Webcomic / Alabaster: The Doomed Session

You can't be Ophiuchus the Great because Ophiuchus the Great is currently busy dressing his Nepeta doll!

They were never meant to win.

Alabaster: The Doomed Session is an interactive comic based on Homestuck, and more precisely on the Hivebent arc, written by Cauchemar. It details a troll session of SGRUB parallel to the canon team.

Focusing on a group of trolls meant to parody various fandom and fan session archetypes, Alabaster is about how one troll wanted to speedrun SGRUB on the hardest difficulty he could muster, bringing his friends and acquaintances along for the ride. As it is a horror story, this plan goes completely wrong in the bloodiest, most terrifying way possible.

Like its parent series, the comic contains multiple Flash games and movies (the most popular one being Silent Hive) and Art Shifts.

• Alabaster
• The Alabaster thread on the MSPA forums
• The Extra Material page

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This webcomic provides examples of:

• Abandoned Area: The OBSCENE complex, the ruins of an ancient troll nursery whose purpose is no longer understandable to modern trolls.
• Absurdly Ineffective Barricade: Pail Head will not be stopped.
• Abusive Parents: Goldie, which goes much further when the game starts. He does a mixture of lethal trap rooms and Riddle Me This puzzles in the hopes he won't solve them, and when those fail he becomes Pail Head and opts to finish the job himself. Then he gets prototyped into Ginneo's Pixelemental, and his malevolence is built into the environment as a result.
• Adjustable Censorship: One is built into SGRUB, ranging from "Black" (completely censored) to "Double Rainbow Extreme" (total unfiltered madness). Even at its most uncensored, the finer points of musclebeast depictions are still too filthy to show.
• Agony of the Feet: Thanks to CD's attack.
• Alien Blood: Like in the canon Hivebent, trolls have different blood colors.

• And I Must Scream: Tentacle King's backstory goes this way. It is also played straight with the puppy's fate.
• Animal Reaction Shot: Usually from the Players' lusus and consorts.

• Antiquated Linguistics: Batori's quirk.

• Arc Words: "The Flesh Must Grow".
• Art Shift: Each of the players has a specific "Mode" that changes the art style when important plot moments are happening. Vaumin has Movie Mode, which makes everyone more proportional, Ginneo has Cute Mode, which turns everything into a cutsey version of itself, Batori has Makeup Mode, which depicts her actions as stylistic gothic illustrations, and Renart has À La Mode, a mode that makes him resemble fashion sillhouettes and views other individuals as scribble figures save their horns. A minor troll even had a Comic Mode that turned their actions into a recolored comic panel.
• Ash Face: Horribly subverted.

• Author Avatar: Notoriously brief appearance (probably in contrast to Hussie's frequent avatar). Cauchemar appears, starts running away from a random threat, get stopped by an inquisitive Formspring question and dies, all in the same scene.
• A Winner Is You: The end of both minigames.

• Backstory Horror: Ginneo looks cute until you learn he's twenty years old. Copycat seems to be funny enough in her imitation of canon characters until you know she does it out of amorous desperation. Ophiuchus the Great sounds merely disturbing until you discover what he's really up to. Also, all of the Denizens have horrific origin stories.

• Barred from the Afterlife: Vamuin deactivated the Dream Bubbles for every Player, thinking it was an option for losers. Except for Sectra, with the intentions of humiliating her when they win. In true dramatic ironic fashion, his action done in spite to put her down has in reality guaranteed that she will be the only one who survives this story, whether she lives or dies.

• The Blank: All of the Underlings in Ginneo's Land are faceless.

• Body Horror: From grotesque protyped bodies to getting wrapped in a decaying Pixelemental, this sessions has all sorts of bodily terrors.
• Body of Bodies: The rebuilt Underlings.
• Born Unlucky: Ginneo... And the entire cast to an extent.

• Box-and-Stick Trap: In the Twin Peaks dollhive.
• Break the Badass: A lot of characters start out as extremely powerful, but... how the mighty have fallen.

