Weakest in the whole ONME / OXO / ECOLI / ECKERD region, but much more solid elsewhere. I needed almost every cross, especially considering that even black-and-whiteness does not suggest BLUE to me. The latter created the toughest part of the puzzle by far. The CYCLADES aren't exactly a household island group name, and I've never heard of either ECKERD College (?) or a BLUE ROAN. Longer weird answers made this slightly tough in parts. But there has to be something Extra that could be done to make this pop. And maybe there's a phrase out there that would make a nice revealer, I don't know. Sabathia and the AA one to something about Milne, then they would all be about people. If you ditched the XX answer and replaced it with some initials (LL COOL J? HH MUNRO? WW NORTON?) and then changed the CC one to a clue about pitcher C.C. Mainly I just thought the theme clues were far more boring than they ought to have been. Also, I really wish the NYTX would avoid chromosome clues altogether, largely because they are oversimplistic and essentialist and blargh. I mean, calling "any one of the 12 steps" a "line" is bizarre. Why not AA TEAM or AA LIST- AA LINE is just bizarre. But there was still something slightly unsatisfying about the arbitrariness of the letter choices and answers. So maybe the list of viable letters for a theme like this is too restricted to do anything Extra. Not a lot of TTs out there, for instance. Now, to be fair, most letters of the alphabet don't provide very good answer options when doubled up at the front. Here, it's just a bunch of double letters. Seems like the potential basis for an interesting meta-puzzle, if you could get the letters to spell something or otherwise work in concert, and the puzzle had a snappy revealer or something. This is the kind of theme that could've been good if there had been some Reason for the doubled letters. Oh, we're still doing the whole "celebrity" co-constructor thing? Really thought that fad was finished, but I should've known better.
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