that might be the thing. try checking "blink while talking" and copy the "blink" sprite into the "talk blink" slot?
im kinda confused how it's still animating as you talk after you remove the blink. is the talking animation set up somewhere else?
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?