Signs Of Co-dependency

How Body Language Changes When a Character Is Falling in Love (Whether They Admit It or Not)

When someone starts to fall, it shows up everywhere—not in the love confession (that’s the easy part), but in the twitch of a smile, in the silence that suddenly feels charged, in the way someone’s hand almost reaches out before pulling back.

╰ They start listening… with their whole damn body

Suddenly, they’re turned toward this person all the time. Full body facing them. Chin tilted slightly in. They lean forward during small talk like it’s breaking news. They notice things, like the rhythm of their voice, the way their lips move when they think too hard. They stop fiddling with their phone. Their knee bounces until the other person speaks, and then, stillness. They’re so present, it hurts.

╰ Their eye contact gets… weird

Sometimes they can’t stop looking. Sometimes they can’t look at all... There’s that moment—the pause, the flicker—where their eyes land on the other person’s mouth for just a second too long. Or they track their hands. Or notice how their hair falls into their face. It’s not about lust. It’s yearning, and it’s quiet and stupid and full of panic. And when the person catches them looking? Immediate eye dart. Back to their drink. To the sky. To anywhere else. Guilty. Flushed. Terrified.

╰ Their hands get stupid

They’re suddenly very aware of what their hands are doing. They fidget more. Or freeze. They keep their arms close to their body, like they’re worried they’ll accidentally reach out. If they touch the other person, even casually, it lingers. Not long enough to be noticed, but long enough to matter. Sometimes they adjust the other person’s collar or brush something off their sleeve and then have a tiny meltdown inside. That kind of touch feels too intimate. It’s not flirtation. It’s reverence.

╰ Their silence means more than their words

They trail off mid-sentence. Laugh at things they don’t usually laugh at. Start saying something and stop themselves. It’s because their brain is trying to do too many things at once—act normal, sound chill, don’t make it weird, try not to look like you’re in love. Meanwhile, the body is over here sweating, shifting, subtly turning toward the other person like a sunflower in denial.

╰ Their whole vibe gets softer

There’s a gentleness that creeps in. Even if they’re a sharp, snarky character, there’s a moment where they look at the person like they’re a planet they’ve just discovered. It’s brief. It’s devastating. It’s involuntary. And they might pretend it didn’t happen. But the reader saw it. The love interest definitely saw it. And suddenly, everything is different.

╰ Bonus: They mirror the other person without meaning to

Their arms cross when the other person’s do. Their head tilts. They laugh a beat after. This is subconscious connection at work. Their body wants to match this person. Sync with them. Be close without being obvious. And when they stop mirroring? That’s a sign too. Maybe something hurt. Maybe they’re trying to pull away. But the body always tells the truth, even when the character’s mouth is lying through its teeth.

@chaiandpages you can never get rid of me <3

lovely character. i need him to finally break down sobbing clutching his chest like it'll stop the pain crumpling to the floor begging God to either help him or let him die

“The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.” — Vladimir Nabokov

writing is hard but coming up with a cunty title and catchy summary will slay even god's strongest soldier

Romeo + Juliet (1996) dir. Baz Luhrmann

Anne Sexton, from a letter featured in Anne Sexton; A Self-Portrait In Letters

The words they're afraid of.

(Read on our blog.)

The recently appointed Department of Defense head Pete Hegseth (formerly Fox News pundit, perpetually soused creepy uncle, and current group chat leaker of classified intel) banned images of the Enola Gay from the Pentagon’s website for the offense of “DEI” language. In keeping with the far right’s stated war on anything vaguely resembling diversity, equity and inclusion, even historical photos are up for cancellation. When a literal weapon of mass destruction is censored for being a bit fruity under the Trump administration’s war against inconvenient truths, what exactly is left untouched?

This is clown show stuff, but the stakes are far from funny. While some might be hesitant to compare the current administration to the very worst history has to offer, we can at least all agree that they are dyed-in-the-wool grammar Nazis. Policing language has been the objective of the MAGA culture war long before Project 2025’s debut—the wave of book bans orchestrated by astroturf movements like Moms for Liberty, and Florida’s 2022 Don’t Say Gay bill have already had a profound effect in the arena of free speech and freedom of expression (despite the far right’s long tradition of doublespeak performative free-speech martyrdom to the contrary). Don’t Say Gay ostensibly targeted K-3 education, but LGBT+ content at all levels of education (and beyond) was either quietly censored or entirely preempted in practice. The results were not just a war on so-called ideology, or words alone—but on reality and essential freedoms.

