2-2-2 meta explanation + winner!

Last week’s meta had me asking for some things that often come in twos.

Meta solution and explanation after the cut!

—

As many of you could tell by this puzzle’s last theme entry, the theme of this puzzle was AELINDROMES. For those uninitiated (as I was up until very recenty), an aelindrome is a variation on the palindrome created by poet Anthony Etherin, where instead of a sequence of letters reading the same forward and backwards, a sequence of letter chunks read the same forward and backwards. An enumeration will often accompany the aelindrome, designating the lengths of those letter chunks.

Some examples by Anthony Etherin:
“Intense ion, Einstein!” (22222) with the letter chunks [in][te][ns][ei][on]
“Reside in desire” (2222) with the letter chunks [re][si][de][in]
“Melody, a bloody elm” (1234) with the letter chunks [m][el][ody][ablo]

There’s a better explanation plus longer examples here!

Anyway, back to the puzzle.

There were four other obvious theme answers:

WE’RE SCREWED [[Gif of Shaggy and Scooby both gulping]]
INSTANT TANS [Some spray results]
CITRUS FRUIT [Orange, e.g.]
EUSTOMATOUS [Having a distinct and well-developed mouth (ooh la la!)]

The last word is a wildcard, I know LOL, but there’s a very particular reason why I chose those specific four: that’s because they are all *almost* aelindromes with an enumeration of (222), with the exception of one letter:

WE/RE/SC/RE/WE + D

I + NS/TA/NT/TA/NS

C + IT/RU/SF/RU/IT

E + US/TO/MA/TO/US

Those extra letters, in order, spell DICE, which are some things that often come in twos. Neat, huh?

Thanks to Will Nediger for test-solving!

—

Finding phrases whose extra letters were specific letters wasn’t really a problem, as I found the phrases first and created a meta answer from the collection of extra letters I had. (I’m very happy I could tie it in with the “twos” theme.) Finding a phrase whose extra letter was E was the hard part, as I didn’t already have one. EUSTOMATOUS came up while searching on The Word’s Word, which allowed me to ReGex search the OneLook database (highly recommend!!). It’s an absurd word, but it provides a really funny mental image to me and the crossings are fair so I consider it a bonus.

Here are some other phrases that didn’t fit in the puzzle:

FESTIVITIES -> (F)ES/TI/VI/TI/ES

There weren’t many. If you know more, share them in the comments below!
Here’s the ReGex pattern I used to find them!
(A (\w) designates a letter and \1 refers to the the first (\w), \2 to the second (\w), etc.)

(\w)(\w)(\w)(\w)..\3\4\1\2

—

There were 19 correct answers this week, with a 100% correct response rate. The winner of a Luckystreak Xwords+ Subby Baka comp subscription is Karen Spencer! Congrats to Karen!!