cry about it

by cantorlope

• Play it ↗
• Difficulty: medium

Another day, another internet meme in a crossword grid.

The lower-left corner in this grid is absolutely brutal. The rest of the crossword? Easy. But "Anyway, here's ____" as WONDERWALL crossing NANDOS, SWOOPBANGS, and a BTS reference? You'd have to be tapped into the constructor's mind palace to finish this puzzle without hints.

Look, throw me a bone here. I know the song WONDERWALL but am unfamiliar with the meme. I'd hope to fill it from some contextual clues, but instead I've got NANDOS (some chain I've never heard of), "BTS fandom", and SWOOPBANGS^[1] running through it. Maybe if I landed the leading W I'd be set, but it's a wordplay clue with "Freestyled, maybe". This whole sequence of solving made me feel personally attacked. The name of this puzzle is "cry about it" so I think I have the license to complain.

I also have to detract points for this constructor bringing me to the BTS wiki to look up ARMY, since that fill makes no sense. "Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth." Sure.

There's some cute cluing in this grid that I'd spend more time praising if I weren't so distracted by that bottom-left corner. Some highlights for me were "Sound-make-louders" (AMPS) and "'...if anyone cares about what I think...' online" (IMO). Not to mention that GOOGOOGAGA is some fantastic fill that I'd like to see expanded into a proper themed puzzle.

It's hard to tag this puzzle with a difficulty rating because I think if you're operating in the memedom you'll have an easy time. But for those of us who are outside the k-pop circle and haven't been guitar shopping recently, medium.

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