Now, words as innocuous and important as racism, climate change, hate speech, prejudice, mental health, and inequality are targeted as subversive. Entire concepts are being vanished from government institutions, scrubbed not only from descriptions but from metadata, search indexes, and archival frameworks.

If you don’t name a thing, does it exist?

These words are as numerous as they are generic: women, race, Black, immigrants, multicultural, gender, injustice. But what is painfully unserious is also particularly dangerous in its real-world consequences. The process of controlling words is a well-worn authoritarian tendency. Fifty-two universities are now under investigation as part of the President's effort to curb “woke” research and thought crimes. Institutions are being coerced to comply with a nebulous set of ideological demands, or face budgetary annihilation. That means cutting funding for entire departments, slashing financial aid, defunding scientific grants, and pressuring faculty to self-censor.

The possibilities for censorship extend far and wide—interfering, by extension, in everything from reproductive healthcare programs, to libraries and museums. The Trump administration’s proposed budget slashing all federal funding for libraries, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will effectively gut an infrastructure that supports over 100,000 libraries and museums across the country—community centers, educational lifelines, internet access points, and archives of marginalized histories (starting with the Smithsonian Institution).

When you erase access, you erase participation. And when you erase participation, you erase people, and the means by which future generations might even learn they existed. A culture that cannot remember is a culture that cannot resist.

The erasure is, yet again, unsurprisingly targeted at minorities and LGBT+ people. The National Parks Service quietly revised the Stonewall Monument’s website to remove references to transgender people—a fundamental part of the original protests. Not an oversight, not a mistake, but a deliberate excision—one point in a wider plan of erasure depicted in stark detail in Project 2025, a blueprint to dismantle civil rights, defund LGBT+-related healthcare, and rewrite history from the ground up.

Dehumanization by deletion—welcome to the reactionary resurgence of doubleplusungood governance. In Trumpland, words are weapons—but not in the way they intend. Their fear of language betrays its power; that’s why they’re trying so hard to police it.

Words hurt them.

Hurt them back.

- the Ellipsus Team

Persephone, I’m sorry I forgot to wear the bracelets out, but I took some pretty photos of flowers to make it up to you.

I hope you like them 🙏🏻

Flowers may not last forever, but the impact you and they have on me does.

Whump Prompts/Ideas

Give your whumpee a raging fever that Caretaker can't seem to keep down, they just keep getting warmer whilst shivering harder

Make the whumpee someone special in whumpees life. A trusted friend turned yandere or a parent or a sibling who was bought out by the enemy. Make the hurt personal

The whumpee is hiding a bullet wound, it's non fatal and for the most part they've been able to walk it off. But they've lost a lot of blood and they are starting to go pale. And no one is noticing

The whumpee was the sidekick of the hero, and they expect the hero to come for them eventually. But one day turns into to two and two turns into a week and they stop expecting the hero to save them

Drop a building on your whumpee

In addition have the person who save them become their whumper

Project your own fears onto your whumpee, if you are afraid of heights put the whumpee on the top of a building. If you are afraid of snakes, bite whumpee with something venemous

Have the whumper act out of spite. They aren't gaining anything by hurting the whumpee they just want to, they don't get any satisfaction out of it either, they just want to hurt something

Have the whumper and the caretaker know eachother, caretaker finally comes in to take whumpee away and they find themselves face to face to someone they thought they parted ways with long ago

Make the caretaker a yandere, turn them into a care whumper. They do care about the whumpee, but obsessively so.

Give whumpee a hobby the requires their hands or eyes or ears. And have the whumper threated to damage those things if they don't co-operate. The whumper will facilitate the hobby but if whumpee steps out of line they lose the ability to do said hobby. They don't loose the hobby itself, the whumper does this so that they still can have the hobby but they can't do it

Have your caretaker trade places with the whumpee. The whumper didn't want to whumpee anyway, it was all to get to caretaker and now they have them

Take whumpees most prized posession and put it just out of reach, put it on a shelf they can't reach, put it in a box they cannot open or break, put it on the other end of a chain that every time whumpee tries to go closer the object is pulled away

Restrict whumpees movement, so much so that even the whumper struggles to interact with them despite having put them in those bindings

I want really really badly to do the whole, corkboard covered in red string and pictures but i have Nothing To Do It For. this is a problem that i could solve by Making Shit Up but also the corkboard is in my room where people go and being percieved is scary as shit.