Back when all that Blood Heir drama first dropped, there was some criticism because Amélie Wen Zhao used the line, "Don't go where I can't follow." People were saying she ripped off Tolkien and there was either a comment or an entire post on the fact that many authors do this all the time and it's considered "homage," but when this author did it, it was plagiarism.

One of the authors mentioned was Maas and when I did my reread before Kingdom of Ash came out, I kept noticing little LOTR-like things going on. In the last book, there's a scene that's beat for beat like the scene in LOTR where Aragorn says "Gondor calls for aid" and the King of Rohan replies "and Rohan will answer."

I don't know why but I bought the Crescent City book and after reading a couple of pages, my first thought was, "Wow, Maas must think the difference between YA and Adult is just how many swear words you can reasonably jam into every page.