#tbh i'm not sure how i feel about this; most days i default to luthien being considered the heir apparent if it ever came to that

[chaos-of-the-abyss]

i do very much think dior and nimloth were super cloyingly sickeningly in love with each other, but i also think the political tangles in their marriage are very interesting. setting aside the fact that they name their first two children so explicitly in memory of thingol -- doriath's first king who in many ways is its actual foundation -- it's somewhat jarring, in a sort of hilarious way, to consider their marriage in the context of the patriarchal society that elves operate in. (setting aside, for this discussion, the wider situation of how tolkien's own sexism influenced his characters' ways of life.)

in patriarchal settings, when it comes to marriage there's an element of the woman being "given away" from her father's household to her husband's household; she joins her husband's family and is thus expected to act with his family's reputation and dignity -- as well as her own family's -- in mind. dior and nimloth though are already part of the same wider family, so like, nimloth in marrying him is being "given away" to... the same dynasty she already hails from. granted they're hardly the only couple in the tolkienverse with some habsburgism going on, but what adds an extra twist of flavor to me is that dior's connection to their dynasty -- the ancestry from thingol, and to a perhaps lesser extent, from olwe and elmo -- comes from his mother. by contrast, nimloth gets her connection to their dynasty from her father. dior is a man but he's thingol's descendant through a woman; nimloth is a woman but she's thingol's descendant through a man. there's not really a point i'm trying to make with this, it's just something that makes me think about what it might mean for their relationship. one can say that dior maybe doesn't have the best claim to doriath's throne -- after all the argument can be made from this patriarchal context that luthien has joined beren's family by marrying him, and thus what dior should be is the next head of the house of beor, not the next king of doriath. but then you look at his marriage with nimloth and you see how they're reuniting the diverging branches of their family tree...

on the other hand though -- under the assumption that thingol's children were considered next in line to the throne over his brothers or their descendants -- by having no other children besides luthien, a daughter, thingol and melian already set the expectation that thingol's line, the main branch of the dynasty, would inevitably continue from a woman. they've already -- i suppose rather anomalously considering as far as the elves go i can't think of a single instance of a woman being considered her father's heir -- broken the agnatic-cognatic succession. in which case dior's claim to the throne coming from his mother rather than his father would have had precedent to back it up and thus would have engendered less controversy. alternatively, if doriath had been viewing elmo's sons (galadhon and celeborn) as having a better claim than luthien due to her being a woman, that could have led to some disagreements about the next in line to the throne. which brings us back to where i started about the political implications of dior/nimloth -- reuniting the branches of their family tree through marriage. i do have to wonder where celeborn would fit into that though, as galadhon's brother and nimloth's uncle.

on top of alllll that we can't forget that nobody probably really thought of doriath's succession as an issue anyway, since it would be impossible for thingol to die of natural causes. there's a fair chance it was never given that much consideration to begin with. anyway idk. i just think dior/nimloth, and generally the political situation of doriath around that time, is Interesting to approach from this sort of angle; there's potential for a serious succession conflict there, and that's not even getting into the fact that dior is part-mortal, which is unheard of in quite literally all of time and creation. and technically that succession conflict wouldn't even contradict canon, since we get so little details about dior's ascension as king in the first place