/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>41720827
Could depend on when & where this started. It at least started before 2010, since the first revision on the wiki that includes the brown pants is from her article on May 8th of that year. There's also a revision note suggesting that fans weren't really making much art of her before then, so that statement is there from a time when there wasn't even an established pattern.

Artists doing this could be in reference to the classic undershirt & shorts for Girl Scout Brownie uniforms. Additionally, there are Japanese kindergarten uniforms that look like this when you remove the blazer, so artists in Japan could've seen the top and completed the outfit.

Looking on old Danbooru art of her, there used to be more of a plurality of styles, between red bellbottoms, military pants (which makes sense for her being a tank operator), and only rarely any type of skirt. There's still some variation in the design of her bottoms, but the consensus is more around those bottoms being brown, which makes sense as a color that can fit both her engineer side and her military side, while also communicating that the shirt may be an undershirt that goes with some sort of matching jacket. It's not a skirt because people who operate heavy machinery, like Rika the tank user, aren't typically envisioned as wearing skirts (downwind from the fact that skirts can get caught in moving parts, which is a safety hazard). This gives us pants or shorts, and artists do still seem to be up in the air about which. Shorts are at least easier to draw with more complicated art styles, though, since there are less clothing folds and no need to outline the form before drawing pants over that form with a whole other set of lines.