So turns out (after indiscriminate deletion of nearly all my variables through a process of utmost stupid human rage) i have found that …
it is a big “NO NO” to have a child actor that has a variable of the
parent class in any fashion.
i can refer to player controller and pull out the character class from it (via casting owning pawn to my custom character class) but i can not under any circumstance be allowed to save that cast as a variable (which i did in a hopes to reduce type casting every tick)
so now i must make some weird functions in my controller to talk between the playercharacter and the playercharacters weapon arms…or i guess i should just learn interfaces 
…
Im going to count this AS the ANSWER but i would love it if someone would tell me a better, more efficient method of communicating between parent and child actors.