Is there anything preventing Odoacer from just declaring himself Emperor?

Zenith, the fact that he wasn't seen as Roman, and the Roman people wouldn't have accepted him. Honestly, if he thought he could have gotten away with it, I suspect he would have (King of Italy was a pretty novel title at the time),.bit he really couldn't have pulled it off.
 
The Roman Senate. They were instrumental in getting rid of both Julius Nepos and Orestes - if Odoacer goes against his backers' wishes, they will make his life hell. Expect urban mobs to be driven into a frenzy in the major cities and the senators to finally accept that the people working their latifundia sometimes have to join the army. Meanwhile, Odoacer's men aren't getting paid, and while loot may keep some happy, not all of them will get to enjoy it, and they may even see whatever possessions they may have being threatened, as the population starts to turn against them.

At this point, individual commanders will see the benefit of switching sides and/or assassinating Odoacer.

Even if Odoacer avoids getting killed or having his main force desert or get defeated (which I find highly unlikely to happen), he will have trouble controlling more than a fraction of Italy, making him extremely vulnerable to even a small-ish expedition launched from the ERE once their civil war ends.

Just my two cents.
 
Besides the fact that he was a foreign dictator, Odoacer couldn't make himself emperor because the title was in use. Iulius Nepos was still alive in Dalmatia and with Zeno in Constantinople he's damn near untouchable. The familial ties between Zeno and Nepos kept the imperial title in Dalmatia. Once Nepos died, the senate took it upon themselves to basically destroy the title of Western Emperor, defacto it died the moment the Imperial insignia to Zeno and de jure once Nepos was killed. Can't Usurp a title that's in use and can't take a title that doesn't exist.

This doesn't even mention just how much of a horrible, horrible move it would be on his part. The Senate would want him dead, they being the backbone of his support in Italy it would be wise to keep them on his side. Also, under normal conditions Constantinople wouldn't have it. Odovacer would go unrecognized and would probably bring in the wrath of the East if one of the Eastern Augusti feel up to it, probably replacing Odovacer with a governor.

It just wasn't within safe reach for most of his reign and would have destroyed him even if he took it.
 
He wasn't Roman. That is as simple than that : imperialiship was based on roman citizenship and political identity, and Odoacer (or predecessors as Ricimer weren't).
It's less as an ethnic or national obstacle (as for POTUS nowadays) than political identification, so the problem isn't that he was a foreigner (while EVERY emperor had roman citizenship, something that Barbarians didn't have originally, Caracalla Edict being not applied to them). Odoacer directly ruled over Barbarian troops and especially Scirii, rather than being integrated within roman structures directly as Stilico, for exemple; and him taking the purple would have looked as a poor usurpation, even worse and silly than Romulus Augustulus' usurpation.

The whole "the title was already in use" is a bit pointless : it never prevented Orestus to proclaim his son as emperor while Zeno still claimed the title.

What could have played a role was the necessary support from Constantinople : Odoacer may have knew that he couldn't have stand his ground for long in Italy with a frontal opposition with both Roman Senate and ERE (as prooved later with Ostrogothic takeover).

Eventually, the prestige factor may have played as well : acting as restoring the imperial dignity, freeing it from Barbarian puppetisation (see above) as it was during all the later part of Vth century may have paint him as the restorer of roman dignity.
 
Less a claim, as we understand it on a Wespthalian conception of state, than some sort of moral and imperial dominance over Roman and Romano-Barbarian entities in the West (eventually possibly being able to play a faction or kingdom against the other, rather than trying to dominate all directly)

Not that these would have ever considered Odoacer as a legit emperor, as they could have with the previous (even Ricimer's puppets), due to aformentioned factors. Giving that he tried to have so, with the patricianship and that Theodoric definitly had a more or less important moral and symbolical precedence in the West by being king and patrice, claiming imperial title wasn't even needed to have so.

Considering the obvious degradation of WRE imperial legitimacy, I doubt he could have even tried that if he declared himself emperor : Constantinople would have definitely remained the focal center of Roman and Imperial legitimacy it already began by the fall of western Valentians.
 
Besides the fact that he was a foreign dictator, Odoacer couldn't make himself emperor because the title was in use. Iulius Nepos was still alive in Dalmatia and with Zeno in Constantinople he's damn near untouchable.

There being another Emperor around never stopped people from claiming the title before.
 
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