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Cyd Sherman AKA Codex AKA My Narrative Crush

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Met Cyd Sherman AKA Codex, the Priest for the Knights of Good and my favorite narrator. That may be the nerdiest sentence I have ever typed, but I'm pretty okay with it.  Cyd is the narrator of The Guild, a web series that ran from 2007 through 2013 that followed an online gaming guild through their real life and online adventures. I started watching it in I think late middle school or early high school, and Cyd and her vlogs have weirdly enough stuck with me over the years.

Why you ask? 

Honestly, if you'd asked me why I liked Cyd so much a few years ago, I probably would've told you I had a crush on her (and on her actress Felicia Day but that's a whole other story). She's attractive. She's nerdy. She's kinda shy and awkward. She's not a manic pixie dream girl; she's a real person. However, this post isn't about why I like Cyd as a character, it's about why I like her as a narrator (though, many of the reasons I like her as a character overlap with the reasons I like her as a narrator). 


Each episode of The Guild kicks off with Cyd vlogging from her bedroom, usually about something that's about to happen in that episode and/or what happened in the last episode. What she chooses to and not to tell us as the audience changes our perception of the story. It frames who we like and who we don't like. What we know and what we don't know. Of course, every narrator does this more or less. So why is a vlog from someone in their pjs interesting? Because it's real. I like Cyd as a narrator because she feels authentic. 

She reminds me a lot of myself at times. Now, I've never been super into MMORPGs, but when I first started watching The Guild, I was a giant nerd with no friends. I was awkward and shy. I didn't know how to talk to people. I didn't know how to exist IRL. The Guild helped me to navigate the offline world. Specifically, Cyd helped me navigate outside the computer and video games.

In her vlogs, Cyd never pretended to be anyone who she wasn't. She saved that for her in-game persona, which I'll get to in a moment. Everything she said, and I may be repeating myself here a bit, felt authentic. She wasn't trying to impress anyone in her narration. She didn't purposefully lie to the audience, but she also didn't report the story to us in a clinically detached manner. She just told the story as she knew it even when it wasn't positive. 


As I mentioned before, Cyd has an alternate online persona. Her online character, Codex, is a lot stronger of a person in a sense. She's out going and sexual. She stands up for herself and just is generally a force to be reckoned with. We don't really see this persona come through in Cyd's narrating though. In fact, in her vlogs are the only place Cyd seems to reveal her true self. See the gif off to the side for example. Everyone else sees Cyd's facade, but we, as the audience, get the inside scoop. We get to meet the real Cyd, the one she hides behind a computer screen. 

 So why is Cyd one of my all-time favorite narrators? It's cause she's honest. That honesty allows me to connect with her to this day even though I'm not a preteen watching her after my bedtime. 

 I find in most television and online shows, I get irritated with the narrator. They always feel so fake (looking at you Ted Mosby). Yet, The Guild was different. Too bad the show isn't still on the air. I would love to binge watch some new episodes. In fact, I may just binge watch it this weekend to reacquaint myself with the subtleties of Codex's narrating. 

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