First Observation: "Normal"

whenever ppl talk about the contestant sleeping arrangements i just think about that one tumblr post that was like Why would they confirm that the ii contestants prefer sleeping in normal beds but mephone makes them sleep outside on the wet grass like dogs when they're in competition why would they show us that. THATS LITERALLY ALL I THINK ABOUT NOW like what is this bro?????

i dont even blame mephone cuz 1. we know he ALSO sleeps outside on the sad wet soggy grass outside with the contestants like a dog without an owner and he never had a real bed to sleep in 2. he probably didn't even think about it until hotel oj was created

after having done Hopefully enough research, i would like to propose that balloon has phonological dyslexia (the common type of dyslexia) and linguistic dysgraphia. this isn’t very long, just an explanation of a headcanon i enjoy :) also i use she/her for balloon in this but pronouns are irrelevant to these diagnoses, i just prefer to refer to balloon this way.

so let’s start with a Classic. multiple times in the series, balloon misinterprets “flour” to mean “flower”. she is struggling to decode the word “flour” and differentiate it from “flower”, leaning on the phonetic pronunciation that seems more logical to her. this is an issue with homophone confusion rather than difficulty spelling an irregular word, which is why i chose phonological dyslexia to explain this (i considered surface dyslexia for a while). i also disregarded audio processing disorder because there is more evidence to balloon struggling to read and write than there is to her struggling to process spoken words, meaning that the mix-up here can be explained with phonological dyslexia.

there are more examples of her having trouble with forming words based on their sounds. this problem follows her into the way she writes. her graffiti in breaking the ice is a great example of her words being spelled incorrectly and very literally. “dident” has an e added to it to replicate the pronunciation, and “doo” and “stoopid” are both misspellings of familiar words.

for this, i chose linguistic dysgraphia (aka dyslexic dysgraphia, but i find the term “linguistic” easier to use). as you can see here, she has bouts of random capitalisation such as the D at the end of “stoopid” (also an example of problems with consistent letter sizing) and the way her sentence becomes all caps after writing her name (“BallooN DIDENT DOO THIS”). her handwriting is poor and her sentence is disorganized, with strange margins at the beginning of her line breaks. i decided on linguistic dysgraphia rather than spatial or motor dysgraphia for the fact that her handwriting and letter sizing improves significantly when she’s focusing, and that she has no trouble drawing. observe underneath.

this page is a great example of improved but still impaired writing. her handwriting is easier to read, but a lot of this is still written in all caps (a strategy sometimes used by dysgraphics who have trouble with lowercase letters or the varied sizing of capitals). the letter sizing changes noticeably from sentence to sentence (“HEY OJ!~” is a lot larger than the words surrounding it) but it doesn’t change much within the same words anymore, such as in her graffiti. the organisation of words on the page, however, is quite messy. she leaves large chunks of space in random areas and writes different sentences all over the page. this indicates difficulty planning written language, common with linguistic dysgraphia. as mentioned earlier, she has no significant trouble drawing, which we can observe with these doodles. overall, this is much better and shows that she was focusing on this page, but there are still issues with writing that we can infer.