I Cannot Hug You / Untouchable [无法拥抱的你]

♥♥♥/♥♥ 

TITLE: I Cannot Hug You / Untouchable  [无法拥抱的你]
ORIGINAL AIR DATE: November 20, 2017 to March 12, 2018 
WIKI: n/a
SEASONS/EPISODES: 2 seasons, 32 half-hour episodes total. 
US AVAILABILITY (as of 2018-11-11): Viki (free w/ads) 

Overview: 
This Chinese drama is based on the Korean webtoon "Untouchable." In the webtoon, vampires have evolved to no longer need to drink blood to survive, but can absorb a human's energy just by skin-to-skin contact. An impulsive young vampiress named Sia Lee becomes obsessed with a human man after a brief (but apparently delicious- haha) hand to hand touch. She has never failed in the hunt before, but this particular prey happens to be germophobic, making him quite resistant to skinship. 

(Warning, if you're interested in reading the webtoon, I would say it's inappropriate for kids based on both the images and content. As a model, the main female character is often depicted wearing little more than underwear for photo shoots. We also read her lustful thoughts for the human male and see her dreams/daydreams of him shirtless, in addition to her male childhood vampire friend constantly saying inappropriate things to and about her.) 

Basic summary: 

Popular model Li Shiya is a modern vampire who feels suffocated by her overprotective family. In this drama version, her father runs a stable and gives riding lessons, a family business that affords many opportunities to casually touch the humans who come to ride horses without absorbing enough energy from any single human to raise suspicions. He drills into his family, especially Shiya, that a vampire should never take more than the minimum amount of energy needed to survive, which is a total of 3 minutes of skin-to-skin contact every day. If a vampire goes a week without consuming human energy, they can die of starvation. Shiya is a bit of a "food"-addict and would love to "eat" as much as she could of many tasty humans every day, but her father is extra strict with her- strangely even moreso than with her older sister and younger brother. 

One day Shiya has had it with her controlling father and runs away, getting her own apartment and setting out to "eat" her fill of tasty humans. She accidentally-on-purpose bumps into a man carrying a stack of books, with the intent of accidentally-on-purpose touching his hand when she goes to help him pick up the spilled books. The touch lasts seconds, if that, but it's a taste Shiya won't soon forget, so delicious it practically spoils her appetite for anything else. The human man isn't pleased and jerks his hand away, shortly accusing her of being a stalker who keeps following him around trying to touch him, before stalking off and leaving her sputtering. Shiya is highly offended and complains to her psychotherapist sister Lanxi and her childhood best friend Simba that someone falsely accused her of being a stalker. And all of her social media... haha. As she's unpacking in her new apartment later, she opens a box that contains... children's books?! It's a misdelivered package that actually belongs to her new next door neighbor, a reclusive author by the name of Jiang Zhihao. Upon attempting to return the package to it's rightful owner, she finds out he's the delicious human from before... he reiterates his stalker accusation over the intercom and refuses to emerge to claim his package. Shiya decides to keep his package hostage then until he comes to apologize and ask for it, at which time she plans to refuse to open the door for him as revenge. After going drinking with her popstar BFF Simba and his human best friend Shihuan, expressing her frustrations by describing her craving for Zhihao as being like craving fried chicken, Shiya saves Zhihao's phone number off the misdelivered package under the name "Fried Chicken." Shiya finds out about Zhihao's germophobic tendencies, and also winds up stopping the REAL stalker from touching him, but to her frustration, instead of being thankful enough to touch her, Zhihao claims she's no better than the stalker anyway. 
Meanwhile Zhihao finds out that he can't just reorder those books from the internet as they are out of stock everywhere now. (We find out later the importance of those specific books!) When he has to go to Shiya to ask for his books back, she has hatched a plan to make Zhihao date her in return for his books. Her plan is that in the course of dating him she will "cure" him of his germophobia so that he'll let her touch him. 

Flow and sequence: 

The plot of Season 1 is half about Shiya's schemes to get Zhihao cured of his germophobia so she can "eat" him and the two of them falling in love with each other in the course of it, and half about a mystery entity kidnapping vampires and performing experiments on them. The plot of season 2 is about Zhihao and Shiya having to overcome each thinking they are protecting the other with their secrecy, but by their lack of communication they are actually making everything worse.  

Cast and acting: 

This drama seemed to be overacted a little for comedic effect, especially near the beginning, but not nearly as much as some dramas I've seen. I think the actors and actresses did a great job with what they were given. I was especially impressed with Xu Kai Cheng's acting skills as CEO Cui and Su Ze Yuan's acting skills as Shihuan. 

Writing and directing: 

The original webtoon was well written and engaging. The characters' behavior was believable. I felt like the writers for the drama adapted it well, keeping it very close to the storyline in the webtoon. Where changes were made that diverted the drama from the webtoon, I feel those changes were beneficial to the film portrayal and kept the storyline cohesive. 

