People are making heart-wrenching memes about 'Among Us,' the explosively-popular mafia-style online game

• "Among Us" is a massively popular hidden role game from InnerSloth that exploded in popularity in 2020 despite its original release date in 2018.
• The game has become a favorite on Twitch, and has developed a devoted fandom on platforms like TikTok and Twitter as well.
• Many people are making "Among Us" memes and fan art that superimpose narratives of friendship and tragedy onto the game.

"Among Us," to many, came out of nowhere.

The hidden role video game, in which players go about completing tasks while trying to determine who the "imposter" is before they all wind up dead, was originally released in 2018. However, as Kotaku reported, the game became a favorite among Twitch streamers in 2020 after a slow buildup of international popularity. That's led to it becoming a social media phenomenon and party game favorite as well. Now, the game has become so popular that its studio InnerSloth canceled an upcoming sequel to focus on improving the original game.

In "Among Us," four to 10 players join either locally or online (the game is available on ioS, Android, and Steam) and are assigned roles. Most will be "crewmates," or normal players who perform tasks on a spaceship. A select few are "imposters," parasitic shapeshifters who can travel through vents, sabotage the ship, and kill off crewmembers. Crewmates must suss out the imposters and eject them from the ship before the imposters manage to kill enough crewmates to win the game.

"Among Us" doesn't venture too much into the personal, and even death within the game is cartoonish — dead players appear as half bodies with single bones protruding from them, and later circulate the map as ghosts. However, the game opens up the potential for heated debates and fun interactions that have sparked much of the fan content surrounding "Among Us." The playful, accusatory debates that players have with their friends morph into heart-wrenching, tragic stories between crewmates in the hands of fan artists and animators.

On TikTok, fan-made animations or stories both poke fun at familiar scenarios that occur while playing — like feverishly denying that you're the imposter, only to get ejected from the ship anyways — and also craft new narratives that add an entirely new element to "Among Us."

Many 'Among Us' memes revolve around humanizing the crewmates

As Polygon's Cass Marshall wrote, many "Among Us" players and fans were creating "crewsonas" — fan art of their in-game characters, but with more of a human touch. That phenomenon plays out on TikTok as well, where one trend set to a slowed down audio of Pogo's "Living Island" sees people drawing their own "Among Us" characters and crafting relationships for them.

In particular, people are exploring potential relationships between unsuspecting crew members and imposters, who develop soft spots for certain players while still carrying out their duty to kill the rest of the crew.

Others make light familiar interactions in the game, like seeing someone travel through a vent (therefore proving that they're an imposter) but being unable to report it before the imposter turns the tables on them, or running into the imposter while the lights are dimmed.

Some videos even give the game an overarching narrative.

In-game 'pets' make for some of the most heartwrenching 'Among Us' content

One particular element that shows up in memes across platforms is tied to one of the game's customization options. Players, for a small fee, can purchase in-game "pets" that follow them around on the map. Some of those "pets" are shaped like tiny spacemen themselves, which makes the death of their "parent" deeply heartwrenching if you think about it for more than a few seconds. To make matters worse, once the "parent" is killed, the "baby" sits idly on the map, alone.

Artists and animators — as well as players recording their own games — have latched onto the "Among Us" babies as a means of injecting pathos into the relatively impersonal game.

On Twitter, artists are also crafting narratives featuring the "Among Us" babies.

Although a solid chunk of "Among Us" memes and fan-made content focuses on narratives that turn the relatively lighthearted game into a tearjerker, plenty are still rooted in plain ol' meme fun.

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