Shared hobbies get harder to enjoy when one person turns them into a competition.

So, what would you do if the sibling who once bonded with you over movies started treating every conversation like a test of taste, pushing extreme film recommendations you had no interest in and calling you closed-minded when you declined?

Would you try to reconnect? Or would you just give it up?

In the following story, one sibling finds himself in this dilemma and is leaning toward the latter.

Here’s what’s going on.

AITA for disregarding my sibling’s movie recommendations

Both my older sibling (NB21) and I (M19) are big fans of movies. We both grew up with a shared love of the cinema and, as a result, grew up to have a deep love of the art of filmmaking.

Our tastes diverged around high school, and we kind of naturally grew distant at the same time, but we would still bond over that shared love. Now I’m in college, and they live at home with my mom, and we don’t talk super often.

I got a job at a movie theater last summer and got to see as many movies as I wanted for free, so when I moved back to college over the school year, I kept up my hobby with an AMC stubs membership.

He likes movies that are obscure but still in theatres.

I like to go to the movies between 1 and 3 times a week to keep up with what’s coming out and strengthen my skills with media criticism.

I consider my taste to be medium levels of out there because most of the movies I end up liking are somewhat obscure and artsy. Not so obscure that they don’t hit theaters, but still somewhat obscure.

I mention this only because my sibling takes great pride in how unknown the movies they watch are. They also watch a great deal more movies than I do. In one month, they were able to pack away 80 movies (unemployed).

His sibling likes a totally different type of film.

Their most frequented streaming service is Tubi, and I rag on them a bit for this, but it’s all in good fun.

The conflict is that I’ll often text them after seeing a movie and tell them what I think about it because even though our tastes don’t really overlap, we still have that shared interest.

Recently, however, they’ve been giving me recommendations for movies that I frankly have absolutely no interest in seeing.

They never agree on movies.

They’ve also recommended five-hour-long splatterpunk films that I just find absolutely unpleasant and probably one of the worst ways I could spend what little free time I have.

Whenever I tell them I probably won’t be watching their movie recommendations, they tend to get upset and claim I’m shooting down their bids for connection. They’re making all of these recommendations in response to the movies I see, asserting how much better their taste in film is.

Recently, in response to my poor review of Wicked 2, they gave me a slew of unappealing recommendations and said I was “submitting [myself] to the mainstream.”

He thinks he should just stop talking to his sibling about it.

They seem to have an odd sense of superiority when it comes to their taste in films.

To be clear, I enjoy a great deal of foreign movies, but they act as if a movie being foreign automatically makes it better. To them, obscurity might as well be as important as cinematography or score.

My problem here is that the only way to appease them, to my understanding, is to put myself through a curated selection of the world’s most unpleasant and distressing movies and act like I don’t hate them. I should probably just stop talking to them about the movies I see. It’s just not fun anymore.

AITA?

Geez. It’s not shocking that they have different tastes in movies. This is actually pretty common.

Let’s see how the readers over at Reddit felt about this story.

Here’s someone who agrees that they treat it like a competition.

For this person, people have different tastes.

Yet another person who thinks it’s common to have different tastes in movies.

He should find a new topic, because it seems like they’re having a harder and harder time talking about this one.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.