The dwarf/elf beauty thing is weird. And also a bit different in book canon than in the movies. Tolkien goes out of his way in the index to let us know that dwarven women look just like dwarven men, to the untrained eye.* I'm glad Jackson kept the beards on the lady dwarves, but they're much more ladyfied and prettied up than Tolkien would have it. Also in the books, Gimli has this relationship with Galadriel that is *exactly* like the relationship between a gay bear and his diva - Madonna or Liza or Gaga. He sees her as something beautiful, but without attraction. Tolkien definitely has the dwarves appreciating elven standards of beauty, even if it's in the abstract.
*(My headcanon is that dwarves have two sexes and one gender; that they just don't make a big deal of gender b/c they're not a particularly sex-dimorphic people; that Khuzdul is maybe one of those languages with 20 genders (for animate/inanimate, sentient/nonsentient, numeracy, things that are round, things that hold other things, tools/objects, etc etc etc etc) but with only one gender for people; and that perhaps half the dwarves we know are in fact female, but it didn't strike the dwarves as important to say that, so we never found out.)
The dwarf/elf beauty thing is weird. And also a bit different in book canon than in the movies. Tolkien goes out of his way in the index to let us know that dwarven women look just like dwarven men, to the untrained eye.* I'm glad Jackson kept the beards on the lady dwarves, but they're much more ladyfied and prettied up than Tolkien would have it. Also in the books, Gimli has this relationship with Galadriel that is *exactly* like the relationship between a gay bear and his diva - Madonna or Liza or Gaga. He sees her as something beautiful, but without attraction. Tolkien definitely has the dwarves appreciating elven standards of beauty, even if it's in the abstract.
*(My headcanon is that dwarves have two sexes and one gender; that they just don't make a big deal of gender b/c they're not a particularly sex-dimorphic people; that Khuzdul is maybe one of those languages with 20 genders (for animate/inanimate, sentient/nonsentient, numeracy, things that are round, things that hold other things, tools/objects, etc etc etc etc) but with only one gender for people; and that perhaps half the dwarves we know are in fact female, but it didn't strike the dwarves as important to say that, so we never found out.)
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