I have cleaned out some irrelevant posts and pared down some others.
At the moment I see two conflicting characterizations of events. In one of them, the player of Khari Kye (posting here as cenrae) grew dissatisfied with the state of FR from an OOC perspective with too few nobles and too little activity in the realm, and resolved to essentially merge the vast majority of the realm with Asylon in an effort to achieve an increased noble density and perhaps liven up the game for her/himself and the remaining players in FR as well as deal with the problem of too many regions/not enough nobles. In the other, there was some sort of power struggle between pro- and anti-Asylon factions in FR that led to Khari making a power play and defecting with her duchy to Asylon.
Just based on what I've seen so far (and with no first-hand knowledge of the situation), I have to say that the case looks a bit stronger for the first characterization than the second (though I'm also sure they're both grounded in truth). It's hard to believe that there was much actively ongoing political conflict within FR given the OOC message that Khari sent to SA:
FR has dropped dramatically in its player count and was becoming near silent.
This is not generally how one would describe a realm with an active power-struggle on-going. The proximate cause of the action appears to have been not any sort of IC conflict per se, but rather OOC motives related to player count, realm viability and boredom. The other characterization of events seems frankly to be a bit of a ret-con... I'm sure there were some nobles in FR that were pro-Astrum, but it appears to me just from what's been posted here that the relative importance of the conflict between them and pro-Asylon nobles is being rather overstated for the sake of applying an IC justification to the secession ex post facto... Vellos had already paused by the time Khari acted, and I have seen no evidence so far of any sort of IC argument or conflict that led directly to what happened. I find the justification contained in Khari's OOC letter to SA to be far more believable, and have no reason to imagine that if there had been a genuine IC motivation for the whole thing, Khari wouldn't have mentioned it then.
So, I would ask you to dispense with the arguments about the IC justification at this point, unless there's more compelling evidence to be had. Instead, the question is (assuming the motivation of the action is as described by Khari in the OOC message), is this an illegal realm merger?
