Shang Yin

An absolute beautiful story of friendship, romance, family, and love and how you can find that one person that can become and give you all of the above.

I don't watch Chinese BL, but Addicted is my one exception. It harnesses a story that is so deep and so real, but also so very magical. I just so happen to enjoy a love story that involves at least a passionate kiss, which is why I avoid Chinese BL, because most often, due to rigid standards, that is not included in the packaging. But Addicted is a stand-out in the fact that it portrayed a very real concept of a blooming love with its own interesting concept of family intercepting with romance and how love can find that crack in the cement to grow from. Addicted is, in and of itself, that tiny sprout that found the sun to grow in even the darkest and harshest of environments.

Bravo to every single person who made this show and didn't hold back to let viewers behold such a passionate love. It's honestly a travesty that a season 2 of this series, with the same cast, will never see the light of day. But it's also a frickin incredible feat that this series even aired as many episodes as it did before it had the plug pulled. Even still, here we are, seven years later, and China disallows same-sex kissing on screen. But no matter any of that, Addicted exists and is loved by so many, including me, because it spits in the eye of every dinosaur out there that would prefer to pretend that love has to be held within certain gender specifics.

This is a beautifully acted, well-done, incredibly wonderful story of two Chinese men who found love, regardless of familial and societal standards, and overcame their hardships, misunderstandings, and seemingly insurmountable odds to give the care and adoration that they so greatly needed, and receive the love that only the other can give, in a setting that made it all feel so very natural and real.

I make no pretense of knowing how this series plays in its own country other than through additional critical sources appearing on You Tube, where I found it with English subtitles. Nor do I think it likely ever to reach a large audience outside places where Mandarin Chinese is a native language. That is a pity, because it holds universal appeal in both story and visual authenticity.

That is not to say it is without faults. I had to watch it twice to make sure I got all the dramatic nuances and cultural elements just right. For example, the title in English is "Addicted (Heroin)" a very confusing construction that does not become transparent until late in the game when a casual conversation reveals that the Chinese equivalent of "heroin" can result from combining two literal configurations of the names of the two main fictional characters, thus establishing the premise that they have become "addicted" to each other. A bilingual viewer would presumably know that immediately.

Briefly, the plot centers on two high school students in Beijing falling gradually in love with each other over a period of several winter months. An element of suspense is created by having one of the students resistant at first to the advances of the other, then gradually finding that both are able to slough off earlier love affairs and interruptions in their daily lives to come together in the end. A partly original, partly borrowed musical score accentuates the story.

So much for that. What makes this series unique, however, is the critical and political firestorm it created. Originally conceived from a popular novel, a planned eighteen-part drama was cut short by official censors who presumably found its sexual content objectionable (though by Western standards no more than a likely PG rating). Nevertheless, the fifteen episodes that made it through to the internet have found an appreciative audience in the tens of millions across much of East Asia and into places where films from mainland China normally consist of flashy acrobatics and graphic violence.

As noted, viewers depending on English subtitles may have to juggle their controls a bit to jump smoothly from one episode to the next, but I think the result will justify the effort. This is a heart-warming narrative that, in my judgment , goes far in humanizing ordinary life in China, which makes it all the more ironic that the Chinese government so determined to present a favorable face to the world would have chosen to ignore its virtues.

Incidentally, if the two main characters seem a bit old to be high school students, at least one speaks of having completed his military obligation. I will leave it to others to ferret out bits of trivia.

This was an amazing show, especially for a web series (usually poor quality) the cast is great Xu Weizhou (Bai Lou yin) & Huang Jingyu (Gu Hai) have a great screen presence and a natural chemistry together which really helps to tell the story. It is a HUGE shame that the show was banned in China and that the actors are not allowed to be near each other all because it focuses around a gay love story which is very unfair as there is absolutely Nothing wrong with being gay, it's not a choice to be gay, you are born that way, why would anyone chose to be gay and put up with constant hatred and belittling being thrown at them 24/7 ?? Anyway apologies for the side tracking but China needs to lift the ban and accept everyone equally in their society and let these stories be shared because we need a season 2 of this show, it ended on an ENORMOUS cliff hanger and I need answers!! Come on people of China, please bring this show back.

Stories like Shang Yin need to be told, it's 2021 the world is changing for the better, there are plenty of BL series being made in Chinese now even on big streaming networks like Netflix. So please bring this back, even if you have to film outside of China to do it

It is not very ' in your face ' type bl , it's soft , light hearted .....left me wanting for more . Episodes felt shorter . So sad we can't get a season two . In many scenes I could feel a connection with those characters , and that's the best part of all of it The reason I gave it 8 and not 10 is .. Da hai ( if I name correctly ) in some moments felt pretensious .some scenes were totally wrong yet it ended well , which some could argue HOW ! ...

I found this mini-series on imdb via "People who liked this also liked...". I looked it up on Wikipedia and it says "web series", so I guess the only way to watch this is on You-tube or related sites. I was a bit sceptical and did not expect much of it. However, I was very nicely surprised. First I have to say that neither Mandarin nor English is my native language and I had to make do with spoken Mandarin and rather poorly translated subtitles which disappeared very fast, so I may have missed many of the details of the dialogues. This series is almost exclusively about the rather special relationship between the handsome main characters Luo Yin and Gu Hai. They are related through Luo's mother and Gu's Father who, after both divorces, began a new relationship, but the lads do not know that. Luo is rather poor and Gu is wealthy. The two meet in school and in the beginning Gu is bullying Luo, but as the series proceed this stops and Gu gets more and more obsessed to Luo. It's an extraordinary combination of love and power. The constant attempts of Gu to conquer Luo and the sometimes faint resistances of Luo are very touching. The secondary characters are mostly decent as well, but Luo (Timmy Xu) en Gu (Johnny Huang) really make this series. It certainly has its downsides as well. Especially the music was a little inconvenient from time to time. Sometimes, for some reason I had to think of the computer game the Sims. Also, the frequent score of Brokeback Mountain was not in its place. Only the song of Twinbed in one of the final episodes was completely in its place. From time to time there were some scenes where I had a little doubts. Things like in class where Luo is sleeping constantly and the teacher doesn't say anything about it. But that did not bother me much at all. According to the info I have read on the internet this series has been cancelled and banned in China and the actors have been banned to do any future acting. This really is a sad fact and proves that there is still a lot of discrimination in the world. A few scenes were also censored (Can't understand why at all), but you can watch them separately on You-Tube. There are 15 episodes and I have enjoyed all of them. It has its flaws, but the main characters (and many other actors) are playing so well that I can easily forgive all of this. 8/10 for this unique series.