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Posted at 2020-08-07
Books. You all read them sometimes. Some of you are even librarians. If I remember correctly, ~acdw is.
So here' a question for you geminauts: how do you imagine characters when reading books? I'll backlink all replies here. I'll know about all replies available at Spacewalk, please notify me about the rest.
Looks like I don't create completely new images for book characters. Instead, I base them on existing characters from a graphical story. I noticed this when I was reading ‘The Wheel of Time’ by Robert Jordan. The setup was kinda similar to the game ‘Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia’; the story starts in a small village, main character is kinda chosen one, etc. So, Rand al'Thor, the main hero with dark red hair, looked like Alm, a boy with green hair. Similarly, Egwene al'Vere looked like Faye because they are both girls from the same village as the main hero is and they also had some romantic plot with main hero that was later gone.
By the way, Egwene al'Vere is my favorite character in the series! She's so cool, wise, epic and, perhaps, based and red-pilled. I don't want to spoil the story for some of you who may possibly want to read the series after this post (though it's not likely) so just trust me.
Back to the images. Once I got more used to the characters (I had no choice, the series is so long that they kinda became part of me for 2.5 years), their images start to shift. Rand regained his dark red hair, got his other traits (like herons and dragons on his hands (absolutely epic)), stopped looking like an anime boy after all. Same for Egwene (though her hair color continued to be Faye's one).
Here are some pictures of the mentioned characters (links to https, images only):
However, such effect of borrowing character designs from other story does not occur when characters have clean consistent design that I'm constantly reminded of. It's not the case with most Western books (I haven't seen any illustration in the whole series beside maps, vignettes and some book covers (which are not consistent and it's hard to understand how exactly someone looks)). Japanese ranobe, on other hand, are constantly reminding you of how characters look! Book covers feature them, there are more than zero illustrations inside. Also, authors try to make them as distinct as possible. Thanks a lot, it is really appreciated.
But sometimes, when there are no illustrations, I still don't develop or borrow any image. It happens when the book is short enough or the character looks mean nothing. I mentioned some books like that in my post ‘Irrational thoughts’. Neither Raskolnikov, Youzou or, idk, Musa/Moses, had any graphical image because their looks meant nothing, only their actions did.
Irrational thoughts; an article from my gemlog
The main hero of ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’, Ivan Denisovich (duh) also had no image. I read this book two days ago. It tells about the life in the GULAGs. Not a pleasant sight (I visualised the prison buildings tho). I'd recommend this book to everyone who thinks USSR was great.
Hm, I wonder what images do heroes of my unfinished stories look like. Gotta write a new one, I guess.
