The Uncanny Radiance of tinysoul’s Blessed and Cursed Creatures

By Kieran Press-Reynolds

tinysoul’s world is a freaky laboratory of experiments gone wrong: priestly hamsters, sharks with breasts, dinosaurs clomping in shiny blue stilettos, cats wispily drifting out of genie bottles. It’s a mutant safari of squirrels who deal poker cards, dachshunds with machine guns strapped to their backs, even a slow-waddling duck with a USB flash drive for a face. This is “blursed memes” and brainrot humor as high art: familiar icons and animals digitally deformed to look foreign and fantastical. 

The pseudonymous British programmer began creating these cyber oddities for an upcoming video game. He’s planning to release Tiny Soul, a 2D battle-simulator game in the vein of Pokemon, as a sandbox beta version later this year. But in the meantime, he’s amassed a cult following by posting drafts of his creatures, often in the form of frantic-movement GIFs. A slew of internet celebrities—the video essayist Hbomberguy, the VTuber Ironmouse, the creator of the horror game Siren Head—have already reached out and co-signed his work.

His most popular piece to date shows an upside-down tomato walking on its calyx, as if its root is arduously carrying itself. The post racked up over five million views on X, with fans creating parody websites like “Walking Tomato,” where they superimposed it striding across the world. Devised in September, the tomato was inspired by a German marketing campaign that had fruit and vegetables with faces. A lot of his creatures feature this cursed but cute pareidolia art, where inanimate objects or endearing animals are anthropomorphized in bizarre ways. 

tinysoul crafts 1-2 characters a day using an open-source Github project called Monster Mash. His process involves making a low-poly model, motion-capturing it, then pixelating it using a filter he coded in HTML. 

As of early January, he’s sculpted 995 characters, though only 25 have made the cut for his game (these require animating a full walk cycle, attack cycle, and unique attack). His arsenal includes: A shrimp madly dribbling a basketball; a gorilla with burgers for arms; the cartoon character Elsa, from Frozen, with a humongous cyborgian eye taking over her face. He’s tried pushing the boundaries so far that he’s lost followers and gotten warnings from X about certain posts. “I did a balding guy getting pegged by a gremlin with his nose. X was like, ‘It’s funny, but you gotta remember your audience is a variety of ages.’ I wanted to test the boundary, because art is all about that,” he said. “I was surprised, I did a bird with giant testicles swinging, and that went through fine, no problem.” He’s also discovered ways of tricking the moderation; he’ll get away with depicting “bums and asses” by designing a peach with jiggle physics and putting it next to a female character, which is allowed. “I’ll be honest, I do enjoy trolling them sometimes.”

The way these characters combine familiar entities (Squidward, Kirby, Hello Kitty) with freaky body parts and low-res degradation feels both magical and nightmarish. I wouldn’t want to see a Barbie doll human centipede or a 10-eyed SpongeBob angel in my dreams, but I can’t look away. They feel like haunted relics of a bygone era of the internet but also feverishly futuristic, like technologies and TV characters that have been warped in from the year 2170. 

tinysoul’s artfully inane media diet might explain why his characters have such an odd allure. As a kid, he loved drawing bizarro personas from the Commodore 64 games he played, even ultraviolent chainsaw-wielders. “I had to do counseling, actually, for that,” he laughed. A friend introduced him to the anarchic forum 9gag, and he’s into all the fried pockets of digital mayhem: horrorcore creepypastas, dreamcore memes, Cyriak’s trippy animations. But he’s also obsessed with physical media and fine art, like the absurdist gags of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python series and lowbrow pop surrealism—anything with “a good balance between random and sensible.”

tinysoul got involved with Verse after he was tipped-off that people were selling copies of his work on crypto markets. His iconic tomato got up to $100,000 USD value on one site, while a fake copy of his well-endowed bosom shark reached $1.9 million. Fans were sending him group chats with 500 members each centered around his works — but he wasn’t getting any money.

He’s currently releasing a collection called 'level 1️⃣' and firing off new creations by the day. A hungry horde of fans — including a nearly 5,000 member Discord channel — suggests lore for the new releases and requests he add their loved ones as characters (“If their actual pets go viral and they’re in the game, they find that very amusing”). As we speak, he giddily brainstorms new ideas for monsters and game mechanics. He teases a system where the value of the character’s NFT could determine its power level in the game. “I think it’d be hilarious,” he chuckled. ”I could do these biblically accurate, massive demon angels, but because they don’t sell well on the market, they’d have like 10 hit-points. It gets killed in two hits.”

“That would add to the What is this? factor.” While his art may rise in notoriety, he’s still a cracked gamer at heart — someone who wants to both bamboozle and beguile his players and himself.