Can you go back to picturing the characters in your head the way you did before you saw the movie? I always try and sometimes succeed. Depends on the pervasiveness of the film. I doubt I’ll read Harry Potter again, but if I do my head will probably be filled with the actors’ faces.
The only example I can think of is Hermione, and I found it quite easy to change. I think this is odd, since I found hyperbole, a word I mispronounced for similar reasons, much harder to change. Her-me-own sounds wrong to me, but “hyperbowl” still sounds right.
Though this might be because I think Hermione is just a really pretty name, and her-me-own is not. I don’t know, because, like I said, I haven’t encountered this before. I only hear from the authors when they get movie deals and that sort of thing, and that doesn’t seem to happen a lot with the stories that use oddly spelled names.
I guess I’ve just outed myself as not being a Game of Thrones fan. Nothing I’ve heard about it has made me want to watch or read them. I like my medieval fantasy to be heroic.
I’m with you on this. But it’s overridden by my pedantry. See example below.
I checked Tolkien’s notes on pronunciation to make sure I didn’t get into any bad habits as I read LotR for the first time.
Vermicious Knids.
The San Xavier Mission betrween Tucson and Nogales is pronounces with an H for the X, but otherwise, not in Spanish. / ha-VEER /.
I recall reading a novel a couple years ago in which 2/3 of the way through the book, a character in the dialog corrected someone who pronounced his name wrong, so I had to shift gears then and think his name the new way through the rest of the book.
On a somewhat unrelated note:
I must confess I am allergic to books with gooblygook character names, especially when the characters are not described fully early on. I find I have difficulty immediately creating a meaningful mental picture of the characters, and get a little lost keeping up when the character reappears.
To give an example - in a book with standard English names it is easy to create a mental picture of characters named Timmy or Sally vs Doris or Herbert vs Biff or Wally. Each one is easy to pick out in terms of age, gender, or other characteristics. Whereas - Brma, Creideiki, F’ruthian, g’Kek, Gl’kahesh…um, idunno.
Or a guy named Remus Lupin being a werewolf?
Or Fenrir Greyback.
Or a guy named Sirius Black whose animal form turns out to be a black dog. Who’da seen that coming?