A possible explanation

[MAKAIROSI]

So, I'm not gonna say something that people haven't already thought of, but this is my personal explanation of the world of hylics.

DNA manipulation. This world has many similarities with our own when it comes to how society lives. They want to stay at houses, they have stores, they mine materials, they breed and milk beings to use their products. There are plants, and water, and stuff like that.

It just looks like everything is almost random - at least to our "unevolved" eyes. I am guessing in a world where everything had been solved, they used DNA manipulation to just have fun really. An NPC says inside something along these lines: "as our meditations became more practical, our bodies became largely superfluous". It seems that NPC is talking about themselves, but I'd say what they are saying is historical?

I am sensing sometimes that there are a lot of similarities with bugs, like scarabs and stuff, so I'd guess some kind of mixture of human-scarab DNA? This would also explain how new-borns are larvae-like.

But explaining gestures, I feel it's much easier. We already have "gestures" with technology in our world. Wear that tech, make a gesture, it takes a picture. So what if this is tech that has been lost from the people, so they use gestures as some kind of "magic"? For example, the "lightning" gesture, owned only by 1 character, could perhaps be ordering some kind of satellite to fire lightning, and that character's DNA/tech/lineage is involved with that. So perhaps we're talking about a post-apocalypse of the far future.

It would also be cool if this was the case, since it would mean that in this future, you can erect entire buildings using gestures (like, that's how far tech has gone).

Obviously I understand this world is not meant to be explained, so even with this explanation some things still don't make sense. I also think this is the problem with human imagination: we cannot imagine something that we haven't already seen at least its parts. So even mixing random parts, it's bound that someone can find something that looks like a possible explanation.

So I'm guessing I'm wrong, but it's cool to think of stuff xD