Honeycomb spinoffs

Question

Two simple puzzles based on the mechanics of this puzzle by Seren. Be sure to solve it if you haven't already! It's a really good one :)

Answer 1

(In this answer, I'm going to assume readers already know how the puzzle works.)

First image:

These sets seem to be playing with ambiguity, and double interpretations.

In the top right, the TIME hexagon can also spell EMIT. And this turns out to be necessary, because the puzzle containing it has the answer [TE]N[ET].

Similarly, in the top left, the internal puzzle can be either ASIDE or IDEAS. The overall solution to this puzzle is [AE]G[IS].


In the lower left, it seems we have the same puzzle twice. We can partition the letters involved into two different sets, spelling VETO and TRUE, and putting these together gives the solution [VO][TE].

And on the right side, we have... what appears to be an infinitely recursive puzzle? It turns out the answer to the internal puzzle here must be of the form _ENTURE. But that first letter comes from the puzzle itself - it doesn't actually need to be anywhere in the puzzle! So there are two possibilities - DENTURE and VENTURE. And using both of these with the L gives the solution of [DE]L[VE].



And now, going across the bottom and then backwards along the top, the final answer to this puzzle is VENDETTAS.

The second puzzle is more interesting - the two subpuzzles seem to contain each other.

For ease of reference, I've colored the two subpuzzles.
The red puzzle is smaller, so it seems more tractable. The options are:

EFO??T / ET??FO / ET??OF
FET??O / FO??ET / FO??TE
TEF??O / TEFO?? / TE??FO / TE??OF / T??EFO / T??OFE
??TEFO / ??OFET
OFET?? / OFE??T / OF??ET / OF??TE / O??FET / O??TEF

Of these, FO??ET jumps out to me as potentially giving FORGET... but that means that the blue puzzle would need to start with R and end with G, and the puzzle wouldn't have any of those letters. (Even if the red puzzle inside the blue was to be solved differently, generating some "letters from nowhere", it would need to have a solution of the form RG...RG.)

Another option is OF??ET → OFFSET. And this one looks more promising! We've got both an F and an S in the blue puzzle, so we don't have to worry about letters coming from nowhere. So we're looking for a word starting with F, ending with S, and having OT in it twice... that gives FOOTNOTES!


And that makes the solution for this last puzzle MOTIFS.