Character spotlight: Starstruck (Patreon)

One of the many things we want to do with the Kinoko Fan Club here on Patreon is talk more about our lesser-known characters. We have well over 100 characters, with more being added on a regular basis, but how many of them do you actually know? Even the ones you do know, how much do you know about them?

As a member of the Kinoko Fan Club, you'll be the first to discover more about all the characters we haven't got around to sharing full biographies for yet - and you'll also get to find out more about established characters, too, far beyond the scope of their official biographies.

Today, we'd like to share the first such character: Starstruck!

Like Kinoko and Neemal, Starstruck is one of the kuparkukes of the Enoki tribe. She resides with the others in the Enoki village, where she's a good friend of Kinoko, although she's shyer and more introverted than most. Her fur is purple - which according to kuparkuke lore tends to suggest hidden layers to one's personality, for purple kuparkukes are naturally quite guarded. She's notable for her fashion sense and her multicoloured hair and accessories.

Starstruck is distinctive for her deafness, but she doesn't let it define her. She's been deaf for most of her life. It came on over the course of her childhood, with her hearing gradually deteriorating. At this point she can no longer hear at all, but she's taught herself to lip read. Not only that, but she and her close friends have even devised a simple form of sign language, so as to not exclude her from conversations. It's not as comprehensive as, say, American Sign Language, but it's a pretty clever system by kuparkuke standards.

Despite being deaf, Starstruck's ultimate passion in life is for music. Though she can unfortunately no longer hear it, she remembers it fondly, and she can still feel the beats and the soothing rhythms. She loves to sing, and the way that singing feels, but she's incredibly shy about singing in the company of others, because she's unsure how she sounds. She's afraid of being ridiculed for it. She likes to go off into the forest to sing, where she knows no one will hear, but ultimately she'd love to build up the confidence to be able to sing for the tribe.

Even though she's quite shy and introverted in the company of other kuparkukes, she's perfectly comfortable around animals. She adores animals of every kind, even insects, and likes to ensure that no harm comes to them. She regularly sings for her small audience of animal friends, being on friendly enough terms with them that they all come to gather when they hear her. She's a vegetarian, and is forever trying to persuade the tribe's chefs like Champignon and Scaber to try cooking a wider variety of meat-free dishes for the whole tribe to enjoy. She hopes that by doing so she might be able to convert a few more vegetarians.

And that, Kinoko fans, is Starstruck! She unfortunately isn't as well-developed as, say, Kinoko or Neemal, but then I suppose the whole point of these Kinoko Fan Club posts is to show off some of our work that isn't quite ready to share with the general public.

We'll definitely be sharing lots more like this over the coming weeks and months, so we hope you find them interesting. If you're interested in finding out about anything specific, make sure you let us know, whether it's a particular character, a planet, a species or something else. We're open to doing spotlights like this on pretty much anything - it would be good to finally have an excuse to get some of this stuff out of our heads and written down!