silly alenoah au: guy who hates movies (Alejandro) has a meet cute with a prolific Letterboxd reviewer with a Substack (Noah) and has to pretend to like cinema so the guy will date him. routes this could go:
Noah realizes he's lying early on but doesn't say anything because he's curious how far Alejandro will go to keep up the lie; he's also a little charmed by the attempt. Alejandro reads up on movies, becoming a bona fide expert in movie trivia without having seen almost anything, and attends film screenings with Noah (which he occasionally enjoys). Noah keeps trying to get Alejandro to surrender and admit he hates movies and hasn't even seen most of them; eventually, Noah drags him to a six-hour arthouse film that makes Alejandro absolutely lose it, and Noah breaks, revealing that he's known all along.
Alejandro succeeds in convincing Noah that they have a love of film in common, and their relationship evolves from there, until Noah discovers Alejandro was lying from the beginning, and is hurt by the deception, which was elaborate and went on for months. (it's also just an important thing to Noah that Alejandro dislikes and disrespects; he likely would never have given Alejandro a chance at all if he knew they had little in common.) angst abounds as Alejandro struggles to win back Noah's trust. to his disgust, Alejandro ends up watching tons of cheesy romance movies to try to figure out how to fix things.
Alejandro genuinely tries to learn everything he can about film just to impress Noah and accidentally gains a real appreciation for it. he starts spending all his free time watching movies, trying to take notes and make observations the way he'd seen Noah do. he creates his own Letterboxd account for his reviews, which are either insanely pretentious or insanely stupid. he watches every single movie about dinosaurs and ranks them, which accidentally gets him a few hundred followers. Noah eventually discovers all of this and is perplexed.
and every version of this au ends with them kissing at the drive-in theater <3






































