Besen made a really cute braided hairstyle a decade and a half back. It has what, to me seemed, one tiny little issue: a stray piece of pixel that stretches out into the horizon for infinite. Probably a mesh issue, I'm sure if I pop into blender, import the gmdc, I'll see what pesky pixel is causing the issue, and just delete that one part--

oh wait, it looks completely normal in the program.

Is this an issue that can't be found in blender? Is milkshape mandatory? Or if I become a blender expert, would I be able to fix this?

Either Milkshape or Blender, but you'll need the plugins for Blender - it's probably a vertex that hasn't been properly assigned to the head joint, or wherever else it needs to be assigned. Should be easy to do (don't delete it because you'llend up with a hole in the mesh, just reassign it).

Issues with assigning don't show up when the mesh isn't being animated, so the mesh itself would look fine in the meshing program.

If possible, you can try to animate it in Blender to see where the vertex is coming from, by moving the head/neck and other joints (if you know how to in Blender - takes some explanation so probably a good idea to find a tutorial if you're unsure. I've only done that for TS4 meshes, so not sure if it's the same for TS2 meshes). I'm not too familiar with how to look for unassigned or wrongly assigned vetices in Blender, though. There's probably a tutorial somewhere. I mostly use Milkshape for TS2.

Thank you, that helped a lot. Knowing that that language I needed was vertex, vertices, and assigning, I was able to find relevant manuals and then fix the mesh distortion.