‘I don’t want to care’: Fandom, politics and affect in post-2019 Hong Kong

The popularity of Mirror, a 12-member boy group, skyrocketed in Hong Kong in 2021 and attracted a mass following of local fans. This fan wave, however, took over the city at a time of drastic sociopolitical changes following the crackdown of the 2019–2020 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 15 Mirror fans, this article investigates how their fandom relates to the local public sentiments of political frustration, exhaustion and dishope in the post-2019 movement period. The findings show that fandom serves as a form of escape that enables fans to regain affective agency deprived in their political life. This engenders an apparently depoliticised fandom that is in fact entangled with the affective polarisation of the society. Furthermore, the success story of Mirror as ‘fostered idols’, a star-making model popular in East Asia, inspires hopefulness in a time described as hopeless. Instead of reproducing the assumptions that fandom can productively ‘galvanise’ political actions or that political disengagement is to be ‘revitalised’, this article uses Hong Kong’s unique intersection of fandom and politics to re-examine notions of agency and hope in disempowering times.