I like all those fantasy setups where dwarves have perfectly reasonable and complex beauty standards of their own which outsiders completely fail to grasp. Those are good, they make perfect sense and are important!
What I want now is an actual wheel of the idealization of the exceptional.
I want to see a setting where the elves consider average dwarvish features to invoke a stark and intense form of beauty. Just. Totally average Bjorn Smith dwarf with his or her average dwarf looks and elvish culture is like How So Handsome, literally all of them, they’re like landscape paintings, it’s Unfair.
Meanwhile dwarves regard perfectly ordinary human faces as models of aristocratic refinement, and humans still think basically every elf is ridiculously pretty.
Aesthetics and genetics being what they are obviously individuals are going to actually live up to, and agree about how much they appreciate, these qualities to wildly varying degrees, but I want those to be the norms.
Humans still tend to see dwarves as sort of coarse and uninspiring to look at, elves generally find human appearances sort of boring, and dwarves mostly think elves seem sort of weedy and ridiculous. But you go around the circle the other way, and everybody’s like Hell Yeah.
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