dreamrider wrote:Adoption is not out of the question. There is plenty of historical precedent. Rome, and the current reigning House of Sweden come to mind - are the Swedes of the early 19th century more flexible than the SKM/SEM House of Lords? Wait - don't answer that.
The Swedes, or at least the Riksdag, were facing the extinction of their royal family, the attempt to adopt a Danish prince had failed when the guy died, and the minor noble who, on their own initiative, offered the crown to Bernadotte was imprisoned on their return to Sweden. Napoleon treated the whole thing as a joke. The creation of the House of Bernadotte was one of the most improbable sets of events going. (Never mind the wonderful cautionary tale that Karl Johan himself had, due to a radical youth, a "death to the king" tattoo.)
Manticore has to be well-supplied with descendants of Roger Winton I. They're also technically able to just create a member of the House of Winton out of retained genetic samples if they really need to do so. So they're not going to go for adoption unless there's an extremely popular candidate and a very large number of dead Wintons. (I will admit I've been wondering for awhile if Mike Henke was going to wind up on the throne; all that discussion of Mount Royal defenses and etc. which doesn't require a sufficiently extreme set of events to get Parliament considering adoption.)
Someone, or rather some little polity in the Verge, undergoing early liberation and trying to snaffle Lester Tourville as a monarch in the approved SEM style, now, that has possibilities.
