i always assumed people who had strong preferences about this just didn't enjoy visualizing it in a who framed roger rabbit way, which i found pretty understandable/harmless, but this and ayrt is so weird lol

like how do you watch tv/movies...how are you somehow not thinking about actors when animated characters are also voiced by actors who are real people

that has nothing to do with how they look and everything to do with how they act, this argument still falls apart on that front

very chronically online north american of you tbh

also that's his face??????

can't you just.
picture both characters in the thread as real people. the drawn medium isn't like… diegetic unless they're literally playing from Looney Tunes.

it happens everywhere, honestly. I've done rp everywhere from mmos to fully text-based games where your image of the character comes from a physical description, and there will always be someone who accidentally or purposefully substitutes your actual description of your character for the image they've got in their head

dda, and i wouldn't really call this pref a hangup. i think some people are just more visual in their thinking/imagining styles than others.

rp is fun for me because it gives me somewhere to point my never-shuts-up internal monologue. i can knock out multi-paragraph tags faster than a lot of other rpers because i think mainly in words with the occasional supplemental picture.
my ability to form mental images is, however, somewhere around a high-school art student's life drawing skills, and I can't retain enough visual information from an icon for it to have a huge impact. so i end up with no medium divide issue since *everything* in my mental picture is super out-of-focus and thus malleable. this doesn't mean i have more or a better imagination. it's more that my mind's eye is nearsighted as fuck and the descriptive video narrator in my mental "ear" is a pretentious, wordy asshole.

gonna hazard to guess the people with vivid enough visual recall of someone else's little 100x100 square that they can mentally cut and paste it into a bigger image with *their* 100x100 square and make them interact as if they've got an animation AND film studio in their head have prettier journals and more/nicer icons than me. i'm glad they're around, even if they don't rp with me since they're probably who i'm commissioning art and/or icons from.

dda we keep going around in a loop because people are assuming things that aren't being said.

the common message alongside "LA icons are weird" in this thread has been "playing real people is weird and I don't like it" to which folks are responding "we are not playing real people, and it concerns me that you can't keep an ic/ooc divide between that."

It stops being about preference when the 'preference' is about a thing that isn't actually happening. It can absolutely be a preference to play with only animation icons. it can be a preference to play with no icons at all!

but in this thread, the common sentiment behind LA icons being weird is this insistence that playing a live-acted character is the same as playing a real person. It is not.

Having a preference is ok. Accusing the people who don't share your preference of being people who are disrespecting the rights of real people is gonna make people worried that you (the you that feels that way, not you airt) don't have a clear ic/ooc divide.

To use your example: wanting to pour milk before cereal? OK. Wanting to pour it after cereal? OK. Thinking either is weird? OK. Thinking the people who pour milk before the cereal are disrespecting the cow is gonna make people think you are really, really off base about the way you're thinking about this.

yeah i too am very visual and it's literally never been an issue to me because like you said, i don't picture the characters as being exactly the way they look in their icons. i just picture them both as being people.

It has been said a million times by now but let's try again even simpler since we keep seeming to miss the point.

Having a preference: OK! No one is complaining about this! Literally no one!

Saying you have a preference because the things that ARENT your preference are weird and icky: Child behavior, a douche move, the thing people are ACTUALLY complaining about OP saying in this thread