LAST EDITED ON Oct-01-20 AT 08:55 PM (EDT)
 
>I hadn't even considered opera, though I suppose in hindsight I should
>have (not sure Meiling would be a huge fan, but she's generally
>agreeable enough and if it makes Sakuya smile she's likely to be all
>for it.)

(nod) Meiling would enjoy an occasion like that more for the sense of, well, occasion, and the whole Family Outing thing, than on the merits of the art itself—although she likes Big Performances, so Wagner would probably appeal, even though she doesn't understand the language it's in. At any rate, she is at least sophisticated enough that it wouldn't be like the episode of Cheers where Diane dragged the whole gang from the bar to Lohengrin.

CLIFF
(peering at the orchestra through opera glasses)
Hey, Normie, check out the warheads on that cellist, huh?

Also (speaking of), going to the opera means Sakuya wears that dress, which... well. That beats a sharp stick in the eye any day of the week.

(I think the artist was trying to Make A Point about the tired old fan trope of "Sakuya pads her bra" with that outfit. :)

That said, of the house's five "current" residents, I can see Meiling as the only one willing to sit through an entire performance of Love Amongst the Dragons. She probably even knows the libretto.

>>I like these a lot, especially Remi's. I feel like she might adopt
>>that as a battle uniform if and when she formally joins the war
>>effort. The skirt's quite short by her usual standards, but when in
>>Rome...
>
>Heh, i hadn't thought of that as an excuse for the usual Danbooru
>habit of 'even our clean stuff is slightly risque'. Though I suppose
>also a shorter skirt (possibly with some leggings/tights) would be
>better for battle than something fancy and flowing.

Yeah, you don't want to go into aerial combat wearing anything that's going to cause drag.

>>(And Flan is scandalizing the witches with her blatant wearing of
>>shorts, proving that they could too if they wanted to. :)
>
>I could swear I've seen one or two Strike Witches characters in what
>look like bike shorts (that might be another rabbit hole I fall down
>now.)

In addition to the ones who routinely wear pantyhose (e.g., Perrine, Sanya) or heavy tights (every witch from Suomus I've ever seen), there is at least one canonical witch, albeit one who never appears in the TV series, who wears actual trousers—Adolfine Galland, who appears in the World Witches artbook in Molly Millions-style very tight leather jeans. I think Hanna Rudel might as well.

>At this point they might well be chalking it up to tradition
>though, "the first witches in the war just had to jump right into
>their strikers, no time to find or make shorts, and we honor them by
>continuing to fly dressed as they were."

The anime never attempts to explain the phenomenon, but there's some inconsistency about whether it's only witches who dress that way or what. For instance, there are a couple of scenes set in the hospital where Trude's younger sister is a patient during the first season, and none of the nurses are wearing pants or skirts either; it's unclear whether that's supposed to mean they're also witches (albeit noncombatant ones), or if it's just that no young woman in the World Witches universe wears lower garments, and if the latter, what the heck is up with that. I think probably the animators just got carried away.

(There are also some Imperial Fusō Army witches in the sourcebooks who dress in modified miko outfits with abbreviated, but still present, hakama, presumably because they would either not be wearing underwear, or would be wearing fundoshi, which are even harder to sell than normal panties under the "not underwear so it's not embarrassing" rubric.)

For OWaW purposes, I haven't explored it on-screen either, but I've been proceeding under the assumption that it's some kind of strange cultural thing with the fighting witches, possibly stemming from War I (and it may, as you say, have something to do with the emergency nature of early witch aviation), and that "normal" girls and women (e.g., Liesel from the Hartmann Flying School seen in Alternate Arrangements) do dress like women did IRL in 1946. OTOH, retired witches like Wilma (when she first appears) and Francie Whittle still dress as if they were on active duty. (To be fair, this may reflect how much they both wish they were still on active duty.)

>All the details in that piece were too good to sit on, plus for the
>most part the energy in the poses and expressions struck me as
>excellent, particularly Remilia and Meiling (who looks like she's just
>about to get into a fight and thinking "buddy, you're about to
>experience what I do best, hope you've got good healthcare.")

This reminds me—somewhere in DBland there is a short MeiSaku manga where they go on a date in the Normal World, and Meiling is late. Because it's that kind of manga, Sakuya is promptly set upon by a pair of Standard Creeper Dudes (you know, the faceless young men who travel in packs of two or three and hit on girls they see standing around alone—"Looks like you got stood up, why don't you hang out with us?").

Sakuya being Sakuya, she's surreptitiously reaching for the sharp objects when Meiling suddenly shows up and beats the crap out of both dudes—not to be particularly white-knight-y toward Sakuya, so much as to preclude her from just murdering them in the street. It's a rare depiction of Meiling being fully genre-savvy and I am here for it, as the young people say. :)

(She then maneuvers Sakuya into a formalwear shop and Just Sorta Casually gets her to try on a wedding dress, which is probably the smoothest you will ever see Meiling being, if you happen to run across that manga. :)

--G.
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