• Bring My Brown Pants: Ginneo's signiature trait. First introduced as part of his "Grubbyfur" gimmick, then becomes extremely appropriate the more he encounters the horrors the game throws at him.
• Broken Record: Octolon, once his prototyping starts to decay. He eventually goes back to normal speech patterns.
  Octolon: I'mfineI'mfineI'mfineI'mfineI'mfineI'mfine
  Octolon: (dragging himself to Goldie) thefleshthefleshthefleshthefleshthefleshtheflesh
• Brutal Honesty: Renart, frequently.

• Cardboard Pal: Played horribly straight.
• Celeb Crush: Done in a weird way with the Main Twelve (the canon trolls), which aren't really famous on Alternia in-story, but the Amazing Stalker Trio is obsessed with them, reflecting the obsession of real-life fans with Karkat and his friends.

• Character Development: Each of the main characters evolves drastically during the story. Vamuin goes from overconfident, overpowered troll to complete victim, Batori is forced to face her greatest fear, Ginneo grows up...

• Coincidental Dodge: Copycat when Ophiuchus is trying to shoot her.
• Coitus Uninterruptus: Ginneo pesters Vaumin to help revive his corpse, but Vaumin was too busy having sex with Batori's dreamself to notice.

• Comically Missing the Point: Ginneo, mainly when he's "roleplaying". Zigzags between this trope and Dramatically Missing the Point depending on the mood.

• Comic Role Play: Constantly, with Ginneo and Batori as the main offenders. Strangely, despite being a Very Serious tabletop roleplay, Crossover never roleplays during pesterlogs.
• Comic Sutra: When Vamuin explains troll reproduction to Ginneo.

• Cosmic Horror Story: Khthonios's origins and implications for the Hero of Entropy.
• Coup de Grâce Cutscene: The end of the Skytroll minigame.
• Crazy-Prepared: Renart via exploitation of Skaia's clouds manages to predict and be prepared for almost anything, although not the precise timing of events.

• Creepy Souvenir: Renart's horn collection.

• Cuckoolander Commentator: During the Decapitateball game.
• Dark World: As a nod to Silent Hill, at the beginning of Silent Hive.
• Dating Service Disaster: Renart and Ophiuchus meet on one of these "services".

• Deconstructive Parody: Mostly of Homestuck, fan sessions and common archetypes both in and out of the fandom. The story plays horribly straight a lot of "jokes", and fun little fan concepts such as "bloodswaps" (the idea of trolls with their respective blood colors swapped) turn to nightmare.
  • The Le Intermission parodies Scratch mechanics and Guardian/Kid Role Swap AUs by only switching the heads of the lusii and trolls, but explains how the changes put an even worse Fantastic Caste System in its place. Even that gets parodied in the in-universe webcomic HORTMUSTCK, which does the same with home planets, but instead of actually getting a cool planet-themed person, Jane's equivalent is a human-shaped pile of rocks.

• Depraved Dentist: Octolon attempts to torture Goldie with a dentist drill attachment, although it is left nebulous whether it succeed in doing so before Goldie was automatically prototyped.

• Dysfunctional Family: All trolls have a weird quirk about their relationship with their lusus, but Goldie and Ginneo are the most prominent. Ginneo did something to force Goldie into his current role, and Goldie in turn puts creepy riddles and deadly traps in every room for him to solve as a "game".
• Earn Your Bad Ending: The Light Ending is reached since page 1108. The adventure is currently at page 2293 and while the Bad/real ending looks closer, we aren't there yet.
• Eaten Alive: The Progenies' stomach. Added Squick effect for the precise process.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Denizens. The Minions. Most of the Underlings, after poorly chosen prototyping.
• Eldritch Location: The Debug Room, a location that contains numerous glitches and otherworldly creatures. It also has elements of Fisher Kingdom, as Ginneo and the child are frequently transformed into various forms the more they progress.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Ginneo's bad at giving the other players nicknames, such as calling Vamuin "Fanny" or Batora Batty.

• The End of the World as We Know It: As in canon, the Reckoning and the Vast Glub are what do Alternia in.

