Alabaster has a lot of parodic elements and comical moments, but it is NOT a parody. It is meant to be, at core, a serious story. The overall approach is very similar to Pantagrame: there is a main plot laced with tragedy, and the humour is mainly coating.

There is a component of fandom satire, which evolved over time to explore various themes, but it doesn't mean the story is supposed to be taken as a complete joke or a deliberate shitpost.

It is, in a way, the opposite to the irony and tone whiplash of canon Homestuck.

That is simply my intent, though. It does not have to be your perception.
You can enjoy Alabaster in any way you want: once a work is launched in the world, it becomes the personal dream of everyone.

It has to do with the cosmogony and cosmology of the Tetracosmos, the world of Pantagrame.

Two important aspects:
- The inhabitants of Nelphis do not see the sky the same way we see it. Musical scores are not written the same in their country, just like they don't really speak English – all dialogue, writing and cultural references are assumed to be translated.
- The staves are not physically here. When cameras take pictures of the sky, it shows a strange, uncanny bedlam of intricate, moving, carved prisms instead. Such is the harmony of the Tetracosmology, such is the creative score of the universe... A complex, neverending structure with a perspective extending in more dimensions than we are used to. This mystical vision cannot be understood by the human eye, and it conveys the prisms into the closest equivalent it can find: music notation.

I have a lot of love for the worldbuilding in [Fuckery], the upcoming webcomic I'm launching in Fall 2024. I can't talk much about it right now, I want it to be a nice surprise for everyone, but it is going to be EXPLOSIVE!

I'm also particularly involved in the Terra Monumenta (gnostic dieselpunk), Mirinar (dark fantasy, Les Mondes-miroirs) and Tetracosmos (radical science fiction) settings, for different reasons.

I like the esoteric and desperate atmosphere of Terra Monumenta, where all characters are looking for their deepest desires, and in the end racing towards the complete destruction of their universe.

I appreciate the caricature of western, reactionary societies in Mirinar, I think about the Archs all over the country, about breathing the divine golden magic, about the cold, clean air when you're walking in a silent mirror-world.

I want to live in the Tetracosmos, a world unbound from most systems of domination, where queer people like me can live without attracting ignorant and bigoted hatred, where money is not a concept, where the main principle of any society is to provide for everyone, where anarchist communities are freeing vast territories from authoritarian states, where you can adopt electric underwater pseudokittens and drive treble-shaped ships and explore your environment with corallian powers!

It wasn't a choice and it wasn't my will. Some people get the desire, but stories always come to me. Since early childhood, tales appear in my dreams, in my thoughts, in my emotions, my heart is full of them. As far as I can remember, as far as my early childhood... Stories were always here. There were always -fantastique- stories, too, events which couldn't happen in real life, a werewolf roaming in the woods, spaceships fighting, a dinosaur attacking a car. And they kept coming, and they never stop, it is a constant avalanche going through my whole soul. With time, I learned to select them... The stories you see are the stories that stay, the stories I have a particular passion in exploring.

Now, what -kept- me telling stories is another matter entirely. I always had friends and family to support me, to help me advance, and to make me understand that my ideas had artistic value, and that the way I was telling them was entertaining; I had this good fortune. I also had the luck and privilege to get all of the time, energy and focus I needed to thrive, so my stories blossomed and met even more love.

I wish to tell stories for my entire life, and I also want to discover stories told by other people! I want to wander in millions of different universes.

The general idea of the universe in Alabaster, from the start, was to be entirely canon compliant to Homestuck BUT to develop the universe by adding a lot of things, expanding it rather than staying stagnant.
SGRUBrip tries to go from the usual mechanisms of SBURB/SGRUB and to add a multi-layered twist of a "broken" session. But generally speaking it follows the established rules.

(This approach made more sense in 2011 than it does in 2023; since, we've had the "Void Session" in canon and countless broken/pirated/glitched SBURB fan sessions.)

