Paranoia Fuel / Webcomics

• From Brawl in the Family : Peppy is EVERYWHERE.
  • This strip puts a whole new spin on the Mushroom Kingdom.
• For the 2007 Crossover Wars event, a fake comic was created as the birthplace of Villain Henchman Max Catnap, a cat furry with a disturbing hatred of his own kind. The fake comic's progression from crayon-drawn, innocently well-intended furry fare to brutal murder is enhanced by Max's erasing of himself from the archives, revealing the full story only in flashbacks.
• In El Goonish Shive, Pandora tells Sarah that due to who Sarah's friend's are Sarah has the interest of Immortals other than herself. Since Immortals are invisible by default, Sarah realizes they could be all around her, observing her at any time and she wouldn't be able to tell. This freaks her out and prevents her from sleeping that night.
• The recent Freefall arc in which Florence's short-term memory is impaired as part of an effort to check on her mind, since she's technically an artificial intelligence.
  • Not to mention that despite being a walking, talking, biological entity, she has a remote control that can turn her off, her brain can be "adjusted" to change her attitudes without her knowing, and every time she interacts with the company that created her, she gives herself a personality test afterward to make sure that she hasn't been "rewritten." If that wasn't enough, when a security guard finds out about it, he yells at one of the developers about it, pointing out that "This stuff could be adapted for humans," and asking whether he should be worried. The developer says of course not: the security personnel are unionized, so the company would test it on independent contractors first.
• Girl Genius:
  • Between stealth-Revenants and Lucrezia's liberal use of mind-downloads, you never quite know who you're talking to at first. Speaking of the Other, the revelation that she can time-travel only makes it worse.
  • It is left unclear what else outside of The Beast may have escaped from the Corbettite's vault full of horrors when most of the doors to the cells were opened or broken.
• This is what you get when everyone you've ever respected or cared about has conspired to hide your true identity from you your entire life. Strange things happen at Gunnerkrigg Court all the time, but Annie didn't see that coming.
• In Homestuck, John and Rose (and possibly Dave) all have Rooms Full Of Crazy without them realising it for most of the plot so far. Apparently, the explanation is that they unconsciously scribble on their walls and then their mind just filters out so they never notice it. Now look around the room that you're sitting in and think about what your subconscious mind has written...
  • Jade has them too, but she's a subversion; she's consciously aware of them due to writing them in an attempt to motivate John and wake up his sleeping dream self.
  • Draconic Dignitary is watching you.
  • "Sollux couldn't know that the virus is essentially a formality. The demon is already here."
  • The narration starts to get a little bit too self-aware in act 5.
    You suddenly wonder where Jadesprite went. You wonder that because I said you did. I know where she went.
  • Are you next?
  • Karkat: HighlightDon't turn your back on the body.
  • Later the tension builds when Tezeri returns to where Karkat was. One of the bodies has gone, the other has bite marks on it.
    This is EXACTLY why you should never turn your back on a body, not even for a second.
  • S u c k e r s .
  • The Alpha universe. They Live!.
  • Lord English is behind the Fourth Wall. No one is safe. He is inevitable by his own existence, in many forms. Is the idea of him enough to make him real? We can't outrun him, he's already here with us, inside us.
  • The Squiddles. They start out as a Sickeningly Sweet cartoon abut cute, silly cephalopods who are running from an evil fisherman and try to fight him with The Power of Friendship and The Power of Love. And then it turns out that this is just what humans see when they look at them. In reality, they're seeing giant Eldritch Abominations. Now imagine your favorite childhood cartoon for a second. Now imagine that it's actually the human perception of an Eldritch Abomination.
  • Lord English has been inside Lil' Cal for the entire comic. He is already here. And it's not just a metaphor.
• Natalie Geln knows where you live...
