The Maddening Devolution Of 'Among Us' Memes

There's a lot of crossover between the worlds of gaming and memes. Lots of gamers meme, and lots of memers game. Considering this, it makes sense that when there's a significant amount of hype around a particular video game, the meme landscape tends to shift and foster a lot of content referencing that title.

If a game remains hyped up and played for long enough it becomes a classic, resulting in consistent new formats and variations well after its peak of popularity, like Minecraft, Fortnite or Team Fortress 2 before them. As these games age and garner dedicated fans, the memes tend to become more niche, often playing off knowledge of the game that only regular players might know.

Fortnite started going through this a while ago with memes hinging on Fortnite Pro speak, where memers spout off legitimate terms used by Fortnite players like "dog water" (meaning trash) and "you're so free" (also meaning trash) that nobody but the players would know for inside laughs.

A mainstream format derived from a classic meme game will still pop up from time-to-time, but for the most part, only those who want to will see and pay attention to these memes after the game has fallen out of its hype stage. Six months after exploding in popularity, it seems that Among Us is joining that list of classic meme games as new, increasingly absurd formats continue to pour in — temporarily stuck between the uber-popular phase and the niche community phase.

Stage One: Sense

Among Us memes have gone through a few clear stages to get to the point of deconstructed absurdity they're at today. When the game first started blowing up on Twitch back in August 2020, the formats that resulted from it were incredibly safe by today's standard.

First, we saw an endless slew of memes playing off the game's gameplay mechanics and the community that was quickly building around it. The words "sus" and "cap" were forced into everyone's lexicon as just about everyone began using them in the game's meeting sections, the subject of countless memes.

A simple Photoshop meme, There Is 1 Impostor Among Us, saw a moment of popularity that month with memers exhausting every possibility quickly and moving on. Then there was the Imposter of the Vent format, a noticeable evolution for Among Us memes, relying on original artwork and slightly deeper jokes while remaining grounded in the mechanics and look of the game.

In the first few months of the game's popularity boom, it was inescapable across social media. Everyone seemed to be playing the game, even those who didn't consider themselves gamers due to the accessibility of it. Every streamer was playing it, new ones were popping up and gaining equally explosive popularity (i.e. Corpse Husband) and the well seemed limitless. Then things started getting a little sus.

Stage Two: Nonsense

More niche, absurd Among Us memes started popping up here and there but didn't become significantly popular until October when an image of Sesame Street's Bert, combined with the caption, "When the Imposter Is Sus" started making the rounds. Then, in November 2020, an unnerving photoshop of streamer Jerma985 smiling from ear to ear, associated with the same phrase, began circulating around the web. The meme blew up over the course of the month leading into November and hasn't really given up since, leaving us with an exhaustive number of memes referencing the image.

Sus Jerma serves as the sort of Team Fortress Freaks or Nintendo Anti-Piracy Screens of the Among Us meme genre, offering a creepy, strange and humorous detour from the usual that was extremely welcome at the time. The memes were getting stale, and a format like Sus Jerma was needed to keep it fresh.

Sus Jerma opened the floodgates for absurd Among Us content, and it turns out there was a lot waiting on the other side of those gates. That month we saw the Among Drip format where users made the Among Us crewmates unnecessarily stylish for no reason and started associating them with increasingly bizarre phrases and situations.

Among Drip resulted in the outlandishly stupid Airpod Shotty video, an extension of the genre that blew up on TikTok, which lead into the Among Us Musical in December, one of the most cringeworthy endeavors in recent memory and a sure sign that Among Us memes were reaching their inevitable peak.

The more "normal" Among Us memes were still being shared, but the interest was decreasing and the jokes were getting repetitive, with most of the discourse shifting to specific communities like /r/AmongUs rather than social media at large. The game was still being played a lot, but fatigue was showing, especially in the memes. That is, until one day in December, riding into the scene on a metaphorical stallion, "Amogus" came to town.

Stage Three: Insanity

Amogus represents the start of the final stage in the devolution of Among Us memes. Amogus, a simple misspelling of "Among Us," first popped up in a version of a Stone Toss comic photoshopped to feature a crewmate from the game.

The comic is devoid of all reason and became popular for exactly that reason. The original Amogus comic represents an exaggerated version of everything that the Among Us memesphere had become at the time. There were no original jokes left, and there was no point in trying to find them anymore. Amogus isn't funny for any reason beyond a misspelled word and a photoshopped shape that kind of looks like a crewmate, but it's different. It succeeds on the premise that Among Us fans will upvote any meme that simply features references to the game, acting as the ultimate meta meme. That is, until it took yet another step into madness with Things That Look Like Among Us Crewmates.

/r/AmongUs users first began posting objects that looked like Among Us crewmates back in October. They would post the images with no context and receive huge upvotes as everyone recognized that they looked like crewmates instantly. In February 2021, these memes came barreling to the forefront of sites like Reddit and Instagram, but with a new element: Users began posting the images along with text expressing insanity and cries for help, acting as if they were going crazy for seeing the crewmate everywhere.

Things That Look Like Crewmates represents the peak of devolution for Among Us memes. It's devoid of all build-up, made-up of nothing but a punchline. You see the shape, your brain instantly sees a crewmate and you feel as though you're going insane. There are multiple examples of this happening in the past, but the strongest case is that of Loss, which similarly reached such a point of oversaturation due to its increasingly absurd formats that the basic shape of the meme became a joke itself, with people declaring "is that Loss?" at any shape that vaguely resembled it.

The format shows us just how common-knowledge Among Us has become. It's reached a point of oversaturation so extreme that our brains instantly know the shape of the imposter with as little context as possible. The days of getting a laugh for saying "sus" are long gone and have now entered the phase of mockery, representing the most outdated stage in the game's meme lifespan despite only being six months old. Amogus and Things That Look Like Among Us are the "cool" Among Us memes now, relegated for veteran players, shitposters and haters who have grown tired of the game and its common meme formats but aren't ready to let go just yet.

Stage Four: Peace

Things That Look Like Crewmates serves as the ultimate cry for help from tired Among Us fans and memers that it's time to let the memes rest for a while. The more absurd and detached from reality the memes get, the less mainstream staying power they have, and the further they relegate themselves to their own niche communities.

Ultimately this is a natural, good thing. The memes will continue to succeed in their appropriate communities and will even improve comedically depending on your sense of humor, but will otherwise leave room for the next big meme game to breathe in the mainstream. Among Us has amassed a massive, dedicated community in six months and it stands to stay that way for a long time to come. Those fans deserve their memes, and the best formats deserve the limelight. For the common memer though, Things That Look Like Crewmates is a hopeful sign that change is coming.

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