Singer Aguilera's alter ego / SUN 7-25-21 / Celestial figure depicted in this puzzle's grid / Fifth century conqueror defeated in the Battle of Catalaunian Plains / Company that makes recoverable and reusable rocket boosters / Gilbert and ___ Islands former colonial names of Kiribati and Tuvalu / Descriptor of almost a million and a half Californians / Onetime material for tennis racket strings / Executive producer of HBO's A Black Lady Sketch Show

Constructor: Chandi Deitmer

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: DOUBLE DIPPERS (115A: Ones committing a party foul ... or the images depicted in this puzzle's grid?) — Big and Little Dippers (the constellations) are depicted in the grid if you connect all the asterisks (i.e. stars), which are formed by writing both an "I" and an "X" in the circled squares (the "I" in the Across answer, the "X" in the Down). There's also POLARIS (68A: Guiding light), which is the tip of the handle of the Little Dipper (represented here by the asterisk that is actually located in the answer POLARIS), and Alpha and Beta Ursae MAJORIS (represented here by the asterisks in IMDB and DOUBLE DIPPERS, respectively), which point toward POLARIS (61A: Alpha and Beta Ursae (pointers to 68-Across)). There are three additional theme answers related to the constellations:

Theme answers:

• DRINKING GOURD (19D: Celestial figure depicted in this puzzle's grid, in African American folklore)
• SEVEN OXEN (9D: Celestial figure depicted in this puzzle's grid, in Roman folklore)
• WAGON OF HEAVEN (22D: Celestial figure depicted in this puzzle's grid, in Babylonian folklore)

Word of the Day: ENATIC (31D: Sharing maternal lines)—

: descended from the same mother : related on the mother's side (merriam-webster.com)

A complex and admirable architectural feat, which (like most architectural-feat crosswords) I didn't enjoy much at all. I honestly had no idea what was going on even after I had finished the puzzle. Things were made more confusing by the fact that the software didn't accept my "X" answers for the circled squares and, when I hit "Reveal All," rendered those boxes as lower-case "a"s (???). So now I'm looking at a grid with seemingly randomly arranged circled squares with "X"s and "I"s in them, and I've got three long Downs that are, and I cannot stress this enough, literally no help at all. At least DRINKING GOURD seems related to the whole idea of dippers, but SEVEN OXEN? WAGON OF HEAVEN? Not only have I never heard of these, they are useless in terms of understanding what the hell is going on with all the "X" / "I" squares. The revealer, DOUBLE DIPPERS, did in fact reveal what I was supposed to be looking for, but I still didn't see how "X" or "I" was related, how you were supposed to get anything celestial or astral from them. Then I wrote "X" and "I" next to each other and was like "... nine? ... eleven? ... nope, there are way more stars than that (combined) in these constellations .... huh?" Then it hit me: superimpose the "I" on the "X" and you get an asterisk, which is essentially a visual representation of a star. Voila! It's a very neat trick, truly it is, and the dippers (big and little) do indeed (once you connect the stars) look more than vaguely like they look in conventional depictions. It's just that getting to the point where I see any of this wasn't really pleasant. I CAN SEE the big picture now, but only TIREDLY. Those three long Downs, I cannot stress how useless they seemed, how unhelpful they were. How do you get away with cluing SEVEN OXEN (plural) as [Celestial figure...] (singular)!?!?  And if you can see either oxen or a wagon in these star formations, you're a more perceptive person than I am. The fill got understandably rough in places (I say "understandably" because holy cow this dense theme must've put a lot of pressure on the grid). So, the end product is very admirable in its complexity, but getting to the point where I could actually see that complexity was not itself a very pleasurable experience.