Okay, but I am not acknowledging the fucking "oh firelizards return to where they were laid to clutch" shit from canon, for a few reasons.
Seriously, question of the day, how does a firelizard that hatched in High Reaches know they were laid in Ista, to give an example? It can't be that their minds reach that far, we've got no example of that and even if we did how the fuck do you know you got laid by these bitches and not those bitches. So is it a genetic memory thing?
2- How the fuck are these golds coming back in even decent shape?
The greens I can understand, they lay their eggs and are done with it, but the whole Thing with golds is that they're very maternal and guard the shit out of their eggs. They're also a highly social species that would have a whole fair helping them in the wild, which they're not gonna have if they just popped in from a whole other part of the planet. So by all rights those ladies should be starving themselves, running themselves ragged. The golds that return should be in awful shape and there should be those that don't return at all. But nope, not even a concern. Yeah.
3- How the fuck is this supposed to work with what we've seen of firelizard social structure?
Specifically, we never see two wild golds in the same fair. We never see two wild fairs in the same location. The only times we see golds in the same place is in captivity and in dragons, and even then how well they get on varies wildly and easily dives straight into violent territoriality. When we see wild gold nests, they're never in proximity to other wild gold nests. But we're expected to believe that an exponential number of fairs return to the same beaches every year to clutch? By this standard the little gold from Menolly's story should have been sharing the cove with her mother, and sisters, and aunts, and cousins, and-
4- Firelizard survival methods don't support this.
Okay, I need you to look at species who do shit like this. Take a look, they all have one of two traits so far as infant survival.
A) They're seasonal breeders that produce a whole hell of a lot of children while providing no parental care, relying on sheer numbers to ensure success and banking on the fact everyone is doing the same in the same place to increase the odds of their own young surviving.
B) They're seasonal breeders that gather in massive colonies to breed, producing few young and giving them more care while counting on the fact everybody is producing babies at the same time to increase the odds of somebody else's baby getting eaten instead of theirs.
Now let's look at firelizards. They gather in individual breeding groups, but not in colonies or really any form of multi-breeding-group clustering. The greens produce multiple small clutches that receive no care. The golds produce a single large clutch that is meticulously guarded. We have reason to believe that green and gold offspring both receive dedicated care upon hatching. We have no reason to believe they're seasonal breeders, doubly so with greens, so these babies are spread out over the course of a year or several.
So they're not making massive numbers all at once and leaving them to luck. They're not seasonally gathering in large groups to shield and tend small numbers of offspring. They, by all accounts, form individual groups with their own seeming territories within which they produce variable numbers of young into whom the group puts in work. Not a system that leads to fucker evolving a 'return to the place of my birth' instinct. If anything it's a system that leads to wider dispersal over time.
And the seasonality thing is important, because without it you could almost make an excuse for greens (there's no excusing golds), but given they just Rise whenever, they simply aren't getting any fucking benefits from the system.
There is, from a Watsonian perspective, no reason that firelizards would have this trait. In fact, there's every reason for it to be counter to what we know about firelizards, wild and in general. And the way it's portrayed simply doesn't make sense within the confines of the settings- where the vast majority of tame firelizards (that's a question, how long does a population have to remain wild before they stop being classed as 'feral', given the firelizards were force-domesticated and then took over) would have no reason to know where they were laid over where they hatched, and there seems to be no repercussion on the golds for fucking off without a fair to guard a clutch they, what, abandon afterwards? Seriously, what happens to these gold clutches, we don't hear anything about golds coming back with offspring but also the golds seem to come back too soon to have raised them up?
Meanwhile, from a Doylist perspective, the entire concept is a poorly utilized attempt to keep firelizards 'special' so that they can continue to be used as a symbol of in-universe status and how how Important a character is. Something that could have better been done (though I think bothering at all is a waste of potential) by having tame firelizards produce few or no successful clutches, a problem to be solved over time as people learn about them. Could even be something they get from AIVAS, just being like "yeah no stop feeding them so much meat, you rich bastards, it's messing with their nutrition" or some shit. Ancient firelizard knowledge lost to time.
