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[FallingWhale]

[GreatWyrmGold]

Well-put, FallingWhale. I imagine it could be both.
knutor: You're not going to win on the miasmic cheese farts thing. Let it go, if you want to prove/pretend you're not a troll.

[Bohandas]

Seconded.

[Auning]

Perhaps whether it's a bad thought or not could be determined by a few factors. A male dwarf seeing a beautiful, naked female dwarf shouldn't produce a bad thought in most cases. However, no one will want to see a naked Urist McUgly lugging around the fort. How beautiful a dwarf is would be gen'd like other physical traits, i.e "He is hideous." or "She is gorgeous.". A few problems I can see with it include the fact that it's presenting objective beauty, which isn't quite right. This would be fixed by having all dwarves have various preferences in appearances, but that seems like a bit much for such a small change to the game. Perhaps something like this would be included with the personality rewrite.

[Starver]

Regarding objective beauty, take the observer's bodily make-up (and perhaps some psychology details) and use that to make a subjective judgement unique to each observer upon each observed[1].

I'm not sure whether that should be "likes qualities that are similar to oneselve" or "likes qualities that are dissimilar to oneself".  On the one hand, there would be a certain amount of the former, after all dwarves like dwarf-shaped mates (as opposed to goblin-shaped ones), but on the other I could see a taste for the exotic.

Probably a mix of both, so a plump light-skinned dwarf might find an equally plump but exotically-dark potential partner quite attractive.  To complicate matters, I could also imagine a preference of attraction for an equally-pasty but well-hewn opposite number, but I can see the former being reciprocated more than the latter (although I'm not sure if I have the relative reasoning sound on that front!).  Perhaps values that can nominally change (relative level of fitness, muscularity, hair-style, etc) are ones where overlapping qualities are the better attraction-enhancers, while intrinsics such as skin/eye-colours and the like are the features that are more sought for while being different. 

Or have included into the dorf-DNA some hidden quality or other (e.g. a phermonic-like smell, an equivalent to whatever it is in humans that encourages different immunity genotypes to get get together) that enhances/deprecates whatever other guides to beauty might exist.

With all the potential factors, it need not be necessarily certain that a partner who ticks all the boxes of one individual should find this given individual ticking all the boxes for themselves!  (IYSWIM.)  When all this is said and done, should there be bad thoughts if a dorf's "perfect partner" pairs-up with someone else?  Unrequited love?   Love triangles?  Love parallelograms?  Cyclicly-mismatching love-parallelograms (a la Midsummer Night's Dream)?



[1] Now I've got the tune "Music To Watch Girls By" with Andy Williams flitting 'round my head, only with every instance of the word "Girls" or "Boys" substituted by "Dwarfs", thanks to my Pratchettesque outlook upon the nature of dwarves/dwarfs/dorfs.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Attractiveness should be based on a few factors. One or two might be more or less universal (mainly on the ugly side), and others would be based on culture. Psychology indicates that people base their subconscious image of an ideal partner on...I forget, something with women or girls they saw while young. I'm not sure how that would be implemented, except as something like a general tendancy towards preferring those who look similar to oneself. Possibly along with certain personality traits causing a preferance for exotic people.

Wow, farts to beauty. We take a troll and derail it into an actual suggestion.