Unwanted audienceship, audience resilience: A case study of the MIRROR incident in Hong Kong

29 July 2022. A large, heavy video panel fell from the ceiling during a concert by Hong Kong boy band MIRROR. Two dancers were injured, one critically. Footage showed how the giant screen landed directly on one dancer, hitting his neck. Audiences were screaming. Chaos. Organisers axed the show; the concert series was cancelled. Video of the crash went viral on social media, reaching more viewers than the 10,000 people at the venue. Soon, angry posts were published accusing organisers and producers of neglecting safety regulations, silent prayers were mobilised for the injured, and events were held to offer support to anyone who needed it. This chapter draws on audience responses to this traumatic incident, to the ways they cared for, collectivised, and consoled themselves to survive what they saw, how they made sense and made do. I will revisit two of my earlier audience studies, published in 2008 and 2019. The first examines Dutch-Chinese men's negotiation of masculine identity through watching martial arts film. The second takes Shanghai single women's passion for Kunqu - a Chinese operatic genre - as a lens to scrutinise their affective community. Building on the latest inquiry into the MIRROR incident, the chapter foregrounds two dimensions of audience studies. First, unwanted audienceship: sometimes they (e.g., the MIRROR incident viewers) are not audiences by choice (unlike those watching martial arts films, or Kunqu). Second, audience resilience: morphing out of identity negotiation and affective community formation is the possibility to understand audiences in terms of resilience, as testified by the MIRROR case.