Thought about posting this in the Ember’s End forum, but it pertains to locations and the locations forum has been pretty sadly neglected.

So it occurs to me that the whole “True Blue may make rabbits immortal” concept sets up a pretty serious logistical problem, though it may be centuries before it really becomes an issue. As stated by Missy Dreft, the long life associated with True Blue requires that rabbits continue to consume it. I would guess that, since rabbits clearly continue to eat other foods after True Blue becomes plentiful, the stuff probably isn’t enough by itself to cover all their nutritional needs. Between those factors and the fact of a constantly increasing, never decreasing (so far as we know) population, there is an inevitable conclusion to be faced: the rabbits are going to run out of room.

Now, of course, it will presumably be quite some time before this becomes an issue. Natalia is pretty sparsely settled, with wide swaths of land showing no evidence of settlements. This goes even beyond the map as we have it, with rabbits now having the opportunity to move into territory once dominated by predators or into unsettled territories like those apparently lying between Natalia proper and Terralain. It’s also possible that, through the Pilgrim’s expeditions, the Kingdom of the Mended Wood could travel across oceans to old dominions of rabbit kind like Golden Coast and the Blue Moss Hills.

However, no matter how vast the world where Natalia is located is, its space is finite. There’s only so much room for rabbits to live in, particularly when you account for the need for land on which to grow True Blue and other food sources. If the rabbits truly cannot die so long as they continue to consume True Blue, they’ll continue to multiply until eventually there will be a critical mass of the number of living rabbits vs. the land needed to grow all their food. At that point, the rabbits will face a crisis, to which only three solutions present themselves-at least to my mind:

1. Smalls and Heather decree that no one can have any more children. This would be a fairly depressing development, like a utopia turning dystopia.

2. Some miraculous event occurs, a truly divine transformation that truly completes the Mending by healing all wounds and reuniting the living with their deceased loved ones and ancestors. Such an event would presumably also bring about true immortality for rabbits, negating the need for food.

3. Rabbit technology continues advancing until Heyward and Emerson invent a

, at which point the rabbits are free to spread through the final frontier. Of course, that them introduces the problem of finding planets they can live on, but if they can develop the technology to actually get their terraforming shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

Well, there’s my crazy thought process for you.