Like I understand these pictures might look silly:
But Star Wars, from the very first movie and that cantina shot (I could write a lot about that shot alone and what it tells about the setting) is about a science-fantasy galaxy with lots of sentient races, some inspired by our own terrestrial creatures, others wholly alien, but they can pilot spaceships and share a drink with you. If they can do that, you can assume that they would get into adventures and politics as any other human character.
"wtf they made a Jedi Wookiee" I should actually expect MORE Jedi to be aliens, since one of the FIRST things we hear about the Force is that it flows through all beings, there are Jedis of all kinds in the movies and the EU "wtf the New Republic has an alien chicken president" yes, it makes sense since aliens were oppressed under the human-centric Empire and they should be more than willing to participate on its overthrow and the politics of the New Republic "wtf Han Solo fights an alien otter queen"... unoriginal design, I will concede, but nothing out of the ordinary for the Galaxy.
I understand that because of budget and costume limitations you can't have alien main characters everywhere. But it is also a mindset limitation because many directors don't see aliens as characters or part of the world on themselves, they see them as props, at most as gag characters. To jump to Star Trek for a while, compare the development that alien cultures got in TNG, DS9 (ESPECIALLY DS9) to say, Discovery, where there's a whole gross and boring gag about how there's a smelly alien with four nostrils or something. These directors don't see an "alien" as a being that can have a story or a personality, but basically as a fun gag to add (they see spaceships and planets and eventually characters and everything the same, and so their films and episodes feel as believable as a Fortnite stream)
If you are assuming a setting with lots of alien species (science fiction or fantasy) that can interact with humanity, you should have alien characters playing major roles, you should have them as captains, as pilots, on the same level as human characters but with their own unique differences from a totally different origin and background. Not only I should expect some strange alien to be a pilot together with Han or a captain besides Kirk, I should expect them to know them by name and even be friends, rivals, antagonists, lovers, etc.
(this assumes the classical "space opera" or "fantasy" settings though where there are plenty of alien species that yet remain remarkably on our same level, comprehensible to us, as people. For *realistic* aliens, the ones that we might actually find, we're talking about a whole other thing)
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