thanks for bringing this up, I've never seen this happen so it would be really hard for me to fix.
if you can catch it on video, with the "talk threshold" bar visible on the offending layer, that might help me figure this one out if that's ok?
Sure! I've got a video of it (apologies, I sound tired xD;) I think I figured out what was going on and I mention it in the video, but just also have it in text: I have a blink set to the mouth layer so that it can have a different position every now and then. The issue happens when the blink is present, but doesn't when it's not. So I guess if that's the core of the issue, should I go about having that blink animation in a different way?
Testing that out, the issue still persists unfortunately. "blink while talking" has the same results. I put a slightly different sprite in the blink talk and could see it picking that one instead.
So far my best solution for this has been to create a mildly long sprite sheet with variations in it for the idle mouth poses, which is honestly good enough for now. I tried doing states for the idle mouth change, but there's a weird jitter/snapping into place of the two frames as they change, so that didn't pan out.
The talk animation is purely set up under the phenom detection. Having a talk sprite or not doesn't seem to affect the animation of talking or otherwise... If that's what you were referring to?