I am currently reading City of Glass and the thing is I watched the show first when I was young, which is why I got curious now to wanting to read the books, and i can’t for the life of me imagine Luke as a white guy with blue eyes, his sister Amatis is the same, they keep describing their blue eyes and how Amatis have a streak of grey in her brown hair but no for me they have brown eyes and black hair.
by foxstroll
37 Comments
I don’t really ignore the descriptions, I just don’t really pay attention. The only reason I remember that Rand Al’Thor has red hair is that I was beaten with the information a thousand times per book.
All the time, unless the author keeps bleating on about a specific trait(s) and then their description and my imagination meld .
Sometimes the author comes in with a descriptive element far too late in the game. It’s been 300 pages and I’m only now learning that this character is over 6ft tall? Wears glasses? Is a different race than I’ve imagined?
I don’t do it deliberately but physical descriptions are the least memorable aspects of characters in books for me usually
I read the ASOIAF books after watching the Game of Thrones series, so Martin’s character descriptions were essentially lost on me.
Pet peave about shows and movies. Harry Potter has GREEN eyes and MESSY BLACK hair, dammit!
And I’ll go ahead and be the uncouth person to say it. The whole race swapping thing that’s happening is annoying. I get that there’s a whole…thing going on, where people are afraid of being accused of being “racist” if they have complaints.
But when fans of the original book get upset that the people in charge of the show mess about with fundamental details and everyone acts like they’re crazy and horrible people to care about details like that, it’s really annoying.
I get that I sperg out about details like that. I’m not a social person and I love my books. People like me buying those books are what made them popular enough to be a money maker in the film industry. Just…don’t be a **** to the fans you expect to part with their hard-earned money and we’ll get alone fine.
I don’t ignore, I just forget 💀
Unless the book hammers a description into my head and starts immediately, I’ll often make up a mental image on the fly and stick with it. If there’s a popular adaption I’ll often go with that even if I’ve read the book first.
A really weird example is Marissa Coulter in HDM. She’s described as dark haired originally, and then they cast the very golden blonde Nicole Kidman for the movie. Phillip Pullman liked her so much she was canonically changed to blonde in the books too.
I try to ignore race at least if I already got a certain picture of the mf. In the James Patterson Alex cross books I imagined his partner as a curly haired Mexican dude in snazzy clothes from the 70’s and it worked like a mf. Ruined it for me when he actually was just another black dude.
I love for the author of my book to describe the character it’s one of the best things I like reading in the book I do not ignore and make up my own way that having to lose. Once they describe the character I imagine what they look like.
The very basics penetrate; gender, age and race, often basic style of dress and hair colour, but any detail beyond this is 50:50 at best and mainly based on how I feel the character should look from their speech and actions.
Never unless the book in question is the cured child because that thing is a fucking train wreck fanfic and is thus not even Canon anyway no matter what bull shit Rowling tries to sell you.
Funny story: when my daughter was little, we started listening to the Ramona Quimby books on audiobook. We’ve probably listened to that series a dozen times over. At some point, well into our repeat journey through these books, she a saw book cover with an artist’s rendition of Ramona on the cover and she was suprised it didn’t match how she always pictured Ramona in her head. I asked her how she pictured Ramona and she said “I picture her as [insert description of the little girl she imagined], but you know, when I was littler, I used to picture all the characters as *different colored crayons*.” WHAT. She was fully serious. 🤣
Yup, all the time. I tend to pay attention to broad things like age and any features that make them stand out and try to imagine the character to fit that. But I’ll definitely ignore hair or eye color or other things that don’t usually matter. And if it does matter later it’s not a big deal because it’s just my imagination so I can adjust it as needed.
Right now I’m reading a book where the main character was described as mid-40s so I started picturing a certain actor and like two chapters later find out the character is blonde but the dude I’m picturing has dark hair. No harm no foul—still gonna picture my dark haired actor.
Author: “Despite the fact the book is 100 pages from the end, I thought I’d let you know that kyle is 6 foot 7 has platinum blonde hair and is white!”
Me: “kyle is a 6 foot tall king with black hair and olive skin. fuck you”
I’ve done this with covers. One of my favorite childhood trilogies had nice, obscure covers that gave little indication of anyone’s appearance. A later edition had the main characters on the cover and they bore no resemblance to the ones I had in my head. They also didn’t reflect what I’d read in the book imo.
Then you have those books that get a tv series or movie and then replace the characters on their covers with the actors and throw the whole vibe off.
