Only human

Let’s address problems and mistakes with a new kind of people.  It’s understood worse than vampires, more erroneously and stupidly than elves. 

Humans.

They look simple enough.  After all, we are them.

But that’s the root of the problem with humans writing humans.  We assume that we’re needed in the story because we’re also the only ones who would be reading the story.

Unfortunately that’s half-true.  Humans are necessary to a story, but not to a world.

Realistically, there’s been a lot of time on Earth when humans weren't present.  A lot happened without us. That’s just one planet.  How many life-bearing planets would develop creatures that looked like us and thought like us?

How do we understand those worlds?  Through human minds, that’s how.  There’s really no alternative.

We compare other intelligences to out own because there’s nothing else to compare them to and no other way to understand them.  We can show a reader a completely different mindset, but we have to explain it on human terms.  To do this, we often need a human character as an anchor to our own reality in a world far different from our own.

But an anchor is not always needed.  We didn't need a human to understand Animal Farm or Finding Nemo.  We never did. Human intelligence can understand small things when the big things are similar.  Needing grounding does not equal stupid.   We ruin things because we think it does when all we have to do is turn on the TV or grab a book to understand that kind of thinking makes us stupid.

When we stop being stupid about what we are, we see far more intelligence in what we create.