Unexpected Successor: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

A character is way down in the line of succession for some political office, to the point where it's reasonable to assume that they're never going to actually take it. Then everyone ahead of them dies or is otherwise disqualified.

 

Usually this is either because a) some giant disaster occurs, or b) the character in question is evil and killing everyone ahead of them. It can also result from a [[Succession Crisis]].

 

 

Also contrast [[Offered the Crown]], where the monarch is selected, and [[Succession Crisis]], where ambiguity about who the rightful successor ''is'' causes problems.

 

{{examples}}

* In ''[[Code Geass]] R2'', {{spoiler|Lelouch, who was originally 17th in line for the throne, becomes emperor of Britannia after killing his father and using his Geass to force people to accept him as emperor.}}

** And at the very end of the series, {{spoiler|his sister Nunnally becomes Empress of Britannia, and she was ''87th'' in line!}}

 

 

* [[Marissa Picard]] and her best friend Clara Stutters discovered that they are princesses of the planet Essex.

 

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

** She was actually asked to resign her position by the President a few days earlier, after going against his wishes when dealing with a teacher's strike. Her resignation would be have been made official when she got back to Caprica from the ''Galactica''.

* Part of the aliens' plan in the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' episode "Aliens in London" was to kill off enough of the British government to make the MP who they'd replaced with an alien into Prime Minister.

* ''[[Jericho]]''. Nuclear attacks leave the Secretary of Health and Human Services as the highest surviving official. [[Divided States of America|Some people do not agree...]]

* A sketch in one of [[Spike Milligan]]'s shows had a Britain devastated after a nuclear war where the national anthem was "God Bless Mrs Ethel Stokes".

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* As his [[Start of Darkness]] reveals, Redcloak from ''[[Order of the Stick]]'' was the newest acolyte in the hierarchy of the Dark One's priesthood, and became the High Priest because {{spoiler|the Sapphire Guard killed everyone else in the order except him.}}

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

* Further down [[The House of Windsor]], George VI was not expecting to become King, going for a military career. Then his brother abdicated.

* While it has never actually come into play beyond the well-known examples of Vice Presidents taking over for their dead Presidents, the US government has a very specific [[wikipedia:United States presidential line of succession|line of Presidential succession]] that specifies who would become President in the event of the inability of multiple people in line to serve. This did come up among pundits in the aftermath of the 1981 assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan, where Secretary of State Al Haig stated to the press, "Pending the arrival of the Vice-President, I'm in charge here at the White House." While he meant that he was just running the White House and Presidential offices until VP George H.W. Bush could return from his vacation in Maine, the pundits all ignored the context and treated it as if Haig was trying to stage a coup. (Until Bush could be contacted, the acting President was technically Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, though his primary responsibility was command over US nuclear forces until Bush could be contacted.) Because this line of succession also puts a hard limit on how far down the governmental food chain the Presidency can fall, the Secret Service makes certain that, at any event where the entire succession would be expected to appear (such as a State of the Union Address), one person in the line of succession is ''not'' in attendance, instead being kept at a safe house far enough away that no single plausible catastrophe could kill him along with the rest of the succession.

** The "Designated Survivor" rule has been unofficially extended by Congress to include at least one Senator and one Representative, so that in the event of a decapitation strike there would also be successors to the roles of Senate President Pro Tempore and Speaker of the House.

** The aforementioned line of succession is somewhat random. Currently, if something happens to Obama, the office passes first to Vice-President Biden, then Speaker Boehner. Okay so far. If something happens to all three, as of December 2011, the man the United States would turn to is...Daniel Inouye, the 85 year-old Senator from Hawaii who holds his position solely by virtue of being the longest-serving member of the majority party. (The spot was held by the even older Robert Byrd until his recent passing.) The Secretary of Homeland Security, who you'd think ought to be in charge after a decapitation strike, is ''last'' in the list. This is because the rest of the line of succession is determined by the age of the office, and since the Department of Homeland Security is the newest department, the Secretary of Homeland Security is last in line, while the fourth in line is the Secretary of State. (Besides, one imagines they'd be rather busy at that moment.)

* [[Gerald Ford]], the only ''truly'' unelected President Of The United States. All arguments about contested elections aside (and there are plenty), Ford was never elected to the vice presidency (he was appointed after Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned), then became president after [[Richard Nixon]] resigned. Then he lost his first election. All Gerald wanted to do was be Speaker of the House.

* Henry VII would not have been expected to be King. He was the half-nephew of the King at the time of his birth, Henry VI, but his claim actually came through his mother's side and was fairly weak. (She came from the line of a legitimized bastard.) Still, he was next in line after Henry VI's son Edward. Then Edward IV took over, and he had two sons of his own, not to mention two brothers. No one thought Henry Tudor could beat those odds. Possibly not a straight example since Henry himself forced his succession via a battle, but he was still an unlikely pretender.

* While we're discussing the Tudors, in 1547, when Henry VIII died, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots was 4th in line for the English Throne. With three healthy legitimate children alive, it was considered very unlikely the Stuarts would ever get a hold of the throne. All three of his legitimate heirs assumed the English throne at some point, and all three died childless. 56 years after the death of Henry VIII, [[The House of Stuart|James VI Stuart]] of Scotland assumed the English throne as James I.

* And then, the successors to the Stuarts, [[The House of Hanover]]. Due to the exclusion of Catholics from the succession by the Act of Settlement 1701 and the death of Queen Anne's children, the Prince of the German Electorate of Brunswick-Luneburg (also known as Hanover) was more or less handed the throne of Great Britain out of nowhere. This is why George I and George II spoke little to no English: George I and II were 41 and 18, respectively, when the Act of Settlement passed, making them second and third in line (after George I's mother Sophia), and were 54 and 31 when the throne passed to their house. This led to the development of government by the King's ministers rather than the monarch himself, and by the end of George I's reign, the general system used in Britain today had been developed under the guidance of the (unofficial) Prime Minister [[Sir Robert Walpole]]. So, indirectly, we have this trope to thank for the modern system of parliamentary democracy—used in some form by the vast majority of democratic states in existence today.

* The possibly greatest subversion of the trope was [[wikipedia:Ramiro II of Aragon|Ramiro II of Aragon]]. The fourth son of King Sancho, he wasn't expected to inherit or hold a political position at all and became a priest. However, all three of his elder brothers died without issue, two of them after having seized the crown. He was then literally taken from his abbey, given a Papal permission to abandon his vows so he could guarantee the survival of the dynasty and crowned. He complied, married, had a daughter, abdicated to her and had her married when she was ''1 year old''. With his deed accomplished in record time, he took the vows again and went back to his abbey.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Death Tropes]]

[[Category:Politics Tropes]]