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.
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.
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.