Bardugo's trilogy is built on the young-adult fantasy market Rowling created and wears its shape: an orphan who discovers a latent power, is removed to an institution that trains people like her, is sorted by ability, and finds the charismatic authority running it is the antagonist. What it changes is the setting, deliberately. The Grishaverse is Tsarist-Russian rather than English boarding school, and the magic is a physiology rather than a curriculum. Filed MEDIUM: a genre inheritance rather than a stated debt, and the strongest part of the claim is commercial rather than textual.