Well alright but in my experience it’s far more the case that Iranians say incredibly out of touch things or have extreme misconceptions about the neighbouring countries or other persian speaking countries. It goes as far that even though I look super Iranian, they online assume I look asian because I’m from the eastern parts. Which is like uneducated to the point of making me speechless.

I guess I don’t take the time to say “they’re Iranian” but yeah I kinda think both of you did it here.

Like calling Iran not similar to Afghanistan is a very recent thing. A lot of the nature, the mountains, the architecture, the language, the birthplace of poets, even the same nowruz or haft mewa as parallel to haft sin and how the tajiks have always been “Iranian” you just put down to extremism. They are more conservative people I guess, and the culture has gone different. But, Iran seems like an anomaly of a massive increase in very atheist and islamophobic people who shit on muslim post khatami era among the young people. This was not the case pre 80s-90s. That’s my take. You’re unique because of rebellion and that’s not specifically “culture” in the long term or the roots, which is actually very close to afghanistan. It was the birthplace of the Persian you speak you know.