[Dragaera] Dragaerans vs Easterners, relative population sizes

[Scott Schultz]

Honestly?

I think it's simply that the Dragaerans (the race, as opposed to merely
citizens of the Empire) prefer living on the Western side of the mountains.
The Easterners prefer living on the Eastern side. The various passes are
inconvenient and the nearest Eastern countries are at least politically
aware of the Empire and possibly even conduct relations with it.

Barring a Dragon Emperor or a Warlord who requires a distraction, there's no
reason the two should ever meet in any large-scale capacity.

My impression is that the East IS huge. It would have to be, considering
that there are probably a lot more Easterners than Dragaerans, unless the
Lords of Judgment are intervening to control the population size.  This may
well be the case, just as they must be intervening to prevent the normal
socio-technological development of the Easterners, in my opinion.

It's also likely that the East is fragmented, culturally. It's not a single
country, or even a single related people. The names of the various
Easterners we encounter are indications that the ancestry of many is likely
rather different from that of Vlad and his family. Vlad himself jokes with
Teldra about living like a sultan with a harem, which suggests that some
Eastern country is, in fact, a sultanate in the ancient Arabian fashion.
They aren't  all like Fenario, and we don't even really know if Fenario is
typical or atypical. Where the Empire is homogenized (and even Greenaire and
Elde Island appear to be pretty similar to the Empire, sans the sorcery) the
Easterners are fractured and quite likely they fight amongst themselves as
often as they might end up fighting against the Empire.

It isn't even really clear whether the "invasions" during the Interregnum
were military operations (some undoubtedly were) so much as the nearest
Easterners fleeing from the same plagues and catastrophes at home that the
Dragaerans themselves were experiencing. It's quite odd that Easterners
should be "invading" only to end up being the equivalent of the illegal
Mexican immigrant workforce that populates many parts of the USA.

I'm not sure that any of the above actually addresses the subject. *heh*  In
any case, it's inferring rather a lot from a very small amount of basically
unreliable information, so it must all be taken with a huge dose of salt. I
don't suppose we're ever going to have detailed answers to most of these
sorts of questions. I really hoped that Jhegalla would give us a glimpse
into the world of the Easterners but it seems it wasn't intended to be so. 

In any case, there's plenty of land on the West side of the mountains,
apparently, and no current reason to suspect that land in the East is in
short supply. Certainly, Fenario had more land than it had people to
populate it. Even if there ARE a lot more Easterners than Dragaerans, it
stands to reason that they generally have little contact with Dragaerans and
hardly any reason to pursue such contact if the country in question doesn't
border the mountains. One reason that no Dragaeran general has ever
conquered the East is that there's too much of it to conquer and it's more
of a hobby than a real thirst for conquest anyway. They do it because it's
there. Once they've pushed in as far as Fenario or their closest Eastern
neighbors, they call it good and march home, feeling proud of having
recaptured the pepperfields or the diamond mines or whatever, and having
taught those lagabout Easterners a lesson or two.