Social media has definitely been abuzz with the breakout of singer/rapper Shanin Blake, who has been making the discourse rounds as the "Hippe Tiktok Girl", courting various controveries about everything from cultural appropriation to petty complaints about not finding her a pleasant listen. However, it is interesting to note her asthetic and style--A very aryan-looking woman (albeit one who claims Native ancetry), who adopts dreadloks, henna tatoos, and infuses indiginous spirituality into hip hop music, and with a somewhat suggestive, titilating manner of dresss akin to many contemporary pop stars (in a way even liberated counterculrutal figures of usually weren't). In short, she is a complete anachronism, which makes her something to take note of when looking at the project.
The Pacific Northwest is the area the site has covered the least, and likely one of the many reasons is that what it'd chronicling what it would be like is the boldest "prediction". In the present day, is a realm of contradictions. Osentisbly foward thinking and unorthodox trailblazers who reject tradition (particilarly Western tradition) a day's away from nature and who's population is inordinately white. In the established canon of Medieval America, they are an almost completely isolated and "hemmed in" civillization, albeit one with an embarrasment of resources. But what makes them especially hard to picture is they are collection of city states, the most prominent being those of Italy, but those of the Meditarrenean Antiquity would do as well. And that is tough to square with a society that draws as much from Asia (where we typically think of things like Imperial China, Feudal Japan, the Mongol Hordes, or even Tibet), and quite possibly the Indginous tribes White never specifically mentions, but would logical bleed into them by trade or war. And even if "Medieval Hippie' is thereotically not hard to imagine (the counter-culture sort of intentionally going for a more tribal look), they're at odds with the materialism and structure one thinks of when they think "city state", even one from thousands of years ago.
After a fashion, Blake might provide a foundatin, or a window into this. Her mishmash of cultures into something very opulent, one might say affected might fit very well for a society that has its root in a professed love for nature and easy vibes, but has not reached a point of affluence, even decadence. A civillization that has always had one foot in the east, one foot in the west, one eye on the past and the other in the future. A rapping hippie from Utah who has curated a rather over the top and colorful look might just be what you see when you visit Oregon or Seattle in 2900.
