A spider in the doorway

One eight-stroke drawing in three states. Rest and watching differ by exactly two characters, so it reads as a mood change rather than a different creature. Braced leaves the spider untouched and wraps it in a frame.

 \\  //
--(oo)--
 //  \\

 \\  //
--(OO)--
 //  \\

┌────────┐
│ \\  // │
│--(OO)--│
│ //  \\ │

Why the frame, and not a different pose

A refusal has to be legible in peripheral vision, before anyone reads a word. The lintel ┌────────┐ is a horizontal contrast bar that no other state has — the eye catches it well before it resolves a leg. Variants that only moved leg position were invisible until focused on.

The frame is open at the bottom: a doorway you walk through, not a box the spider sits in. Closing it turns the mark into a portrait rather than an obstruction.

Braced is 4 rows against rest's 3, so rest and watching carry a leading blank line. All three occupy a stable 4-row block and the header never jumps when a refusal fires.

ASCII plus four box-drawing glyphs only — no emoji, nothing exotic. Diagonals use \\ and // rather than ╱╲, whose font coverage is patchy: a fallback face at a different advance width would shear the drawing sideways in exactly the plain-xterm-over-SSH case this has to survive.