Holly genus / FRI 8-23-24 / Beat decisively, in video game lingo / Jazz trumpeter Jones / Forest, in a metaphor / Color of a proverbial French beast / Antagonist in a 1604 play ... or a 1992 animated movie / Free-roaming residents of Japan's Nara Park / Famed recipient of a lesser blessing

Constructor: Taylor Johnson and Rafael Musa

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Aparna NANCHERLA (33D: Comedian Aparna who wrote "Unreliable Narrator") —

Aparna Nancherla (born 1982 or 1983) is an American stand-up comedian and actress. She has had recurring roles on television series including BoJack Horseman and Corporate and has written for Late Night with Seth Meyers and Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. Nancherla released her debut comedy album Just Putting It Out There through Tig Notaro's Bentzen Ball Records on July 8, 2016. [...] In seasons four, five and six of BoJack Horseman, from 2017 to 2020, Nancherla had a recurring voice role as BoJack's alleged daughter, but actual half-sister, Hollyhock Manheim-Mannheim-Guerrero-Robinson-Zilberschlag-Hsung-Fonzerelli-McQuack. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was two puzzles: extremely easy, and NANCHERLA. Pop culture proper nouns are, as you know, frequently an adventure, and can be radically inclusionary ("Hey, I know that person! So happy to see her!") ... or exclusionary ("Who the ...!?"). I fell somewhere in the "Hey!" / "Who the!?" gap. I could picture her. I knew I'd seen her in ... that thing ... with those people ... on that show ... but her name, I just ... couldn't retrieve it. I would've been able to retrieve APARNA much more easily, I think (her first name has appeared once before, in a 2018 puzzle), but NANCHERLA, that ended up being a letter-by-letter ordeal. Well, "ordeal" makes it sound harder and more grueling than it was, but still, her name was an extreme outlier in this otherwise very easy and relatively (if not completely) name-free puzzle. What I liked about NANCHERLA was looking her up and discovering that she voiced a recurring, important character on Bojack Horseman (a show I adored); she was the voice of Bojack's half-sister, Hollyhock. In fact, she does a Lot of voice work for animated shows. Unreliable Narrator (the book mentioned in the clue) was not something I'd heard of, so it did nothing to help me retrieve her name. She's an established comedian / writer, so she's eminently crossworthy, but she's also not a household name, so if solvers are gonna struggle *anywhere* today, they're gonna struggle there. And when you struggle in only one place, it gives you a kind of WARPED solving experience, an imbalanced feeling. It's like I forgot most of the rest of the (lovely) puzzle because all of my actual solving energy had to go into making NANCHERLA appear. But—and this is crucial—the crosses were all fair. Can't imagine a single letter that a solver might wipe out on. So, no Naticks! Which, at the end of the day, is the most important rule of crosswords. So you have to work to get a name you've never heard of. It happens. And if you have heard of it, then you get that thrill of recognition. Either way, we all survive. 

["... hunting the HORNY black TOAD ..."]

But there were other answers in this puzzle, so let's look at them. We've got SWIFTIES content, which seems like it will never let up, abate, or relent (10D: Fan base added to the O.E.D. in 2023), but beyond that we've got a cavalcade of cute colloquialisms—a truly loaded puzzle at the marquee-answer level. "I HAVE TO RUN!" over "NOTE TO SELF ..." into the big drop at "ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?" You've got the cutesy half-sailorish "AHOY THERE" (2D: Bit of salty language?) ("salt" is slang for "sailor") and the curt "YEAH, FINE" (20A: Begrudging assent) and the exasperated "WHO KNOWS!?" All the moods, basically. It's colorful and smooth and entertaining, extremely hard to fault. I don't have any real struggles to document or report, though. Didn't make any mistakes, didn't fall into any traps, and didn't work particularly hard to get anything beyond the aforementioned NANCHERLA. There was one little moment of puzzlement when I wrote in OWN for 60D: Beat decisively, in video game lingo (PWN), and then, faced with BIG O- at 59A: Forest, in a metaphor, just stared for a few seconds and thought "BIG ... BIG ... BIG OLD TREE?" What the hell kind of folksy idiom is that, I wondered. "C'mon, kids, we're gonna take our sleeping bags and tent and go out camping in the BIG OLD TREE," Pa would say. I thought the answer was the metaphor. But the forest is the metaphor. "You can't see the forest (BIG PICTURE) for the trees." And so PWN, not OWN. That's the kind of fun, low-key struggle I enjoy having on a Friday. Wish there'd been more of that, or more of any kind of resistance today, but I can't be too mad at a grid this pretty.

Bullet points:

• 18A: Holly genus (ILEX) — OK, so there's one stale olden Maleskaesque answer in the puzzle. Sometimes you gotta feed OOXTEPLERNON (the God of Bad Short Fill). Sacrifice an answer. Appease him. It's easier that way. You don't want him angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry. The things he does to grids ... gruesome.

[October 30, 2009]

• 40A: "TiK ToK" creator (KESHA) — this clue made me smile. Her hit song "TiK ToK" (2010) preceded the existence of the app by many years.

• 58A: Antagonist in a 1604 play ... or a 1992 animated movie (IAGO) — I want to say I got this because of Shakespeare, but if I'm being honest, I think the Othello villain and the Aladdin parrot flew into my head roughly simultaneously  
• 38D: West Coast political hub, familiarly (SAC) — do people call it that? I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, just a few hours south of Sacramento, and I don't remember anyone saying that. But then, I don't remember anyone talking much about Sacramento at all. Anyway, SAC is a baseball term to me, now and forever, irrevocably. 
• 52D: Color of a proverbial French beast (NOIRE) — from the expression "bête NOIRE" (literally, "black beast"), which means "something strongly detested or avoided" (merriam webster dot com). It is also the ironic name of a 1987 Bryan Ferry album ("ironic" because I neither detest nor avoid it.)

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]