It's a (th/m)emed puzzle! I had this idea during some down time and decided to fire up Crossfire. I managed to find some good themers, find a good themer arrangement, and fill a grid I was happy with, all in the span of a few hours. Then life caught up with me again and it took me like a month to finish cluing this. Whoops! Guess I'm just wAcKy like that!!! 🤪🤪
Normally I hold myself to very high standards when it comes to puzzles, but this one definitely has a more slapdash feel to it. There's nothing bad about it, of course, but I didn't take the time to explore each and every branch in the tree of possibilities for themer arrangement/fill options. And I think that's okay! There's value in obsessively refining a grid to perfection, obviously, but sometimes it's fun to just sketch out a silly idea and set it free into the world.
Shoutout to Paolo Pasco for confirming that this theme idea hadn't been done before! This puzzle is completely un-playtested, so (as always but especially this time) let me know if there's anything in need of fixing!
Finally, as is customary in my puzzles apparently, I conclude this write-up by telling you to go check out some Thing I reference in one of the clues. This time, the artist at 44D. This song is not from the album mentioned, but it's one of my favorites. Absolute jammer. (SPOILERS, obviously).
-SPOILERS-
Not much Behind the Scenes content to share this time around, just an alternate version of the grid that I made because I thought I could optimize for better bonus entries and fewer 3-letter words. I could not. The bonuses are better, and there are fewer 3s, but the rest of the fill suffers as a result.
