Is OTHER wrong in the post ? POST : This is a bit older, but I only just found this sub and this has brought a twinge of confused feelings every time I think about it. 

A few semesters ago, I was in a film class where, for one assignment, we came up with an "elevator pitch" about a historical fiction script we would like to write. These were then voted on to find which were the "coolest", and those whose pitches weren't chosen were assigned to work on the projects of those who were. 

I gave a pitch about a man who converted to Voodoo as an actual faith system and had the misfortune to move to Salem during the witch trials. It was popular enough to be voted in, and I was assigned a fellow classmate, a mixed-race female, to work with me. Since I feel it pertinent for the story to mention her sex/race, I need to tell you that I am a white male. 

Right from the start of working together, it becomes apparent that she missed some key details from my pitch and had a different idea for the story. I wanted to write about a realistic Voodoo practitioner, as in a follower of the actual religion who believed it was a "good" faith meant to help others. She wanted to go into the mystical magical voodoo trope. She kept wanting there to be spirits and spells that actually worked in the plot, and I kept shutting her down. I had a reason in my mind to do so: I wanted this to highlight religious tensions and fears where the community judges a believer to be evil based off of incomplete information about the faith, such as Islamaphobia. She wasn't necessarily against that theme, but neither did she seem to care about it. In fact my number 1 problem seemed to be she didn't have any overarching thematic ideas at all. As far as I could tell, she just wanted to write a compelling conflict with cool effects, without any thought as to what it meant, and real voodoo would heighten the wow factor. I didn't want real voodoo though because I felt actually seeing spells operate would have given some justification to the Salem townsfolk, and would thus ruin the message I was trying to convey. If she was trying to take the story a different way for a reason, she never revealed that reasoning.

I argued my view a bit forcefully. I also tried to make sure I said "I want to know your opinions and reasonings" each time I did so, but every time, her ideas conflicted that core theme I wanted. So I explained why I didn't want to go that route yet again, and it ended up being me repeatedly turning down her ideas. I worry that, because I repeatedly said "no", she thought my offers to accept her advice were hollow. I sincerely wasn't *trying* to reject everything, it just honestly felt like every suggestion she made was running counter to my theme. 

Eventually, she said something along the lines of "I guess I just misunderstood your story from your pitch. I don't want to work on this one, just do whatever you want." That hurt. I see myself as trying to be a fair man and a feminist, but seeing how she shut up, I could see in her eyes that she thought I had "mansplained" her out of the project. During the actual writing, I asked her repeatedly for how she wanted it to be written. I find that I come up with overarching ideas fairly well, but am not the best dialogue or action writer, so this was where I truly needed help and I tried to show this to her. She gave minimal feedback and stuck around for the minimum required amount (since this was a graded group project). Then she basically had me finish it on my own. For what it was worth, I accepted all of her input about dialogue and action while writing the actual script (sometimes even when I didn't 100% agree), but of course, at that point she had given up and was just trying to agree with me and get the project done.

So AITA? The idea was mine to begin with, and I had a theme and idea which I tried to do my best to convey in the pitch, but it didn't get across to her until she was actually assigned to my project. Her ideas weren't bad in and of themselves, but they didn't match my theme, so I rejected them. I tried to give her opportunity for input, but after arguing so long before even starting, she gave up and left me to do a group project pretty much alone. Part of me says I was justified because I was defending the core idea of the story, which was mine and which was chosen for the assignment. The other part feels horrible for not allowing a mixed-race female voice to be heard, since we need more of such voices in the industry imo, and I can't forget that look she gave me when she gave up.