like the title says. also, when i turn the armature modifier off in the viewport. I don’t have this problem. not sure what went wrong 
edit: this is definately bad
If your armature in pose mode is different than your armature in rest mode, and you haven’t posed the bones, then it’s because of constraints. If you disable all constraints, you’ll see that the rest pose (the edit mode pose) is the same as the posed pose.
How to make the constraints the same as rest when unposed? Depends on the constraint and its details. Ctrl-a apply selected to rest pose is a good tool, though. In general.
Edit: I suppose it could be drivers or constraints.
heyyyy, so I’ve (sort of) identified the problem. I’m appending this character from another file and when i scale the character down and then apply the scale, the whole face rig gets messed up (like in the last picture i shared above). any idea what i ought to do? the whole face is full of copy location and stretch to constraints.
Look at constraints. They’re likely to be made in the assumption of certain dimensions. In a way, scale is baked into constraints like “stretch to”, in the form of “resting length”.
Fixing stretch-tos is a pain, because they have to be fixed in order. You have to reset the rest length. But if they depend on each other, you have to do this in the right order (basically, the same order as the dependencies work.)