This is the main reason I don’t like to watch shows and movies based on books, I always picture the actors, or if I read the books first I think the actors are wrong because they look nothing like what I pictured and know them as
Yes, to me Lyra has black hair not blonde. When rereading I actively dislike the bit at the start that describes her blonde hair. Even to the point that I’m convinced the crappy movie got it totally wrong when they gave her blonde hair.
Sometimes I like imagining what a character looks like, but at the same time I can get distracted by my brain rethinking and reprocessing what they look like. So sometimes having seen a show/movie based on a book and then reading said book, my brain goes “that’s what x character looks like” and it allows me to focus on the story without getting distracted trying to picture what x character looks like.
This is a little random but it’s so hard for me to picture Adam Parrish from TRC books as blonde. He reads as brunette to me and I don’t even have a good explanation as to why lol. So when I’m reading Pynch fanfic you best believe it’s always brunette Adam by default.
I feel like that’s putting ketchup on an expensive steak. The author created that character for me to enjoy and they have a purpose in how they prepared it. I want to enjoy that character as intended
Hermione Granger will always be Gretchen Grundler from the 90s cartoon RECESS in my mind.
I don’t intentionally ignore the author’s descriptions, but if they give a description too late I’m not gonna stress over making my mental imagine align.
IS it YOUR imagination when you’re picturing the character from a show?
The first time I read Harry Potter as a kid I must’ve glazed over McGonagall’s description. For some reason, my brain pictured her with blonde hair in a low bun, wearing glasses and a lab coat (why a lab coat??!!). That was my McGonagall.
Even on subsequent reads, when I did notice she was described differently, that’s the image I had and I stuck with it. It’s how I picture her to this day. The brain does what the brain does.
I don’t really imagine characters’ appearances when reading, they’re just sort of vague abstract clusters of personality.
Otherwise, if there’s a popular movie or tv depiction that I like then I’ll usually just imagine them looking like that.
Currently in a weird situation with this. I’m reading a book and one of the main characters is described, in every single way, physically and behaviourally, identically to my ex. Things didn’t go well with my ex and I’d really rather not imagine her for the entirety of this fantasy epic, but every new detail is just…a new feature which is identical to her.
The most bizarre part is that my ex is Chinese, and the character in question is pretty certainly meant to be white (it being based on medieval Europe and all). But the author never mentions race so it literally never gets contradicted.
YEs, lol usually if I’m reading a sappy romance, I feel like it doesn’t matter to the story what either protagonist looks like, so Ill put in my own placeholders in my mind. Like me and Pedro Pascal lol
Many time
As someone with low grade aphantasia, it wouldn’t matter because I don’t really “see” the character anyways.
All the time. Especially romance novels.
When i was 13, no one at Hogwarts looked like I imagined but everyone in Middle Earth save the orcs did.
I’m still amazed my English teacher let me read HP1 and Hobbit back to back.
I do not have the ability to “picture things in my mind” which a blessing and a curse. I’m a terrible artist because I have no idea what things look like when I look at a canvas. Like I know what a windmill looks like. I can describe two kinds: the rickety old fashioned one on the farm and the fancy white ones as the windmill farm. But if you were to describe a windmill to me in a story? Nope, cant picture it. I do not see things in my “minds eye.” That baffles me. So to me the description of things and people is less important that how they interact. Now if the windmill and it’s construction become integral to how it’s used, then I have to go back a reread it and figure it out. Character descriptions are similar. Unless how someone looks is integral to how they fit into the story (ex: the gunslinger from the dark tower) then I don’t actually care. I am an exception to the rule. I’m also a writer, I’m sure you see where my difficulties are. Often in creative writing they say “show don’t tell” and I have no idea what that means. As an adult I understand why I don’t get it. The color of the walls in a house mean nothing to me unless we come back to it and it becomes important to the characters actions somehow.
I picture Amos from The Expanse show when reading the book. He is described differently in the books
I’ve read David Eddings’ Belgariad and Mallorean series many, many times over the years, starting from a young age. I did not notice until my last read through that Durnik, the blacksmith, was not, in fact, a black smith. But 25 years of picturing someone like D.B. Woodside in the role means I keep that as my head canon. Anything else feels *wrong*.
in Hunger Games, lots of people turned Rue into a white girl
I do, often. It depends on how good the character description is, but quite often, I have a picture in my head of how the character looks as I’m reading, and when they try to alter that description, I just ignore it. Read a middle eastern inspired fantasy recently where a key element of a main character was that he had a lot of tattoos. I either didn’t see them mention it the first time, or it wasn’t mentioned, but about a hundred pages in these tattoos I didn’t know about suddenly became very important, so in my head they were magic tattoos that only appeared when it was important 😂