• Everyone Chasing You: Dream Ginneo when he wakes up.

• Exposition Diagram: By Vamuin, explaining how Team Alabaster is going to win.

• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Tentacle King. Or maybe it's another kind of tentacle-on-troll action.
• Face Plant: Vamuin after getting hit by a particularly powerful monster, on his way to perform the Scratch.
• Fantastic Caste System: We find once more the Alternian castes related to said blood colors.

• Flaying Alive: In the very first action scene.
• Foreshadowing: Here, Vamuin mentions he saw Batori and Ginneo fighting a resident together. They both imagine it like this, which is a bit different from reality.
• Funny Answering Machine: Cross' autoresponder.

• Goofy Suit: Jack Noir is forced to wear a whale suit.

• Graphics-Induced Super-Deformed: The usual Homestuck-like sprites. Ginneo's sprite in Silent Hive.

• Guilt by Association Gag: "Many innocents will share their dark destiny".

• Harmless Villain: Ophiuchus The Great, though eccentric, is handled so ludicrously he hardly seems like a real threat. Zig-zagged horribly, as, while Ophiuchus fails to harm the main twelve directly or leave much of an impact on the story as a whole, he routinely performs atrocities on captive trolls in attempts to simulate his perfect world. These include complete blood transfusions in attempts to create "bloodswaps," drugging and kidnapping, forced sex as "shipping", etc.
• Head Desk: Done on walls and computers.

• Horrifying the Horror: The nightmarish troll species will find worse than them.
• Human Mail: Edwardsprite is chopped/torn into bits and stuffed into boxes, a note from the Underlings indicating that he was killed for being a rival for Batori's "affections".

• Ignoring by Singing: Vamuin and Cross during their coplayer's horrifying roleplay sessions.

• Intoxication Ensues: Ginneo and the slime vapors.
• Involuntary Shapeshifting: The Underlings, after the most traumatizing prototypings.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: Mainly heard in the OBSCENE complex.

• I Say What I Say: Multiple Doomed Vamuins.
• It's the Best Whatever, Ever!: Vamuin gloating that Team Alabaster is going to "be the AWESO°MEST" and to "kick SGRUBrip's ass".

• Jaw Drop: Multiple characters, but most famously Kanaya.

• Joke Exhaustion: Vamuin with innuendo.

• Killer Teddy Bear: Truncare, the denizen of Evisceration, is a massive teddy with a deformed right hand.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Vamuin about SGRUBrip.
• Lampshaded Double Entendre: Vamuin all the time: "I kno°w my Bat... much better than yo°u kno°w yo°urs, man, if yo°u kno°w what I mean", "After I o°wn yo°ur ass at spo°rts, ho°w abo°ut I o°wn yo°ur ass at spo°rts... the epic way? If yo°u kno°w what I mean", etc.

• Layman's Terms: Vamuin chooses the "Lowest Blood" setting at the beginning of the game, which sets the language to Layman's Terms... for trolls. Dred is not pleased to deal with it.
  All these foreign-sounding words like bathtub or safe just give you headache.

• Made of Explodium: The enemies hit by Vamuin's Sunburn Eyes power.

• Magically-Binding Contract: One of Khthonios' favorite methods.

• Mirror Scare: Doomed reflections.
• Misplaced Sorrow: Vamuin cares more about his lusus than about Ginneo.

• Mobile Menace: The Minions, one particular Progeny, Renart, Ophiuchus the Great.
• Moment Killer: Nietzsche interrupts Jack Noir and Vamuin's intense battle just as Jack was about to suffocate Vamuin with his face.

• The Most Dangerous Video Game: SGRUBrip, a troll-tailored, uncensored, Hard difficulty version of SBURB. Plus since it's a pirated copy, it contains failsafes to destroy the illegitimate Players. Sadly, our heroes are said illegitimate Players.

• Naked People Are Funny: Used, twisted and subverted. Played for screams too.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Tentacle King, The Swarming One, The Disfiguring One, The Conjuring One, The Delving One. Most of the Denizens' names or nicknames.
• Nausea Dissonance: Ophiuchus' end.

