Whenever you play a game of Among Us, the Impostor’s identity is completely random. Red could just as easily be the culprit as Blue, and there is no narrative reason why any character in particular gets chosen.
But when Among Us made its jump from video game to TV show, the choice of Impostor had to be intentional and character-driven. So, how did series creator Owen Dennis decide that the show’s Impostors would be (spoiler!) eager unpaid intern Green (voiced by Elijah Wood) and overly peppy HR rep Orange (voiced by Yvette Nicole Brown)?
The answer was rooted in murder mystery tropes.
“If you think about the various tropes that come with murder mysteries, you end up with the classic: The butler did it,” Dennis told Mashable in a video interview. “Why did the butler do it? Why is that the idea? It’s because the butler is the person that’s always there. At the time period that these sort of mysteries were written, they’re basically the lowest on the totem pole.”
Who, then, is the lowest person on the totem pole on Among Us‘ spaceship, The Skeld? None other than the unpaid intern.
While Green gets taken over by the Impostor alien parasite, Dennis views the harm as also coming from MIRA, the mining corporation behind the Crewmates’ mission. After all, their nefarious pursuit of Ore+ — otherwise known as the alien eggs — is what caused this mess in the first place.
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“The entire ship is just like this negligent corporation,” Dennis said. “Who would the negligent corporation hurt first and hardest? It would be the person who has the least power, and that would be the intern.”
The aliens’ parasitic nature acts as a stand-in for MIRA and its wrongdoings, which is why Orange, the company’s main presence on the ship, also wound up as an Impostor.
“The first person to turn in this [situation] would be the one who is the most pro-corporation, who, of course, would give themselves willingly to this horrible machine that they’re a part of,” Dennis explained.
Anti-corporate, anti-capitalist messaging was one of the last things I’d expect to see from an Among Us adaptation, but for Dennis, the idea jumped out at him from the sheer isolation of the game’s Crewmates.
“Why isn’t there anybody to help them?” Dennis asked. “There’s so many systems that seem to fail them over and over again throughout this whole process. There’s no government system that can help them. There’s no corporate system that seems to help them. Even when they follow their own rules that are given to them by the corporation, where you have to do a vote, it’s still an extremely imperfect system that can get a lot of innocent people killed.”
Among Us‘ combination of murder mystery tropes and anti-corporate rhetoric became a potent fuel for its Impostor choices, and Dennis wouldn’t have it any other way.
“If there’s anything that I’m always happy to push out into the light of day, it’s how shitty corporations are,” Dennis said.
Among Us is now streaming on Paramount+.
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