Seeing a funny seemingly unintended thing where certain npcs will keep performing the nod emote in the same response

That might be because of some sort of prompt you did that they remembered? Sometimes when you ask an NPC to RP a certain way, they'll remember it. Like I've asked NPC's to post multi paragraph and describe their actions, and sometimes an NPC will just remember that I asked them to do that and be very wordy in al their responses.