Early reviews say this theme is “very clever but somewhat inconsistent”.
So I guess, enjoy the cleverness and bear with the inconsistency.
Grid: 15×15, Difficulty: Medium
[solve online] [.puz version] [pdf version][solution]
Constructor commentary (contains puzzle spoilers)
For some reason I thought this theme would work best if all the theme answers were in the corners. I really like how the puzzle turned out, but having the themed answers in the corners ended up making it difficult for me to make a fillable grid, let alone a good one. I thought of this theme about 6 months ago when I first started constructing and the only way I could get the puzzle to work was if I made it 21×21, but there really isn’t justification for this puzzle being that big (Well, not the way I did it. Ellen Leuschner and Jeff Chen totally justified a 21×21 in their NYT puzzle with the same theme). Since then, I’ve gotten better at constructing and started using crossfire (before I was using the open source program Phil, which is great but much more limited in it’s capabilities), so I decided to revisit the theme and came up with this puzzle.
Theme: The black squares in each corner act as rebuses for the word “hole” making each a BLACKHOLE. The inconsistency that reviewers correctly complained about is that most of the theme answers like CORN[HOLE], [HOLE]INONE, and PIGEON[HOLE] are normal phrases, while [HOLE]OFFAME and [HOLE]SOME are puns. I certainly agree that the puzzle would be better if these were all consistent and I dislike inconsistently applied themes like everyone else, but I decided this was okay because the two punny answers have question marks in the clue.
AHA (13-Across: “Take on me” band) I recently watch a-ha: The Movie, a documentary about the band a-ha. Before seeing it, I didn’t know much about them besides “Take on me” but my local theater was showing it and both my partner and I ended up really enjoying it.
ACE (24-Across: Part of LGBTQIA+, familiarly) ACE has shown up in the NYT crossword 932 times and as far as I can tell the clue has only referenced asexual folks once (shout out to Brooke Husic and Brian Thomas). I will almost always clue it as a reference to Ace folks because why would I want to reference a card instead of an awesome community of people.
ITINA (29-Across: “What’s Love Got to Do With It” singer’s autobiography) See, I told you that this comes up in crosswords a lot.
CHADWICKBOSEMAN (6-Down: Actor who played the king of Wakanda) I enjoy the fact that the actor who played the Black Panther intersects with theme revealer BLACKHOLE.
ELM (32-Down: Common arboreal street name) The Washington Post did an interesting analysis of US street names, which includes a cool map of the most popular street names in each state. For lots of states (particularly on the East coast) tree names are the most popular, but none of them are ELM. Oak, which is also 3 letters, is most common in Oklahoma and Arkansas so I guess it was kind of misleading for me to put ELM as the answer. Park is the most popular street name overall and 2nd is second which is fun. The most popular street name is Virginia is Lee… really Virginia.
DERM (52-Down: Ending with ecto- or echino-) I love echinoderms (seastars, sand dollars, urchins, etc) so much! They’re one of the best groups of animals. I have a wonderful life-sized tattoo of a pisaster seastar on my thigh.
The LilyPad 