A Scholar Dream of Woman

While in Europe movies and series set around the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are quite popular (Downton Abbey, Peaky Blinders, Becoming Jane, The Favorite etc.), it is hard to find such productions in Korea or China. I was pleasantly surprised to find a few such productions on Viki. A Scholar Dream by Woman is from 2015, so it's been 7 years and although there are differences in the quality of production, this series is still pleasant to watch.

Early Republic times, around 1911. Chen Bi Yun, a prodigy from the South is willing to battle for her right to study. In order to find out the truth behind her father's death, she puts her own happiness on the line, risking it all while marrying into Xuan family, wealthy owners of the biggest library. This step, however, instead of bringing her closer to her beloved books, will throw her into internal power struggles between different members of the family.

I was excited to start this series, finally something from a different time period and with quite an interesting story. Unfortunately .... that is for my excitement. The series turned out to be stretched to infinity and painfully boring. Although I tried and rewinded some episodes, I even got to the middle of the series, I couldn't make it. My biggest problem with the drama was story dragging and constant revolvig around the same scences again and again and again. The story as a while wasn't bad, execution was 👎

I don't understand the score this series got on Rakuten Viki - 8.4/10 because for me the series doesn't have more than 5.5/10. Even though I can't get through it myself, I can see how much work was put into it. The actors aren't bad, the story isn't bad either, but the editing is terrible - hundreds of drawn-out scenes, unnecessary takes and scenes that give the show nothing more than extra minutes of length. If we cut the episodes, we would have 30 minutes from 45 minutes, which means the series would be shortened by 30%! 14 episodes less!

Shen Bi Yun, the female lead seems to be quite a complex character but her development and mysterious willingness to stay at Xuan family is annoying and hard to put together. The same goes for the rest of the family. They all have secrets (which is nice and interesting) but characters are not much explained. At this moment they all seem to be 100% of pure idiots. Whom I find interesting there were Old Masters and the youngest son of Xuan family but I am not patient enough to get to their decent development.

When I see comments like "It is also trully entertaining to see how this family cannot adjust to the new times, and hardly can survive wars, Comunist Party, Japanese invasion etc. While they're busy dealing with their own family drama, they also have to face a lot of this historical events... and that's trully what makes this drama worth watching.", I'm a little sad that I gave up but I had a really hard time watching A Schola Dream of a Woman. Maybe one day I will come back to it, who knows....

1 month and 2 abandoned dramas 😖 adding Lady in the Butcher's House to that, we have 3 in one year 😭😨 I hope She and her perfect husband that I'm currently watching, will keep its level and break this Chinese bad streak. It's a shame that all these dramas had too slow development of the story and therefore too many episodes. Having an interesting script and ruining it like that is more than a pity 😯 I would love to see the end of those stories, which some of you say it brilliant, but how?! when going through the drama is a torment!