Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes What is Gates Species?

I have been doing biological research into various species for inspiration for my own fiction and Stellaris playthroughs, and I was trying to figure out what type of species Vgyrans are based on. I originally assumed his species evolved from ants, but he has too many legs. He looks more like a centipede or millipede, but those species are not social. His mouth looks kind of like a bird. Do you guys have any opinions?

Neither of the artists have wikipedia pages so I assume they aren't active on social media to ask.

Vyrgans seem to have sinilarities to pillbugs. Umbra once facetiously called him the “pillbug of happiness”

Socially, Vrygans resemble ants, bees, wasps, and termites... although possibly without a 'queen'.

(On the other hand, possibly maybe. Insect 'queens' refers not to regency, but to the fact that one 'queen' is the mother of all the members of a hive. For example, there are probably a trillion or so bees on Earth, all descendants of only ten or twenty million queens.)

Physically, Gates has always reminded me of the larva of the Japanese Silk Moth, which means that Vrygans would have evolved from some distant prehistoric giant moth-man ancestor through some neotenic process.

Neoteny: Also called pedogenesis. The production of offspring by an organism in its larval or juvenile form; the elimination of the adult phase of the life cycle.

Gates' face is very birdlike, and he has that torso and those upper arms, so, yeah, something of a centaur-like composite.

The Vyrgans are led by a Matriarch, who could be their queen. Gates and the Vyrgans also comment several times that most Vyrgans think alike, with Gates and Mantis Morlo being some of the rare independent thinkers/dissenters. The Matriarch didn't seem to use any type of mind control or pheromone secretion though; she even says once that they encouraged Gates and Mantis Morlo to think independently as it might be useful for their society's development. (Sources: Legionnaires 37, 45).