A Worldbuilding Snag

You know, I keep trying to give my orly aliens a broad but definitive cultural background, to give them opinions and attitudes and strong identities and understandable material culture and basically make them as real as possible. I want to give them, with their own alien twist, the breadth of human experience, from war to love, from art to industry, from stone wheel to spaceship. Theirs is a dignified and worthy entry into the ranks of alien concultures.

The only problem is, every time I make another entry into their hitchhiker’s guide, I wind up making them look FUCKING ADORABLE.

I wonder if Poul Anderson, or indeed the Na’vi anthropologists, ever had this problem.