Seth

Despised this one. The challenging answers felt nitpicky or unnecessarily obscure, particularly for a Tuesday. The theme is great, but the ancillary clues and answers range too dramatically from good to downright bad.

I really disliked this one. It required far too much deleting and reworking due to it not being a rebus (I'm generally not a fan of rebus squares overall, so that might've colored my reaction), and I felt too many of the clues were unintuitive and stretches, be they for a Thursday puzzle or a Saturday one. I can forgive clues for which I'm just not clever enough to figure them out, but that's not what these felt like, if I'm being honest. A cute concept, for sure, but I found the implementation sloppy, intentionally obfuscated, and unnecessarily opaque. Time to stew and wait for Friday's effort, I guess...

Did not like this one at all. The repetition of the theme letters without a unifying clue is poor design to me. Some of the clues and answers are also really strange and weirdly hit the extremes of "tries to use new-age language" and "clearly grew up a long time ago" rather than just sticking with one or the other (examples include BADASS and GOTH, contrasted with DODOBIRD). One of my least favorite Mondays in a while.