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.

very often you can google a character or actor and find dreamwidth or livejournal icons.

since when? nobody uses livejournal any more and dreamwidth has been impossible to google properly since they removed and re-added the seo bots. even if you search "[actor] dreamwidth icons" you're more likely to get results from tumblr lmao

this pearl clutching doesn't even make sense

writing fanfiction, drawing fanart, and making other fanworks are still not expressions of the actor themselves. It's absolutely possible to participate in making fanworks and showing fanworks to actors in a way that can make them uncomfortable. It is completely possible to be irresponsible about how you make and express that work. It can absolutely be frustrating for actors when they haven't signed up for that, especially since one of the rules of the internet is: if it exists, there's porn of it. That's all understandable.

And it's totally fine that you, yourself, prefer not to play LA characters often.

none of the above makes interaction with the fictional character through the production of fanart inherently a depiction of the actor that plays them.

It's different, when, say, they are making content of those actual actors. That is called Real Person Fiction, which we don't do here.

not everything that makes you uncomfortable is inherently wrong.

i just googled 'jensen ackles' out of curiosity, and not a single dreamwidth or livejournal page came up. reddit? yes. the rest of it was news sites and instagram.

also, my guy, i don't think accidentally stumbling across a contained thread on a very niche site is causing relationships to break down. it's the totally unhinged fans who can't tell the difference between jensen ackles and dean winchester, who insist on sending jensen ackles rpf of him with jared whoever or misha collins. it's the people who line up outside of hotels and disturb celebrities at dinners and in their personal lives.

also, even googling 'actor' + 'dreamwidth icons' barely turns back icons. are you stuck in 2005?

if you were truly worried about what the actor may find, you wouldn't rp at all. the icons you use won't have an impact on the actor's google search. this is all bullshit to look morally superior

if google searching icons were this easy nowadays i wouldn't have to be constantly cropping my own gd icons after hitting up the rpa thread just to find a decent pb the way i've had to for the last couple of years now

Hi, as someone who actually works on search engine stuff as part of their job, you've fundamentally misunderstood how they work just to get a gotcha in. The reason you get dreamwidth results first is because you visit dreamwidth a lot. Your search engine results are at least somewhat tailored to you

Unless Sebastian Stan is himself a dwrper he's not very likely to stumble across someone's 500 comments of Stucky smut, hth

at the risk of worsening this tangent, a lot of visual thinkers never realize word-thinking people constantly have a "voice" in their head.

neat thing: people who have an internal monologue move their larynx along with their inner "voice." reading and counting silently also create this kind of sub-vocalization. you're moving your larynx ever so slightly right now, as you read this.

You know what's way more exhausting for me? The voice I hear narrating everything I do 24/7 as if there's a third-person book about my life being read aloud in my head. People talk about "silencing your mind" so much as part of anxiety treatment but that bitch just is not shutting up.

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.