Aim offset problems. Works fine by itself, breaks in the animation blueprint.

My mesh and armature are scaled at 1 across the board. The animationsa nd aim offset actually works fine by itself. There is no problem with the pitch value being fed to it.
But when I use it as a node in the anim graph, it breaks immediately. The model blows up, shrinks to 0, the character contorts wrong, or nothing happens.

I’ve been trying to solve this for TWO WEEKS. I literally have no idea what else there is even to do. I cannot believe this might be the end of my project. This is absurd. I have little problem with the actual programming and blueprints. It’s just unsolvable blackbox problems like this that keep stopping me for days. This is actually insane.