What happens when you read descriptions if you can't skip over them?
It always baffled me when a movie adaptation of a book came out and people were really upset that the characters looked wrong. And I was just "... you remember what the people in books look like??". It turns out they do.
I don't.
When I read a book, I kinda retain the "feeling" of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character's adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an "uniform" they tend to wear.
I've read all 5 books of The Stormlight Archive and I couldn't tell you what Kaladin looks like. I have no visual recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or body type.
Without discussing this and understanding how processing can truly differ like that I could go a lifetime wondering how people can read fiction etc, and how is it possible that I don't get what they are getting. I wonder if some drugs might allow me to get the same out of fiction books.
Another discouraging note from school times was that whenever I tried myself to read the mandatory literature fully myself, and formed my own conclusions I got bad grades and no one understood what I was getting at or what my conclusions were about, but when I just read summaries and conclusions on the Internet it was easy to get perfect grades. Too many of those things during school which made me feel delusional/crazy. Oh well. The rant went off-topic, but I just have I guess "vivid" memories of how school affected me emotionally in terms of self esteem and confidence. I remember just having my own thoughts, conclusions punished, while not understanding others, but still having to learn and memorize those facts even when I didn't understand how they came to be.
I described it to my partner as one of those AI generated videos where the details are constantly morphing and shifting, even if the general idea remains the same - I simply can’t hold onto a single still visualization for more than a second.
So, to agree with you, I have also read all five SLA books, and I could imagine Kaladin right now, but in an amorphous, constantly shifting way, which is a bit unsettling - maybe like Pattern? :-)
Likewise. It even happens even with the people I know in detail such as family. If I try to project the image of my own son in my minds eye it is not clear and is always shifting, it's more of a feeling than a clear picture. Once, when I was a teenager, I was mugged and when at the police precinct they showed me a booklet with the common offenders in the area. After a few pages I could not remember what my mugger looked like. Always wondered how people manage to rebuild sketches of offenders not knowing as an aphantasiac it's nearly impossible.