Holly genus / FRI 8-23-24 / Beat decisively, in video game lingo / Jazz trumpeter Jones / Forest, in a metaphor / Color of a proverbial French beast / Antagonist in a 1604 play ... or a 1992 animated movie / Free-roaming residents of Japan's Nara Park / Famed recipient of a lesser blessing

Aparna Nancherla (born 1982 or 1983) is an American stand-up comedian and actress. She has had recurring roles on television series including BoJack Horseman and Corporate and has written for Late Night with Seth Meyers and Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. Nancherla released her debut comedy album Just Putting It Out There through Tig Notaro's Bentzen Ball Records on July 8, 2016. [...] In seasons four, five and six of BoJack Horseman, from 2017 to 2020, Nancherla had a recurring voice role as BoJack's alleged daughter, but actual half-sister, Hollyhock Manheim-Mannheim-Guerrero-Robinson-Zilberschlag-Hsung-Fonzerelli-McQuack. (wikipedia)

This was two puzzles: extremely easy, and NANCHERLA. Pop culture proper nouns are, as you know, frequently an adventure, and can be radically inclusionary ("Hey, I know that person! So happy to see her!") ... or exclusionary ("Who the ...!?"). I fell somewhere in the "Hey!" / "Who the!?" gap. I could picture her. I knew I'd seen her in ... that thing ... with those people ... on that show ... but her name, I just ... couldn't retrieve it. I would've been able to retrieve APARNA much more easily, I think (her first name has appeared once before, in a 2018 puzzle), but NANCHERLA, that ended up being a letter-by-letter ordeal. Well, "ordeal" makes it sound harder and more grueling than it was, but still, her name was an extreme outlier in this otherwise very easy and relatively (if not completely) name-free puzzle. What I liked about NANCHERLA was looking her up and discovering that she voiced a recurring, important character on Bojack Horseman (a show I adored); she was the voice of Bojack's half-sister, Hollyhock. In fact, she does a Lot of voice work for animated shows. Unreliable Narrator (the book mentioned in the clue) was not something I'd heard of, so it did nothing to help me retrieve her name. She's an established comedian / writer, so she's eminently crossworthy, but she's also not a household name, so if solvers are gonna struggle *anywhere* today, they're gonna struggle there. And when you struggle in only one place, it gives you a kind of WARPED solving experience, an imbalanced feeling. It's like I forgot most of the rest of the (lovely) puzzle because all of my actual solving energy had to go into making NANCHERLA appear. But—and this is crucial—the crosses were all fair. Can't imagine a single letter that a solver might wipe out on. So, no Naticks! Which, at the end of the day, is the most important rule of crosswords. So you have to work to get a name you've never heard of. It happens. And if you have heard of it, then you get that thrill of recognition. Either way, we all survive.