I did some limited mistakes on the way, the most significant one being, once again, the Prospitian clothes which follow the reversed Harlequin palette.
[ https://mspfa.com/?s=236&p=2432 ]
If I restarted Alabaster today, their clothes would likely be dark blue at the beginning (the reversed palette to the orange Decapitateball clothes) etc.
But this one error will stay since I like the results and it doesn't threaten continuity or the political/ethical implications or anything. I've also found a simple in-universe explanation.

Now to deal with the core of your question.

Alabaster Alternia follows the same general logic than the one applied to the more general Homestuck setting. The idea was to stay true to Homestuck Alternia but to expand it.

So I expanded on the musclebeasts and other xenobiological or cultural stuff...
[ https://mspfa.com/?s=236&p=69 ]
The sicklehead shark is an example of direct extrapolation. In canon, John has a hammer and Karkat has a sickle. We have hammerhead sharks on Earth. So...
[ https://mspfa.com/?s=236&p=51 ]
The main idea was to always make things as grotesque as possible, to take jokes and to turn them into serious and sinister elements. Alternia is clearly a nightmare world in more ways than one. It is horrific but it is also -surreal-. Hussie worked from bad puns and old scifi archetypes and took the idea further.
So I added more bad puns and archetypes and worked from there with a general hard science fiction approach, trying to reach consistency, to really see how the Alternian ecosystems and Alternian culture could work. That's the general move for all of Alabaster Alternia.

It ends up diverging in some ways from Homestuck Alternia as it was developed in late Acts of Homestuck as well as in the Hiveswap games.
I always tried to keep Alabaster Alternia architecture brutalist and a little ugly, for example, if not downright absurd and Timburtonian.
[ https://mspfa.com/?s=236&p=2547 ]
I like the ugly grey concrete.
Meanwhile, Homestuck Alternia evolved into a more colorful and futuristic interpretation. It went in a radically different direction, particularly with Hiveswap's very bright and psychedelic palettes.
So against my will, yeah, Alabaster Alternia became its own Alternia in some ways. Originally the aesthetics were built from what we see in Hivebent and nothing more.
It will keep this kind of palette and keep developing its own specificities in culture and ecosystems.
I don't think I will use the New Alternian Alphabet for example, or only for some tiny details.

This answer is drifting in a lot of different directions at once, and if developed further it could reach novella proportions, so... time to sum it up!

Bullet points:

• Yes, Alabaster Alternia has specificities, the culture and xenobiology were developed following hard scifi worldbuilding principles building from jokes and archetypes (basically the Hivebent approach but a little more in-depth).
• However, it was not part of the original intent, the differences with canon Homestuck Alternia originate in the fact Alabaster is an early work.
• It may make more sense to now occasionally call it "Alabaster Alternia".
• I will keep working the same way and not contradict what I developed before, so the differences with canon may continue to pile up a little in the future, even though to remain "as canon compliant as possible" is still in the goals.
• I now work with Cerulean Snake when it comes to worldbuilding; we've united our settings under the name C.H.A.O.S. (Cerulean-Homestuck-Alabaster-Oasis-Snake). C.H.A.O.S. is our free interpretation of the Homestuck setting.
• We do take Hiveswap into account occasionally, the complete Alternia map in the Ausira flashback was made by merging cartographical data of Homestuck and Hiveswap.
• Our general rule when it comes to the sequels and spin-offs is "We take what will fit".

Alabaster was originally interrupted at the beginning of 2014, following some hard moments in my life. I tried to keep updating but couldn't do it anymore. Other works of mine suffered the same fate.

It was a conjunction of progressively finding again more creative energy in my life and feeling my love for Homestuck reigniting which slowly brought back the revival. Friends of one of the MSPFA splinters (Eagle Time) advised me to listen to the podcast Homestuck Made This World, and doing so, I progressively got back in touch with the passion. I always wanted to finish Alabaster properly, I just lacked the passion.

I re-immersed myself in the fandom, and in parallel, I gauged cautiously my level of motivation for Alabaster. The 100+ panels update in the first months of 2023 was both a demonstration to my dear readers I was serious with the revival and a way to make sure with myself I was invested enough to continue.

I'm happy to be back in the game!