Tuff Crosswords

 Just in time for a month before Valentine's day! 

This one was a fun experience. It's probably four years old and I only remembered vague parts of it when I opened it last night. At this point I have no idea how I made this. There are eight regular theme entries, set up in four pairs which have to be in a specific order relative to each other. There's a fifteen letter revealer that crosses two of those theme entries. There are three bonus revealers (which are three letters) All told, there are 79 squares with part of a theme entry in them. There are a lot of clue "pairs" (71- and 49-Across; 37- and 53-Across; 1-Across and 2-Down; 68-Across and 46-Down) All of this, and the only sacrifice I had to make was expanding the grid to 15x16. I considered ways to update the grid but I honestly struggled with getting three pairs and an alternative 10 letter revealer. So I don't know how me four years ago managed it. Nothing short of a miracle. SPOILERS! Here are some of the entries that didn't make it but were stil...

I'm probably still going to see it though. If nothing else for the fact that it's a battle between a character called Lang and a character called Kang.

This puzzle was originally made with movies, but those were harder to come up with good entries for. The only one I really liked split TRON across BEST RAP SONG to form BE STRONG. I needed a category that had lots of clear, short entries, so people's names was my go-to, and I think the result was a lot better. Turns out I was still able to use my favorite entry from the movies puzzle, the only difference being that RON was now split. Other movie puzzles I wasn't able to use include: T(HE) SOP(R)ANOS --> THERANOS [HER]  T(HE) SHAPE OF W(AT)ER --> THEATER [HEAT] (this one was gold too since all three parts are movie-themed Name entries I wasn't able to use include: H(AR)D ACT TO FOL(LO)W --> HARLOW [ARLO] MAD(E) A BEE(LI)NE --> MADELINE [ELI] PU(B)LIC PROP(ERT)Y --> PUBERTY [BERT] T(R)OPIC OF CAPR(ICO)RN --> TRICORN [RICO] TEA(CH) TO THE T(E)ST --> TEA CHEST [CHE] TW(IN) ENGI(NE)S --> TWINES [INES] TE(C)TONIC PL(ATE) --> TECATE [CATE] T(E)SLA ROAD(S...