Empire of Flame and Thorns builds its plot around a device with a well-established pedigree in YA and New Adult fantasy, the deadly competition that doubles as political control. Suzanne Collins popularized this convention with The Hunger Games (2008), a YA novel about a televised death match used to keep a conquered population from uniting against their oppressive government. Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes (2015) adapted the device into court intrigue, pitting rival Aspirants against each other across four brutal Trials to determine an empire’s next ruler. Blackwood’s Atonement Trials borrow this structure: An oppressed group is told the contest offers a path to freedom and then pressured into sabotaging one another instead of their true oppressors.

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000) offers a literary precedent for the plot twist at the end of Blackwood’s novel. The Triwizard Cup, the tournament’s promised prize, is secretly rigged into a portkey delivering the winner to his death. The device plays on a habit the genre trains into readers: rooting for a protagonist to win a contest framed as a fair test of merit. Making the finish line itself the trap indicts the institution running the contest, turning the promised reward into proof the system was built to consume its participants, not reward them. Blackwood’s ending performs the same reversal: The “winners” of the Atonement Trials are secretly declared the dragon shifter rulers’ “life slaves,” and their victory becomes their downfall.