*hands raised* goodness I was just trying to say it's not unheard-of that people go missing. I guess I'm just as wrong as Harry.....
Dead beat harry to Butters.....
"All right" I said " Last year in the U.S. alone more than nine hundred thousand people were reported missing and not found"
"Are you serious?"
"Yeah" I said "you can check with the FBI.....that breaks down to one person in three hundred and twenty five. Vanishing. Every year....."
I'm not trying to argue your real world statistics i was just pointing out people go missing and in the FICTIONAL world of Dresden some of them could be changelings. it was my take on this topic of fae reproduction and how it can go unseen....just my opinion. I'm leaving this topic as my two cents worth is unwanted....bye
I get what you're saying, but... yeah, there's always a 'but'... as I recall Harry follows that statement up with saying that that number - expressed as % of the population at large, is almost exactly the same ratio of losses herd animals in the wild experience from predators. The implication being that all those "missing" people are probably dead because of supernatural creatures (Vampires, Ghouls, whatever) - that whatever small margin of error leftovers there are aren't really worth considering.
We have to remember here that to make anything in the DV make sense we have to presume that the world of Harry Dresden is an exact copy of our world taken whole... and that the only differences between the two are those the author tells us about. One of those differences would be that magic works there. Another might be how those missing statistics work. Your idea works if, and only if, those changelings are going unreported as missing and therefore not part of that statistical group.
This would be a bit difficult to pull off as - at least in the U.S. - census numbers are pretty accurate and taken regularly. The mismatch between the number of people the census says should be around and the number practical experience says actually exist should balance fairly closely, not leaving a whole lot of room for large #'s of changelings to just disappear, unless... they're somehow managing to elude the census as well. Might they fake the data there? Sure. But that's getting into a rather extreme level of plotting and planning to pull off a charade that can be accomplished in other, easier ways.
