InsaneJournal

Okay, I'm going about this two ways. First, just in general, I'm really not a fan of using models as PBs. I just get really frustrated by the lack of anything but :| faces and the weird hairstyles and makeup, and weird runway outfits, and for a purely selfish reason, it's damned hard to find good-quality, non-crazy (hair/makeup/outfit) pictures for things like graphics.

And then on the other side, I'm going to do my least favorite PBs that I've used. I'm not going to cast stones on anyone else's PB choices, just my own. And it's also not going to be any kind of "in general, I hate [person] because they are ~sooooooooooooooo~ overused" or anything, because I believe that in the right setting, any PB is possible to be used (hell, I've used a Suicide Girl as a PB, and it worked; just not in an HP game!), even the models I dislike so much.


Josh Groban (Alexander Taylor)
This pains me, because my love for Josh Groban is very deep and will never die. Back when I first started journal RP and was still getting used to that whole "using a real person to represent your character" thing, I decided that I really wanted to use Josh Groban. So I did ... as a 15-year-old. And the thing is ... much as I love Josh, he's just not a CW!teenager. He really didn't look like he could pull off 15. My more-appropriately-age-obsessed now!self kind of cringes at the thought of using him as a student nowadays.


Kate Bosworth (Dona Blanchard)
This entire character was just ... a disaster. Story time: a friend (who no longer is) convinced me to join a FF-mashup game, and the first character I picked up was an older sister to her and chthonian's twins. She basically walked me through picking the character's name from a list of ball players from FFX(?) and helped me pick a PB. That character, I had no qualms about the PB. It was the next character that she (and another friend who wasn't even in the game) helped me with. I wanted another character, someone entirely different from Shaami, a self-absorbed bitchy character. But my knowledge of FF is pretty much entirely limited to FF7 and FF8, since those are the only ones I've played, and that just didn't fit with Tifa/Aeris(th)/Yuffie/Quistis/Selphie/Rinoa. Plus, I think all six of those girls were probably taken. xD So I returned to the same site to find a name of a random FF character. Hopefully a relatively low-canon one (the equivalent of HP characters like Sally-Anne Perks: a name and not much else) so that my lack of knowledge wouldn't hurt me. I kept grabbing random names and running them by the two friends, and the non-game friend liked Dona and suggested I "steal" one of her character's surnames (Blanchard; since the Dona on the site didn't have a surname). She also suggested Kate Bosworth as a PB, because she has a really good bitch-face in photoshoots. (See above.) The no-longer-friend in the game agreed that KBosworth would be good. WELL. What I didn't know at the time, but what became obvious to me in the time I was in the game ... is that the Dona character from whichever FF game I pulled her name from ... was black. And eeeeeeveryone in the game knew that except me, apparently. I was horrified when I found out, and since then, I just plain don't pick up a character if I can't reasonably determine their ethnicity (and I try to match the PB's ethnicity as close as possible to the character's; I specifically made Audrey's mom's family from the Dominican Republic because Michelle Rodriguez is of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent, according to imdb). I also really wish the mods had said something to me when I applied. Changing the PB would have been no problem at all. :/


Aubrey Dollar (Misty Hooper)
Okay, when Amortentia was on GJ, I used Taylor Swift. But when the game made the move to IJ, we were given permission to change our PBs without question/consequence. Much as I loved Taylor, all my icons of her were too :D for Misty, who was more :/ than anything else because she had a giant stick up her arse. So I decided to change her PB to Aubrey Dollar (who I'd used as her mum [Natalie McDonald] at Euphoria Lane, lol), with icons from Point Pleasant. idk how old she was supposed to be in PP, but she was 25 when the show was on, and even though she had somewhat better facial expressions for Misty, she just ... she didn't jive with the character anymore. She wasn't Misty anymore.