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Obviously when I'm partaking of a visual medium, such as film or comics, I see the actual image of it. But when I'm reading narrative text, I form my own visualizations. This is a complex enough process for original fiction, but it's got even more layers when I read fanfic.
I do get visualizations from text, but I don't always get visualizations of all scenes. Writing is a much more sensory and visceral process than reading. The thing I want to focus on here, though, is most specifically the way that characters look to me when I read, not the way that scenes play out.
First off: Characters look different in each fic. Every fic has a slight variation on the way the character is described, not just in the features the author focuses on and the words they use, but also in the way the character moves, talks, acts, thinks, feels. None of the fic characters look exactly like the canon character, regardless of whether canon is visual or text. Each story is separate and unique, and so each character is separate and unique, even though similar. It's like fanart in that sense.
Second: My visualizations are an odd in-between of live action and drawing. This is true for everything, whether it's original fiction, fanfic of a textual canon, fanfic of a drawn (animation, comic) canon, or fanfic of a live action filmed canon. I used to draw a lot, when I was a teenager, and even though I've almost totally dropped that form of expression, there's still this desire I have to be able to draw really well, well enough to get the images in my head out into the world in straight visual format, rather than having to translate them all into words. I've drawn enough that I have my own style, my own look, to my drawings. And the pictures I see when I read fiction are a platonic ideal of that style, far better than it's ever been done by me, yet also somehow like live action, 3D, moving, but all blurry and shiny and perfecter than real life ever looks. If I'm reading fanfic for something with a drawn canon (ElfQuest, Revolutionary Girl Utena, etc) the images also incorporate the style of the original. It's really hard to explain how something can be both real-life, detailed, 3D, and yet have that stylized cartoony look, but in my head it can. The images shift and sway along a continuum between the two extremes, from moment to moment becoming solider or flatter, but they never hit either full extreme, always hover as some combo in the middle. Fanfic for a live action visual canon tends to be closer to the original, but still polished and rubbed smooth, filed down and picked over and made more stylized.
Third: I use the version of canon I'm most familiar with and do my own manips on it, rather than fully absorbing minor alterations canon has shown me. This applies to things like age regression (flashbacks to younger versions), especially when I had already read lots of fic before any of that was shown in canon. If I'm reading fic about small child or teenage Sam and Dean, for example, they don't look like the kid actors that have been used in the show. They also don't look like teenage Jared and Jensen did. In fact, high school AU Jared and Jensen characters don't look like actual teenage Jared and Jensen did. I think small child Lex and Clark look more like the versions from the pilot, though not exactly the same. There's nothing I can do about this, no intellectual process. It's all automatic when I read. (Although I think the RPF thing does have to do with my desire to separate out RPF fantasy from actual reality, treating the characters as characters and not as real people. It doesn't matter what the real people used to look like in the past before I knew about them, the younger characters look like what I know and like now, just.... younger. I suppose this would be different if I'd been following them since they were younger, and had formed those images of them firmer in my mind at that point.) This also applies to the way characters from drawn canons look when there have been multiple artists interpreting them. Whichever interpretation I'm most familiar with, whichever one, through being first or through being most, has formed the greatest part of my emotional attachments, wins. Although sometimes there are multiple sources that are used in forming the internal image, a combining of styles and looks from various artists.
Fourth: On that note, I am also very firm about separating each character as an individual from other characters who look similar for extra-textual reasons. As in, characters from other stories who are played by the same actor or drawn by the same artist. So, in my head, Jared and Sam look less alike than they do on film, Dean and Alec look less alike than they do on film, various versions of Sandra's characters look less alike than they do on paper. (And my own internal separation of them trumps authorial claims that they look identical, in crossovers. Similar yes, identical no.)
What do you see, or not see, when you read fanfic? Does it vary based on whether canon is textual or visual, drawn or live action? Is it affected by alternate canon versions of characters, or similarities between characters in various canons? Is it affected by your real-life vision? Is it affected by your experience as a writer, or artist, or vidder? There's more I could say here (I could probably go on for hours if I got into lots of specifics about various characters and stories), maybe comments will pull it out of me.
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