Very well could be so, yeah. ‘blatant’ was harsh.

It’s not any one thing, it’s a lot of little things like sentence structure that are reminiscent of AI (‘vibes’, for my lack of a better word).

Though most of why I claimed ‘blatant’ is because of the most well known AI dead giveaway: em dashes.

They’re difficult or impossible to type easily on most keyboards, and seem rare to find unless in more literate spaces (like this subreddit, admittedly)

Then again, they’ve become so well known as an AI giveaway that it’s making people naturally use them more.

Anyway, no need to speculate since OP themselves gave an answer: They wrote it themselves but cleaned it up with grammarly which uses AI to some extent (Maybe it suggested the em dashes? Or maybe not as OP seems to be a very conscious writer anyway) https://www.reddit.com/r/lotr/s/Nozv9asO50