them's crossing words

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X-Linked Traits

by enrique

Today's theme is a lot of fun to puzzle through, way better than your run-of-the-mill apt pair. Even though the themers aren't proper words/phrases that you'd see in the wild, they fit together perfectly thanks to the shared vertical cross at 15D.

The theme is hard to coin a phrase to, but something along the lines of "words separated by X's" probably fits the bill. The three themers FUNXGAMES, LATINXGREEK, and WOMENXMEN include both an opposition (FUN and GAMES, LATIN and GREEK, WOMEN and MEN) and a word that includes an X: XGAMES, LATINX, XMEN. All three are positioned nicely with 15D: XOXOX.

The majority of my solve time was dedicated to puzzling out the theme, particularly LATINXGREEK. I caught on to the X pattern quickly because 15D's clue is a dead giveaway: "Sweet sign-off written with alternating letters." Figuring out the other two components in each themer wasn't so easy.

The lower-left corner posed a bit of trouble because I slotted DIMLIT instead of LOWLIT for "Like a space made romantic with candles." In theory they're interchangeable but you'd have to try really hard to convince me that LOWLIT is a better fit for that definition. It doesn't help that I couldn't for the life of me remember the answer to 23A, "Demon in Japanese folklore" (ONI). I was kind of just scrambling around in that corner, revisiting definitions and peeking at the themers. Finally I committed to 25A and discovered WOMENXMEN, revealing my mistakes.

The rest of the grid is kind of boring, honestly. I think the constructor held back on more interesting clues because they wanted to ensure the themers were nice and solvable for crossword plebs like myself. The result is some extraordinarily average definitions littered about the corners. You know, the kind of stuff like "Newspaper VIPs" for EDS, or the timeless "'Let's chat again soon,' over text" (TTYL). It's not a big deal because the theme holds its own, but working through most of the fill today was robotic.

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