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"Daemons of the Shadow Realm (Yomi no Tsugai)" TV anime episode 11 stills 

Asa ☀️

Posting this late- oops! I attempted using screentones in Procreate, and it's definitely not the same feeling. Anyways, I still had fun drawing her. I'd like to draw her again in the future and maybe her brother, too.

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Once I saw a world map showing which countries have ever had female heads of state, and which ones were always lead by men. And Hungary was coloured in as having had a female head of state and first I wondered if it was a mistake, then I wondered if they meant the eighteenth-century Habsburg Empress Maria fucking Theresa, then I remembered that Hungary did actually have a female president between 2022-2024. It's just that the president of Hungary had been a ceremonial role for decades. Political leadership is in the hands of the prime minister and his cabinet, the president at best provides some symbolic moral leadership, but mostly they're just window dressing. Katalin Novák, our sole female head of state, never did anything but smile in photographs, and then she was discarded the moment Orbán needed someone disposable to scapegoat for one of scandals. Hungary has never had a woman in a democratically elected head-of-state leadership position, but if you don't know that, you might look at the map and assume our society is far more progressive than it actually is.

And this isn't new. The Hungarian State Socialist system really prided itself on social mobility, and despite them being a dictatorship serving their Soviet overlords, I'll admit that they did facilitate social mobility for women and for the working class. But real social mobility is slow and boring, it takes years if not decades to see the results of poor children going to school and poor adults going to night school. But the party wanted big showy immediate results, so they just picked people and put them in nominal positions of power, mostly for show. Look, there's young female factory workers in our parliament! Yep, because you picked them up and put them there, with like two months of "political training." They are backbenchers who do literally nothing, and the parliament itself does next to nothing. But an outsider who had no context, and operated under the assumption that actual political decision-making took place in the Parliament of State Socialist Hungary, might have assumed that there was far greater social mobility than actually was the case.