves many important details that sets up the story. The story usually consist of characters, genre, plot and theme. All these factors contribute in to building up a story that grabs the audience’s attention. But over the years, many directors tried moving away from the normal way story telling is done, producing new ways to tell a certain story using different kinds of media. An example would be the cartoon series, South Park.

South Park:

I find South Park a very interesting cartoon series because it’s not your everyday cartoon where everything ends with “happily ever after”. In fact, South Park is far from happily ever after as some would consider this cartoon to be the “greatest modern satire”. Instead of making it a cartoon for children, South Park’s crude, violent and vulgar humour focuses on the real world issues which have been ignored by society today. I find myself thinking of what the director was trying to tell me after every episode, and true enough the episode always relates to some kind of recent events.

Currently, South Park has produced a total of 257 episodes to date, 1 movie titled “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” and it’s very own game “South Park: The Stick of Truth”. Besides that, South Park fans also generated thousands of memes based on the show.

Source: Google images

South Park is the perfect demonstration of transmedia as it uses the same content but across different media spreading different stories. What’s more amazing is the thoughts that editors go through whenever making a new episode. Every episode of South Park is made 6 days before the episode is aired, and they’ve only failed to meet the deadline once due to electrical failure. This is how the directors keep their content fresh and new, by covering recent global events.

One of the episode titled “Beast Cancer Show Ever” shows the lack of awareness of society today towards breast cancer. In the episode, it has a very symbolic representation of the character. Cartman being the cancer, and Wendy being the victim of Cartman (cancer). The episodes begins with Wendy being mocked by Cartman on her presentation of breast cancer.

In the struggle for Wendy to fight back, she approached her principle teacher for advice, coincidentally she was a victim of breast cancer too. She gave the told Wendy that cancer “does not play by the rules, and the only way to win is to fight back”. Wendy had a big fight with Cartman and eventually she won, showing that breast cancer can be defeated, but you must first fight back.

South Park demonstrates how different way of storytelling can bring different message to people. It teaches the audiences to see beyond the vulgar language and see the message they are trying to send. This is why South Park is one of my all-time favorite cartoons.