• No Fourth Wall: In opposition to Homestuck, Alabaster usually keeps the meta stuff out of the way of the narration. Then there is the Glitch and Light Ending parts, special sequences which are complete craziness, playing not only with the readers and the support, but also with other webcomics.

• Ominous Fog: Around the Forbidden Zone.

• Paper-Thin Disguise: Vanity Ibizaa.

• Phlebotinum-Induced Stupidity: The sopor slime vapors.

• Posthumous Character: Tozy. His story is told through flashbacks, as he's been killed for his horns in the present.
• Previous Player-Character Cameo: Victory in Silent Hive.

• Psychological Torment Zone: The OBSCENE complex, and particularly the Forbidden Zone.
• Psycho Party Member: Renart is a serial killer who uses to horns of his victims in sculptures. Renart happily manipulates his teammates for his own ends and treats them as beneath him, right up to killing their loved ones. To make doorknobs. Renart just seems to get off on violence.

• Rage Against the Author: Seigneur Français. Apparently a common problem for Cauchemar.

• Running Gag: The Glub painting, by Edvard Munchk.
• Sacrificial Lamb: Tozy, the Thylacine puppy.

• Satire: Of the Homestuck fandom, Original Characters, and various other works.
• The Scream: Done literally and repeatedly. The actual painting shows up as The Glub by Edvard Munchk, with Vamuin relating it to the personal horror of learning more about Ophiuchus the Great than he'd like to know.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The Denizens. Too bad the heroes find the way to awaken most of them simultaneously.
• Shadow Discretion Shot: Frequently done with silhouettes.
• Shoehorned First Letter: Done with the "DOO..." words at the end of each chapter, which probably were meant to spell 'Doomed'.
• Shout-Out:
  • Here, here,here, here, and here(and from there onward), runes are used. The first one is the musical variety, and the others are archaic. This is in particularly fitting since some of the landscapes, their 'Territories' (Lands), and especially Ginneo's travel into the Void look like a witch barrier. Renart's 'vision' also looks a bit like Gekidan Inu Curry style.
  • They read:
    • Tentacleking First form
    • .. Don't enter, you ... (repeated on both sides). Note that these runes are here called the "Walpurgis Cypher subquest"; obviously referencing the witch Walpurgisnacht. The quest itself lampshades its Freeze-Frame Bonus status: "Seriously, who gives attention to poor background details?"^note The Madoka Magica fans certainly did.
    • Tentacleking the Squid
    • Great old one
    • A pact, invoked. Kinship, enforced.
    • I declare you as my ally.
  • The Twin Peaks in the Territory of Beligerence and Glaciation. One of the peaks even has a Red Room-esque dollhouse parallel to the one in the other peak.
• Screw Yourself: Dred-Vani can't keep their hands off each other thanks to being prototyped with a troll porn magazine.

• Signs of Disrepair: "Dead [end]", "To the rat[tle room]"...

• Something Else Also Rises: Vamuin's typing quirk elongates when he's pestering a character he's flirting with, and noticeably shrinks when he's disgusted or terrified. The cannon in Renart's big bloody scene.
• Spawn Broodling: Tentacle King and Progenies.

• Stalker with a Crush: Ophiuchus has an insane obsession with the Main Twelve, and Copycat secretly grills Ginneo about Sectra's personal tastes.

• The Talk: Mentioned as "The Carve" in Alternian slang, as lusii write it out due to their lack of vocalizations. Done and illustrated with the canon characters.
• Testosterone Poisoning: Vamuin, a concentration of strength and epicness getting ridiculous quite quickly, also surrounded with phallic imagery.
• That Came Out Wrong: Most of the pesterlogs are filled with innuendo, both intentional and completely accidental.

• This Is Going to Be Huge: Vamuin when talking about his future success.

• Too Much Information: Frequent with Vamuin.
• Torture Cellar: Ophiuchus' hive.

• Weird World, Weird Food: Most of Alternian food, particularly the scarabs and the candy tentacles.

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