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How characters are described vs how the appear in your head.


ChetLee

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Atium I always picture as a black beed even though it is clearly described as silvery, I can never seem to mentally agree on the size of Nightblood, and all shard blades look like they come out of final fantasy 10. 

Edited by ChetLee
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On 10/24/2018 at 9:14 AM, Child of Hodor said:

I had a hard time accepting that Kelsier had blonde hair. 

 

Same. I think that's not far off though (apart form the red hair). He reminds me of a Final Fantasy X character, Wakka, who has red hair but is otherwise based on Pacific Islanders and the english voice actor does a Hawaiian accent for him. Like Wakka, Rock is very good natured and jovial, but also very casually racist. "Air-sick lowlander" 

I know Brandon has played FFX and said it was probably his favorite gaming experience. He's also said the naming conventions of the Horneaters is based on Polynesian names.

interestingly my mental picture of Rock actually comes from a final fantasy game, but a different one.  for some reason in my head he looks like a taller version of Reddas from FFXII.  complete with those ludicrous muttonchops

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Nightblood actually seems androgynous.

Lift uses "she" to refer to the sword near the end of Oathbringer:

Quote

I knew I liked you, a voice said in Lift’s mind.
The sword. So it was a spren? “You almost ate him,” Lift said. “You almost starvin’ ate me!”
Oh, I wouldn’t do that, the voice said. She seemed completely baffled, voice growing slow, like she was drowsy. But … maybe I was just really, really hungry.…
Well, Lift supposed she couldn’t blame someone for that.

Sanderson, Brandon. Oathbringer: Book Three of the Stormlight Archive (p. 1140). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition. 

I don't think the "she" refers to Lift, so she must be interpreting Nightblood's voice to be female.

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4 hours ago, StormblessedSurvivor said:

What I meant is that I don't visualize or see what's happening, I just think of it-kind of just thinking the story.

I'm the complete opposite:D I see the book crisp and clear. It's better than movies most of the time! (Especially because get to decide what everything looks like!) Although when reading graphic novels i tend to think it instead of visualize it....

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Hoid and Taravangian are 5ft tall

Zane is a Greninja the pokemon

Prof is Oscar and Tia is Pam from the Office. It got weird to imagine them together when I realized they were a couple

Galladon is Morgan Freeman

Raoden is Brandon Routh

Steris is Angela from the Office 

Atium is a light blue metal for some reason

Kelsier and Hoid are identical. It made their fight scene in Secret Hostory a little confusing 

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On 10/17/2018 at 11:16 PM, RShara said:

One very common misvisualization is that the Alethi are Caucasian, when they are actually very dark skinned, with epicanthic folds, and are closest to a Arabic/Asian/Indian mix. I personally have a hard time visualizing people, so I pay really close attention to descriptions :D

Wait, alethi aren't Caucasian!?!?!  Dang, I really need to pay more attention to character description.

Also, Kelsier has always been brown-headed.

I agree with the inquisitors being 9 feet tall thing.

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4 hours ago, Kaladin78 said:

Wait, alethi aren't Caucasian!?!?!  Dang, I really need to pay more attention to character description.

Also, Kelsier has always been brown-headed.

I agree with the inquisitors being 9 feet tall thing.

A mix of various Asian/Middle Eastern ethnicities. They have dark skin and epicanthic folds.

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On 10/26/2018 at 8:10 AM, The Grumpy Elantrian said:

I always tend to imagine atium shadows as faint blue images rather than simple translucent copies (no idea why, I guess my mind thought 'hey it's magic lets make it blue').

Woah, thought I was the only one. That was exactly how I saw it!

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A couple from me (mostly about characters' hair, for some reason):

I've always pictured Straff as having a short beard from his earliest appearances in Final Empire, despite the text stating he'd only grown his beard recently in WoA and that they are, in fact, unfashionable for aristocratic men ("I set the fashion now, boy!"). In a similar vein, I can't help but picture Marsh as bald even before he has to shave his head to impersonate an obligator.

Hrathen I've always imagined as an older man with mostly grey hair, even though per Elantris he's only in his early forties and his hair is still a pretty solid black. I also tend to picture the dakhor as having more extensive body modifications, including bony armored plates and talons, than the book or Word of Brandon indicates they have.

Susebron I always want to picture as bald, even though he's supposed to be dark-haired.

And when I first read Mistborn I kept wanting to picture the Inquisitors as sort of steampunky-cyborgs, with more elaborate mechanical prosthetics besides just spikes (I think the fact that I'd just recently watched Avatar the Last Airbender for the first time and was getting my wires crossed with Combustion Man*, who's a bit like an Inquisitor in that he's a creepy, physically imposing powerhouse who pursues the heroes to kill them on behalf of an evil empire, may have been the problem). Fortunately, reading Hero of Ages and getting a good idea of how hemalurgy actually works cured me of this one.

*In a similar vein, my mental image of the Lord Ruler looks very similar to Avatar's big bad, Fire Lord Ozai, except clean shaven and in different clothes. Of course, Ozai already looks fairly close to how TLR is described - they're both tall, powerfully built, relatively youthful-looking evil overlords with pale skin and long black hair - so in this case it's less of an issue.

Edited by MasterGhandalf
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I can picture most of them correctly, I think, even the appearance of the Alethi and other Rosharan ethnicities, but for the life of me, it is a SERIOUS CHALLENGE to not picture Elhokar as being blond-haired. I don't know why, but I've always been picturing him as blond, and part of my brain rejects whenever I tell myself he has black hair like all the other Alethi. I am trying to think of other examples I may have thought of incorrectly...

Oh, yeah. Just remembered. An exception to my Roshar races claim. My problem with listeners/singers. I've always thought of them as having red-and-black marbled skin, to the point that it's hard to picture them as anything else such as the also common red-and-white marbled, even though last we saw, Venli still has a red-and-white skinned appearance. It's difficult for me to imagine her as having the white skin with red swirls that Envoyform gives her, because I think of all of the singers as having the same basic blend of red-and-black.

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