The Fall of A Starchaser

The Fall of A Starchaser

In a world of the eye-less, the one with eyes was hunted. They were chasing after me, for I was the mutated one.

With shimmering light from bioluminescent algae, I saw my aberrations: Hands and fingers instead of fins and flippers, skin and hairs instead of scales and barbs, long lost features of the ancestors were preserved. Features not for living in an aquatic labyrinth, features for living in a world I've only dreamed about.

Dreams were wild but life was tight, confused by my anomalies, I could only hide. Lived in isolation, far from my pack. But in the end I was found, The first touch on me made the tribe leader flinch, "Cull the unnatural one!" The order was given, and the tribe started the hunt. I ran.

I remembered the old tale: "We were once cosmic explorers, the flight was daring, and machines went wrong, explorers crashed into a labyrinth of caves, where water carried nutrients flowed over, while darkness and nothingness filled the rest. Generation after generation, hopes of escape were lost, and evolution seeped in. In forever darkness, no more need for clear eyes, in endless nutrient fluids, no more need for dexterous hands. Senses shifted and bodies morphed, another lifeform was born. And since then no one has ever tried to find the stars."

I ran away from my tribe to find the stars. A fast runner, but a clumsy swimmer, I was surrounded and a fight was put up. Survived but wounded, I staggered upwards.

Up and up, until an opening was found, Starlight poured down, ten thousand times brighter than the algae that glowed. Photonic shards stabbed my eyes, gushing blood blurred my vision and consciousness began to fade, My aberrations granted me the wildest dreams, but it had been all too long to be a starchaser again.

800x1128px, GIF

(original pixel art painting size 2100x2960px, together with above poem/verse, created for The Tickle Lit - Issue 3 (Aberration), contract address: KT1LA5NeudWHSKXToy5WZkSmMPE3TT1iey3d, token id: 2)

Poppel, 2022-10

Additional statement about the work

The main inspiration for The Fall of A Starchaser came from a sci-fi story I read when I was in high school: A group of human space explorers crash landed in a labyrinth in deep space (which turned out to be the intestine of a gigantic creature). Generation after generation the humans evolved into a new species that were adapted to living in total darkness and with free-flowing digested organic matter (the creature’s gut content) which they fed on. Newborns with human features such as eyes, teeth or nails were treated as a threat and instantly culled upon birth.

Gruesome cosmic horror apart, we modern humans today are also evolving into something at a speed so fast that we can almost not see the change. In the eyes of our ancestors a few centuries ago, we are probably the new homo sapiens manusmachina: a new sapiens species with an external cybernetic organ para-permanently attached in the hands which causes information overload. Everyday the cybernetic organ provides entertainment and solutions, but it also makes us exposed to so much information which we can’t really react to, thus breaking the primal stimulus-response loop. It deprives us of the ability to stay idle. Nobody knows where this will lead us to, what impact it will make on us in the long term, besides the often ruined upper spine.

So maybe we can say a new aberration is in the making…

Process-wise, this work was hand-drawn in pixel art illustration tool Aseprite plus post-processing. It's quite large in size when compared to average pixel art works seen online, and it was done by brushing rather than line-drawing. What I tried to do here was to break common cliché of pixel art, I want to show that pixel art does not have to be on a small canvas size of 200x200px, and it surely does not have to have that "cute and blocky" look in side-view or top-down perspective which often makes it associated with retro video games (I love games though!).

Poppel, 2022-12