As readers may know, my lockdown hobby was and is learning to crochet, to the extent that making things out of yarn is now just a thing I do. If you cut me, do I not bleed? No: yards and yards of wool spools out of my veins. Quickly, we must wind it up and pack it back in, or else make a scarf! My digital game interests and my physical craft interests collide with surprising regularity, though. This is the 21st century, after all, so instead of joining groups that meet in person in church halls, I am in a crochet-specific Discord group as well as subscribed to several different crochet subreddits. And if there is one thing I have learned from them over the last few weeks, it is that people cannot stop making the crewmates from secret murder game Among Us.
Among Us is the hot new kid at school right now, a multiplayer game where a crew of lil’ coloured spacebean astronauts must fix their ship by doing various tasks. But! At least one of the astronauts is an imposter trying to sabotage the repair efforts by murdering their crewmates and trying not to get caught. Players can call emergency meetings and vote to get suspicious miscreants kicked into the airless void of space. This does not sound a concept someone would play a round of and then immediately go “I MUST RENDER THIS IN A WOOL/ACRYILIC BLEND!”. And yet, this is what you get if you search for ‘Among Us’ on r/crochet:
Seriously, there are a lot of these. A few months back, the chubby bouncy beans of Fall Guys spread across my niche corners of the internet like a wobbly rash, but it was nothing compared to this. There cute little ghosts like this one by “cupcatt” (who also provided a pattern) bigger, stress-buddy sized ones like this extremely neat green boy from “miharu17”, and little desk pals like this eggplant crewmate from “appocat”. There are even huggable dead crewmates. There are 2D keychain and fridge magnet variants (by “oafese” and “CitrineSensibility”, respectively). I think the popularity of Among Us “amigurumi” (for so these little stuffed figurines are named, after the Japanese art of crocheting little creatures out of yarn) is that a) the Among Us spacebeans are somehow very expressive in spite, or perhaps because of, their blank features, b) they are very cute little fellows, and c) they are an easy shape to fashion out of, well, most things. Crochet would be my go to, but you could also make a crewmate out of mashed potato or hair collected from brushing your cat. That would be weird of you to do, but I’m not judging you, I’m just saying, you could do that. But I am particularly impressed by the ingenuity of my fellow yarnpunks. They have made so many different versions of the crewmates, all different, but all so recognisably what they are supposed to be - like how everyone has a unique impression of Tom DeLonge’s verse in I Miss You, yet they are all unquestionably Tom DeLonge’s verse in I Miss You. Also, everyone has much more consistent yarn tension and stitch size than I do. As a parting note, I want to venture that you, reading this, would be able to make a crocheted Among Us crewmate even if you’ve never crocheted anything before. There are so many patterns on Etsy and Ravelry, too, even for tiny accessories for your tiny wool friend. G’wan, admit it. You’re sort of tempted, aren’t you?
