we will flower again, i have surely seen it

I'm honestly still not happy that this is what the specific setting is, but I don't know where else we would put it, and it would be a pain to change it now. That, and there are a few benefits: everyone is forced to be here, and they are all mentally ill teenagers, so nobody can escape the plot and their problems with each other sustain said plot. I think we're also just willing to cut corners on much of the setting just to be able to tell this specific story -- here, specifically, the world facilitates the plot, it is not the point of the plot. The point is watching everyone feel strong and complicated things about everything and everyone else.

Anyways. I thought that gendered uniforms would make sense here for a few reasons. First of all, everyone looked kind of naked, and without any unifying design elements they all kind of looked a bit too disparate as well. Secondly, the plot hinges pretty directly on misogynistic violence, so I think it makes sense to include the enforcement of gendered dress just to further gesture at the specter of gender enforcement. Thirdly, dragons in this setting do not have meaningful sexual dimorphism even though they do have expectations for what each sexgender is Supposed to look like -- creating a means by which to identify the sexgender category of each character at a glance simplifies things for readers and circumvents the classic exposition problem of "how the fuck are we going to explain all that?"

The straps (present in both versions of the student uniform) are diegetically a means to reduce flight risk and non-diegetically a means to address some design problems. Everyone is forced to be here, but most of them have wings that function. That poses some obvious security problems in-setting. But, consider: we don't want to draw a giant net over the entire campus because it would be kind of ugly, as well as a massive pain in the ass. We understand the straps to be a bit of a lazy solution since, obviously, anyone could just take the straps off at any point, as long as school faculty aren't watching, and then just leave. But, also, they do have guards, and that's also not important to the plot, or the goals of the story, so we don't actually care very much, and they look sort of cool. Conclusion: It doesn't really matter...?