this comes from a cassual discussin I had with some friends, we are all biology students and the demi elder thing for gore magla plus the implied competion between shagaru and gore that are close to moulting is just incredlible.
People thing the classification of gore magala is odd but demi elder is because gore magala is LITERALLY Demi-elder, in the raw sense of being a creature that is partially an elder dragon, the sunbreak lore book clarified that the gore magala are born from the frenzy virus of a shagaru infecting a monster to a hightened degree and the virus starts invading cells and mutating that monster into a gore magala that then bursts out of its host and that very young gore magala still carry over visual traces of its host that are quickly lost over time.
So every gore magala is a hybrid of some creature and an elder dragon, and thus they are classified as demi-elder, but as they mature and moult they likely eliminate those non elder traits and genes and until it becomes pure elder dragon enhancing the themes of darkness and light and how shagaru has some symbolism of purity.
What is also crazy, is the competition it has with its own species, shagaru magala when they moult will go to the highest peaks of a region and will then spread its own frenzy verus to halt the molt of its siblings (turning them into chaotic gore magala) and then spreating its own frenzy on other creatures birthing new gore magala specifically from the one shagaru that matured the fastest.
This means the shagaru is the biggest predator of gore magala and its entire life cycle in a region is a race against its siblings to see who matures faster and can spread the most frenzy, natural causin all that fail to go chaotic and die, this is natural selection ay its finest as only the most fit and healthy indivuduals get to mature even if the reproduction is entirely asexual and prone to wild mutations due to the whole cell highjacking clone machine virus that turns normal monsters into gore magala, from an ecological and biological standpoint shagaru is the most fleshed out elder dragon which is quite an oddity since we have next to no information about the rest of the elder dragons and seemingly only the Teostra and Narwa species has sexual reproduction making asexual reproduction the norm since fatalis, safijiiva, Shagaru and Nergigante reproduce asexually and the rest are completely unknown in terms of reproduction.