A woman revealed on social media that an argument over Black Widow led to the end of her two-year relaitionship with her boyfriend (with her now needing to move out of their shared apartment) due to his anger over her calling him a "gatekeeper" after he dismissed her opinion about Black Widow.
The poster shared her dilemma on the popular Reddit forum, "Am I The Asshole?" where people write in about interpersonal conflicts in their lives and then anonymous Reddit users vote on whether they were the "asshole" of the situation, whether the other person was the asshole, whether neither were assholes or whether everybody involved was an asshole (the vote is done by virtue of upvoting comments containing judgments on the scenario. The most popular judgment is the "official" judgment for the thread. So even if the majority of comments say that the person posting is "not the asshole," if the most popular comment says "you're the asshole," then that is the "official" judgment).
The woman opened up by explaining the initial conflict that occurred after she watched Black Widow with her boyfriend, "We just finished watching the Black Widow movie, and I told him that I really loved the beginning but towards the middle all the action scenes seemed a bit messy and convoluted and ended up not enjoying it as much. He then said that it was because I didn’t understand some “inside” easter eggs because I haven’t watched like 50% of the Marvel movies."
When she contradicted him, he shifted tactics, "The thing is, I have watched them, and I’m only missing Infinity War. He proceeds to call me a liar and changed his narrative saying that I haven’t REALLY watched them because I didn’t sit down and watched them in order, and because I haven’t talked to him about the other movies. I explained to him that I had a life before him, that he can’t tell me that I haven’t watched something I watched BEFORE i even met him, and that it is annoying that he keeps insisting that I haven’t watched something and calling me a liar. He even wanted to go through every Marvel movie for me to tell him what they were about and prove to him that I have watched them and that I remember them, because even if I have watched them, if I don’t remember small details it means that I haven’t REALLY watched them."
She then pushed back, "Anyway, I told him he sounds like a gatekeeper by telling me that I can’t comment or something or that I don’t like something because I dont meet his standards of what it means to REALLY watch a marvel movie, and that the timeline and the character relationships are not difficult to understand, I can connect the dots when watching the movies, it’s not rocket science."
He slept on the couch out of anger and in an update (after the Reddit users all voted her "not the asshole"), she revealed that the relationship is apparently now over, as he continued to be defensive over the term the next day.
A fascinating wrinkle that the poster added in a follow-up comment is that the two had not yet watched Loki yet because, "he said that we will watch it... after I sit down with him and marathon all the marvel movies so I can really understand Loki," which is particularly amusing since she noted, "I’ve been obsessed with Loki since Thor came out and back in the day I ran a Tumblr fan blog on Tom Hiddleston as Loki haha. It’s not that I haven’t watched the movies, it’s that I haven’t watched them in a certain order and I don’t talk about them a lot, especially since I am not the biggest fan of the latest marvel releases."
The poster deleted the thread on Reddit, but it lives on in Twitter reprints of the thread. Naturally, with anonymous posters on Reddit, the standard "this could just be an elaborate fiction" disclaimer applies.