WAI illustrious Character Select CN

This node is a dropdown with roughly 5,000 anime characters in it, and picking one hands you the Danbooru tags that make WAI-Illustrious actually draw that character. That's the whole pitch, and it's a good one. If you generate anime on an Illustrious-family checkpoint, you already know the model knows thousands of characters by name - the problem is you don't know that Nier's 2B is tagged one specific way and Hatsune Miku another. This node is the lookup table so you don't have to memorize it.

It's the ComfyUI port of mirabarukaso's character_select_stand_alone_app, which is a real, actively-used tool in the WAI/anime corner - there's a whole thumbnail-browsing version of it on a HuggingFace Space. Inside ComfyUI it collapses down to a single node with two string outputs.

Why it works at all

WAI-illustrious-SDXL is the checkpoint most anime users actually load, and its built-in character coverage is broad: a character with a few hundred Danbooru works usually resolves from the name tag alone, no LoRA needed. The catch is that WAI's tested-character list uses a specific set of tag spellings (a lot of them Chinese aliases mapping to Danbooru tags), and getting one wrong just gives you a generic character instead of an error. This node ships that curated list - the same wai_characters.csv the standalone app uses - so the tag you get out is the one the model was actually tuned against.

Worth knowing the model's own quirks while you're here: WAI wants a short prompt. Its page explicitly warns that long quality-tag stacks and long negatives make output blurrier, which is the opposite of old SD 1.5 habits. So don't undo this node's clean character tag by burying it in boilerplate.

The inputs that matter

• character - the big enum, ~5,000 entries plus random. This is the whole point of the node. random is genuinely fun for exploration and pairs with the seed below.
• character_weight - wraps the character tag in emphasis, i.e. (character:1.2). Range 0.1–2.0. Bump it slightly if the character's identity is getting drowned out by your style tags; the practical ceiling before artifacts is around 1.5.
• custom_prompt (optional) - your own tags to combine with the character. Quality prefix, pose, outfit, whatever.
• insert_before_character - puts your custom_prompt in front of the character tag instead of after it. Tag order matters on these models (earlier tags get more attention), so this is your lever for "is the character or the scene the priority."
• random_action_seed - drives the random pick so it's reproducible.

Outputs are prompt (the assembled tag string - wire it straight into your positive CLIP Text Encode) and info (a text readout of what it selected, handy on a ShowText node when you're using random).

Install

Through ComfyUI Manager: open the Custom Nodes Manager, search ComfyUI_Mira, Install, restart. Or by hand: cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes && git clone https://github.com/mirabarukaso/ComfyUI_Mira.git, then restart ComfyUI. If it errors on load, run pip install -r requirements.txt inside ComfyUI/custom_nodes/ComfyUI_Mira - that's the author's own first fix.

On first run the pack pulls down wai_characters.csv and a thumbnail JSON. If the character list ever goes stale or you want a fresh pull, delete mira/json/wai_character_thumbs.json (and wai_characters.csv) and it'll re-download.

Common issues

The most-reported snag isn't really this node - it's the full standalone-app workflow people import alongside it. Users hit a Checkpoint, value not in list error, and the fix is boring but real: the workflow ships pointing at checkpoint/save-image nodes referencing model filenames you don't have. Open those loader nodes and re-select your actual checkpoint. The node itself only outputs strings, so if generations come out looking generic, the usual culprit is that you're on a non-Illustrious checkpoint (Pony and Flux don't speak these tags) or you've swamped the character tag with a giant quality/negative block. Trim it back and let the character tag breathe.