ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses images shared on Instagram in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena attack, where a suicide bomb killed 22 people and injured over 800. Manchester quickly became a site of public memorial, and so too did Instagram, where users united to share thousands of tribute images. Amongst these online communities, the most prominent was Grande’s fans, “Arianators”, who saturated #PrayForManchester with remixed photographs and fan art. The images highlight the incongruent ways in which users engage with mediatised conflicts on a platform like Instagram, where irreverent topics, branded practices and highly personalised reflections collide. The intersection of community interactions with a conflict event diversifies and yet standardises expressions of public mourning, shaping the way a conflict like Manchester is constituted, but also raising tensions around redirection and co-optation of grief. The chapter explores how responses to the attack are conveyed through the lens of routine fan practices, such as celebrating Grande, but in doing so, these practices risk supplanting commemoration of the attack. Despite tensions around appropriative fan engagement, the images shared by Arianators account for some of the most enduring symbols of the Manchester attack to date.
