This song is the ending credits song from the 2016 Chinese LGBT-themed web series, Addicted (上癮). I can’t remember how I came across this song in the first place last year, but after I first heard the song, I love it due to its very hummable melody, even though I have not heard or watched the web series. So with lockdown and so much time being trapped at home, I searched the series to watch recently. Then… I realized the wildly popular web series was banned by the Chinese authorities in China after 12 of the 15-episode series were broadcast. Worst still, the two lead actors were also banned by the authorities to appear together in front of the cameras! What, this is the 21st century, and things like this still happened, unbelievable!

The full uncut official 15 episodes including the last 3 un-aired episodes were then uploaded to YouTube (which is also banned in mainland China) by the film company for viewers outside China (here’s the trailer for the series if you want to see what it is all about). Then I found another problem, the end of episode 15 of the web series is NOT the ending to the story! Then I searched again and found out the web series is based on a web fiction, Are You Addicted? (你丫上瘾了?), and the 15-episode web series only covered about the first 1/4 of the full story! Damn! But I wanted to see what happened next! So I searched for the web novel and spent the past couple of weeks reading it, still haven’t finished it yet, got to the end of the main story in book 2, but still got the long epilogue chapters to read yet, LOL… Here’s a warning, the novel is very good if you read it as an adult fantasy fairy-tale LGBT story, but if you want realistic storyline, you will be disappointed. Also there are quite a number of holes in the story which do not match up, but if you can get over that, you will enjoy it nevertheless. There are also a lot of Chinese wordplay in the story which do not necessarily come across if you read the English translation of the novel. For example the names for the main couple, Gu Hai and Bai Luoyin, Gu and Bai are their surnames, put together pronounced as “goodbye”; then if you put Hai and Luoyin together, it is Chinese for “heroin”, the drug, thus the title of the series, Addicted!
OK, back to the song, there are two versions of the music videos, one featuring the two main leads, the other the two side leads. The scenes in the first video with the two main lead actors are actually scenes from the end of book 1 of the novel when they escaped after being tortured by Guhai’s militant father. Whether these scenes were shot especially for the music video, or they were already filmed for the second season which will never see the light of days, I don’t know, but I only realized these scenes were from the actual storyline after reading the novel. There are rumours they are currently filming the sequel in Taiwan, fingers crossed, with new actors, and also the rights of the novel has been bought by some Korean TV networks which means there maybe a Korean reboot of the TV series?
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