Characters (contains spoilers):
The storyline itself is a fresh take on the old vampire lore, and having the vampire be the female and the human male be a germ-freak makes for good plot twists and a lot of options for turning the old drama tropes around backward. For example, Li Shiya lustily pins Zhihao against a wall at one point and down on the couch at another, as he cringes away afraid of cooties. Then in season 2, we get to see Zhihao being manly and protecting her more, not just taking the lead in their relationship physically when she's shying away afraid to hurt him, but also with his beautiful writer's brain as he expertly goes all Sherlock Holmes and solves the mystery of who is out to hurt Shiya, why, and how.
Simba struggles with abandonment issues from being orphaned and unhealthy people-pleasing and fixation on Shiya as a savior-figure who gave him a home where he was finally understood. Zhihao also struggles with abandonment issues after his mother left him by default when she walked out on his cold workaholic father. Instead of people-pleasing, his symptoms manifest as an OCD.
Season 1 antagonist CEO Cui has tortured himself with the guilt of unintentionally having killed his first love, to the point where he has delusions that even if it took killing Shiya and Zhihao in the course of resurrecting his dead love, doing so would somehow absolve him of that guilt. Talk about serious mental issues. Even Shiya's family struggles with properly dealing with what happened with Shiya's childhood friend in season 2- Shiya's parents and older sister are overly strict and overprotective hoping to not have a repeat of the situation, but instead of giving her the knowledge and power to avoid duplicating her mistakes, they are relying on keeping her in the dark and controlling her. Shiya is chaffing from being so strictly controlled and aching to be free to make her own choices as an adult, and almost repeats a nearly-deadly mistake from childhood in her quest to make her own decisions even if it means direct disobedience to her parents and sister.
The whole series, Shihuan wholeheartedly loves Simba who only has eyes for Shiya. I found the contrast between the wholely unselfish way Shihuan loves Simba and the entirely self-serving way Simba loves Shiya quite profound. He defends him and stands by him, letting himself be used and abused as a human battery/ emergency food supply and never asking anything in return. In the end, he sees Simba starting down the path of evil and finally turns his back on him, which I suspect might have been the only thing that prevented Simba from totally turning evil in the end. After that, unless I missed it, we don't get to see what ever happened to Shihuan. The love Shihuan had for Simba was so pure and unselfish, so unsexual (in the webtoon it was more of a crush-love, but in the drama it's portrayed as a very pure kind of love), that I couldn't help but see beauty in it. Even the love between Shiya and Zhihao was more selfish and far more lust-based at times, making the truly self-sacrificing way Shihuan unchangingly cared for Simba bring me to tears. 

Other: 

If you're not familiar with Chinese dramas, the dubbing may catch you off guard. Many Chinese dramas have all the lines and sound effects re-recorded for volume and accent consistency and then dubbed over the video! In some of the older Chinese dramas I've seen, the dubbing is not in sync with their lips much if at all and it bothered me terribly! In this particular drama, the vocal re-recording is fairly well done and well synchronized (though still obvious it's dubbed over), so IMO one can get used to it quickly and get absorbed in the show without too much distraction. 

Happy Ending Factor? 

Both seasons ended happily for Shiya and Zhihao, though some of the side characters fared less pleasantly. There were some loose ends in the end of season 2 of the drama that were actually wrapped up a little better in the webtoon.  

(SPOILER SECTION! SKIP to Final Summary if you don't want to know how it ends!) 

At the end of Season 1, Yu Ze (the boyfriend of Shiya's manager Xu Quingran) kills himself out of guilt for the atrocities his underlings committed in his name, so if suicide is a trigger for you, you may wish to avoid this drama altogether or at least skip the rest of the episode when it looks like that part is impending. Quingran just thinks he's in prison and we don't see any resolution to that.
At the end of Season 2, Shiya and Zhihao are back together but we don't get any explanation as to how they can be together now after having it drilled into our brains all 2nd season that Shiya is so powerful she could accidentally kill him at any moment. However in the Webtoon, it was indicated that after sharing half her power with Zhihao to save his life, her powers were no longer a danger to him! We see Shiya and Zhihao back together and find out that when the child Shiya was in the hospital unconscious, having given up on her own life after nearly killing a friend, it was a child Zhihao who saved her life. Which brings up the question of what if Shiya and Zhihao have a child together... I don't remember that being addressed in the webtoon and the drama does not clear it up either; no it leaves us hanging on that question with the ending of the first season still lingering in our minds. Remembering the hopeless halfbreed Yu Ze killing himself because he spent his short life sparing no cost to try to live past 30 and wound up buried under the guilt before he could find a cure. So if Shiya and Zhihao have a half breed baby, what will be that child's fate? 

Final Summary: 

Very interesting drama that kept my interest throughout the series. No slow patch in the middle of the series- it mostly kept a steady pace. I think it took me 3 days to binge watch this entire drama! I watched the first season in 1 day, and then took 2 days for the second season. I liked how the characters struggled with deep and profound issues that took more than a few minutes in dramaland to work through. 

Check out I Cannot Hug You [无法拥抱的你] on Viki! 
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