Emoticons

I really don't like the graphic emoticons or even unicode emoticons. It looks way better as just ascii text. The problem is the overwhelming majority of programs automatically translate anything that could be an emoticon over to either unicode or some shitty graphic. It's really upsetting me. Even starcaft 2 does it as of this month so I have to go back to Brood War. And that's fine, but it's just taking over everything in scenarios where I don't have good options. I spent 3 hours trying to get my phone to leave the ascii alone, but it won't do it so my options are to write my own messaging application or go back to an old brick phone. I just don't get why devs want to make the decision to translate my text into something else without my concent! It's unacceptable!

I really like it when forum software replace parts of code with emoticons, like this:
int smaller_than_3(int i)
{
return i ♡;
}
(instead of <3)