And then there's Adolfine Galland, who wears Molly Millions-style tight leather jeans, but only when not operating her Striker. If part of the rationale behind witches not normally wearing pants is that they have to be able to get them off in a hurry, Adolfine's magical gift must be taking off hard-to-take-off pants really fast. (Canonically it's witch eye, the same as Mio.)

>>By this
>>point it's just a Thing that witches Do, in order to differentiate
>>themselves from normies.
>
>There might be some of this already even without the rest of it... at
>least I coulda sworn there was a scene with a non-combatant witch who
>still dressed the same way. (In OWaW I mean... I think.)

If it was in OWaW, that was an error, given how many other places the narration specifically notes someone identifying a stranger as a witch based on her mode of dress.

It does turn up in a couple of places in the first Strike Witches TV series, although in at least one case it seems more like a production error and in another it's kind of ambiguous. In the first episode, Yoshika's schoolmates are all dressed like she always is, in a school swimsuit under a sailor blouse, as if it's their school's uniform--including her cousin Michiko, who is explicitly described as a non-witch--but then Yoshika goes on to wear the same outfit throughout her career with the 501st, suggesting that it is in fact the uniform of an enlisted naval witch aviator. ... Until Shizuka shows up in the movie wearing a different enlisted witch uniform, which looks like Mio's except with a different-color jacket.

(Also, Micchan is a huge witch fangirl, so she might be dressing like one just because of that. Although that doesn't explain the rest of their class, so I'm still going with "they just didn't think that hard about it." :)

Meanwhile, other Fusō witches you see along the way are either dressed like Mio (e.g., Junko Takei), or similarly to Yoshika but in different colors (such as the protag of Brave Witches, Hikari Karibuchi). So I dunno what's going on there, and I'm not 100% sure the production staff really thought it through.

On the other other hand, the nurses at the hospital where the still-comatose Chris Barkhorn was being looked after in season one were also rocking it witch-style, and there was never any indication either way as to whether they were witches. Again, I think that's probably a matter of the production staff not really having bothered to think it through.

Anyway, inconsistencies in the source material (and possible errors on my own part) aside, my thought process in OWaW has always been that the no-pants thing is a Witch Thing and has been since before the advent of aviation, its origins lost to history--but that times are slowly changing, which is the main reason why witches from some countries sport different gear in this war. For instance, they say that Suomi and Orussian witches wear tights because it's cold in their countries, but witches' powers make them largely indifferent to that sort of thing, and does that apply to Gallia too? Meanwhile, Imperial Fusonese Navy witches are well-known for their swimsuits, not underpants. Likewise, Captain von Preußen has the excuse that she doesn't operate a Striker, and her skirt is very short by the standards of the 1940s, but she does wear one as part of her Reichsmarine uniform.

As Striker performance advances, we may see further changes out of necessity as much as style (witness the pressure suit built into the NF-104A Starfighter supersonic time-to-climb interceptor Striker Shirley destroyed in Higher, Faster, Farther).

>Of course, there's also the question of whether Flandre or Remilia
>will ever adopt the style. They're probably already listed as witches
>on at least one bit of military paperwork as it is, and when in
>Romagna...
>
>(my prediction: Remilia won't, Flandre will... once)

Remilia absolutely will not; she's still getting used to how short the skirt Sakuya designed for their FAAL uniforms is. No petticoats! It's too short to even wear bloomers under! The twentieth century is terrifying.

Flan already doesn't mind showing her knees, but whether she'll be of a mind to take it beyond that stage is unclear.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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