Ask Lemmy

Details in books and written media as a list, not a series of images. Loved reading as a kid, dropped off when I spent more time doing other things, like cpmouter gaming.

The upside is that witthout a mental picture of characters any close enough visual take on the character will work for me. I also have ADHD so small details are likely forgotten and only the prominent ones that the character is defined by are going to be weird if mkssed.

For example when I heard Idris Elba was going to be cast as Roland in The Dark Tower it was a big positive because he seemed like someone that would be able to oull off the personality of the character and I was only concerned about whether they would do a good job with the missing fingers or drop it entirely as missing fingers was a big part of Roland's character for me. Yeah I know there was something involving race in the books, but that plotline was something that didn't seem to be necessary to carry over into a movie.

Of course the movie ended up being a pile of trash, but is a good example of how I focus more on how the character acts than how they look.

Same with a lot of science, swords, and other objects where I really don't have a mental image so a lot of sets work as long as they have the things or the general feel.

I don't have aphantasia and I don't particularly fancy any medium over the other, but what I often miss is sound. Music is a whole different language to either visual or conceptual as conveyed by words, whereas imagery to me feels the most direct and laziest, music can convey feelings there are neither words nor imagery for, and so often I like adaptations of written works for injecting some fitting music, and will listen to fitting music as I read books.

Time spend on video medium is like 1000x more than reading.

I rarely read books, by rarely I mean I just skim all school reading materials, and only pick up random books lying around at home (that were given out for free by the public library) to read when my electronics were broken/consfiscated by parents.

I read a lot of news and wikipedia aricles tho, those are somehow just more fun than a book.

There are some adapted works that I've seen the adaptation of, but still haven't read the source materials yet. I kinda just read the wikis to check any differences between the 2 mediums... 🤷‍♂️

Recently, I came across some interesting works of fiction that didn't have an adaptation in a video medium, so I reluctantly started reading. Recursion was a fun read with the audiobook playing in background at 1.2x speed.

When I read, I usually use the sterotypical portrayal of that character's archetype from other visual mediums to like fill in the character model and use similar scenes from visual media to paint the room and atmosphere.

I have like a "level 3" on the aphantasia scale, so like I could just barely paint the scenary.

If I do my own worldbuilding and my own story, I can sort of see the world slightly mroe clearly, like a "level 2" on the apantasia scale.

Completely. Books are only good to me if the author has a nice writing style. Those character descriptions or scene description paragraphs? I just skip them. They don't do anything for me.

On the other hand, I LOVE movies.

Itt, people that can visualise but think that not constantly visualising everything they read means they have the superpower to "feel words as concepts"