The black jewel similarities are so crazy to me. I remember hearing about the similarities for the first time and being skeptical because people accuse copying for unfounded reasons a lot in fantasy especially towards women(and I do think some are ridiculous). Then reading the posts and being like??? She couldn’t have been a LITTLE more creative? I also wonder how much this affected her rewriting of books 2&3 and adding to book 1, which she did less than a year before they came out. Like rhys thing with amarantha and acomaf is obvious but what about other parts of book one? Like did she add high lords and the name prythian along with rhys or was that always there? Sorry I’m rambling I just find this so interesting. I’d love to know what the original storyline was. Do you think sjm is aware of the similarities and doesn’t think it matters or doesn’t care or is she somehow oblivious?
See: the post in question!
Love this ask! Firstly, I think Sarah J. Maas that is an uncreative and unoriginal writer and, hence, that she always intended (perhaps passively) to make ACOTAR virtually identical to The Black Jewels. This is, in part, because the same situation exists when it comes to Throne of Glass, ASOIAF, and LOTR. Sarah J. Maas would have been a teenager when TBJ first came out and I think it left such a mark on her that she couldn't help but reproduce it in her own writing. TBJ is fairly popular among millennial fantasy-reading demographics but most people born after 2000 (more than half her fanbase) don't know that much about Anne Bishop nor care for writing as dark as Bishop's, period.
I also think she doesn't care about the similarities between ACOTAR and TBJ because she knows neither her hardcore stans nor casual fantasy readers will be able to immediately identify Bishop's work in her own and cramp her sales. This is the woman who name-dropped Breonna Taylor's murder while promoting her book and simultaneously relegating every major Black character in her works to the developmental back-burner if she doesn't kill them outright. She doesn't care. And there is no way she obvious to these glaring similarities.