• In an episode of The Parking Lot is Full◊, you are informed that you are one of only 23 real people in the world and everyone else is a fake, designed to keep you from the others. Taken to logical conclusions, this becomes even more terrifying. Everyone in your life, everyone you love, hate, talk to, work for, even all the tropers here are designed by some malignant force to keep you from making a genuine connection with one of the few other 'real people'.
• The Petri Dish:
  • Nicole got symbiotically joined to the monster Kang while she was just looking for a snack in the fridge.
  • Thaddeus got the flu, despite being hyper-vigilant about protecting himself.
  • One plot is about Gordon, and later, Thaddeus, drinking "soda" that turns out to actually be gene-altering chemicals.
• This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic sums up this trope very well.
• The majority of Stand Still, Stay Silent is this. Each and every chapter has a little something to give you the urge to check your back
  • Prologue: Fast-spreading, harmless flu? NOPE
  • Chapter 1: Keuruu's population list is a quiet eye-opener. 650~ military to 162 civilians. Whatever is out there would have to be one hell of a threat for that many soldiers.
  • Chapter 2: We know there's some kind of superbug, but the decontamination procedures remind us that it is a major threat. The question is, what is it, and how do we kill it? It's real easy to get twitchy when you realize there's at least two things trying to kill everybody- and while it's quiet, whatever they did worked.
  • Chapter 3: It all starts coming home to roost here. Opening with a blood-covered Trainsaw, and then later showing you exactly what left that blood there, as well as what all those soldiers were needed for at Keuruu. Bonus point for the mage knowing exactly how it was going to happen
  • Chapter 4: Main battle tanks that could easily fit in a Warhammer 40,000 game are shown- while knowing that the army that used them was beaten back dozens of times. To think our heroes are going into the exact same place, in a glorified RV.
    • Seeing the way home fall apart after they cross it
    • That dead troll. Did we mention that those things are very common where our Ragtag Band of Misfits is going?
    • The Dead Have Names memorial.
  • Chapter 5: The... thing in the underbrush that Emil sees. Sure kid, it's only looking at you a little.
    • The dead scientist. Looks like he got killed in a gunfight, but with what?
  • Chapter 6: Running out of food, and then finding a untrained, vulnerable kid in the next food crate. Double points for getting The Load and a side case of Adult Fear at the same time.
  • Chapter 7: The dog's transformation into some spider like-thing after it's injured and also there is something looking for Hotakainen family, and that something has just become active again. This causes Onni to tell Lalli to avoid leaving his dreamspace safe area.
  • Chapter 8: Lalli misses one troll pod in a tunnel full of them. Its contents start following the team... oh, and the info page informs us that in rare cases, mages can basically die from overusing their power. Guess what Lalli just did as we get that information.
  • Chapter 9: The "weird spirits" turn out to be not-so-harmless.
  • Chapter 10:
    • Even the more light-hearted beginning includes everyone leaving a Deep Sleep ridden Lalli alone in the tank, Tuuri and Reynir doing so basically out of boredom.
    • Good news, turns out there is someone in the party who can pick up on the magic-related slack while Lalli rests. Bad news, nobody will listen to that person because he's the untrained, vulnerable kid mentioned in the Chapter 6 entry, and a threat only they can see coming is approching.
    • A child decides to give Onni a haircut while he's in a magical trance, and ends up cutting his ear in the process. Why is it chilling? Onni just got an extremely similar injury while giving the crew a hand with the ghosts via mage-space.
  • Chapter 11: There are many ghosts following the crew.
  • Chapter 12: The reaveal about the cure is quite chilling: it works on the Rash, but ends up killing the patients for unknown reasons. It was sent out anyway because they thought it was better than risking turning into what would later be called trolls. Even that assumption was wrong, it turned them into the type of murderous ghost that is threatening the crew and nobody noticed. The issue revealed to exist in Chapter 11 catches up with the crew at the end, and it seems to have gotten even worse, to the point of making Lalli worried about it.
• xkcd has this, in strip 525.

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