If you are considering zapping players in a dying realm who are trying to keep the game fun admist game-wide declining populations then I think you need to seriously reconsider your policies. I foresee this sort of case becoming more common as the game continues to lose players, banning your existing and loyal player base seems counter-intuitive. This is a holdover rule from another time in this game's life. It is also extremely obscure and poorly worded. Realms can never merge as equal entities, and if they can it is not applicable here. Asylon maintains its governmental system, personnel (especially in regards to our King), name, capital, distinct history, distinct culture and overwhelming player amount. Further, Asylon unilaterally culled out FR nobles that it deemed politically harmful, explicitly demonstrating its overwhelming advantage in the duchy change. And that is considering the fact that you are ignoring that FR still exists in GF and might be able to exist indefinitely and perhaps even expand with the new addition of sea travel.
Your post is extremely troubling. In character wise I'm not sure what the problem is, it isn't like nation states in the past never conglomerated together. It seems like you want to bring down the hammer just because you don't like the way the rule has been applied or not, and not for mechanical or roleplaying atmosphere reasons. A dying realm can takes months to be finished off naturally, and I imagine that natural attrition is extremely boring for those involved. In this case a Duchess decided to proactively change her duchy in a way that made sense in character and in line with explicit or implicit political strife in her realm. The fact is that strategically this does not help our realm in our war, we now find ourselves in a food shortage after accepting the duchy change, further none of the regions would allow us to change the capital to a more strategic position. Finally, it lowers our population density per region.
I do not want to clutter this post, however I feel that the overwhelming amount of magistrates on the other side of this conflict puts Asylon and former Farronites at a severe disadvantage.
I think you're reading too much into what I posted... I have no particular desire to punish anyone. I am merely concerned now, as I was in the prior case concerning strategic secessions, that the rule could be so narrowly interpreted as to be pointless in which case why have a rule at all. That said, my thinking on the topic continues to evolve and these discussions contribute to that evolution. I hear what you are saying. Also, Please do not derail the topic with accusations of bias. Vellos and I happen to be the two Magistrates who do most of the posting in these cases, but we aren't the only ones who vote, and I haven't had a character active on Dwilight for months now.
