See, this is actually what I really like about the slight canon confirmation from Matt about Sprig probably having ADHD, because it isn‘t just a thing that this man confirmed outside of the media and left it at that.
The writers continuously make it clear that Sprig is a hyperactive and impulsive boy. He isn’t just mentioned to possibly having ADHD and then just never showed again in how he acts or how it affects him or the plot. Instead you get to see how these behaviors become not only a strength in stuff like curiosity, initiative, and stubbornness to authority but how it could also be a struggle in resistance, impulse control, and attention span.
You get lessons where the people around him do get hurt for his impulsiveness and he has to take account for it. You do get lessons where his curiosity not only reveals new secrets and mysteries, but encourages other people like Anne to become her true self and fight for her identity, or have Hop Pop question his strictness.
It steers the behaviors away from the neurodivergency being mainly written as a comedy thing and more of something that’s just human for Sprig to go through as someone with a differently wired brain. He uses these different perceptions and views to be his strengths, his weaknesses, and this doesn’t mark him as a caricature (this could be debated of course, I am no expert on this topic).
For this instance through Hop Till You Drop, not only do we see Sprig actively get curious over every single new stimulating thing but we also see how absolutely anxious he gets when he resists and tries his best to hone his attention span to something else.
He knows he has to resist, but it’s just really hard and it takes so much mental effort just to do so, it honest to god stresses him out.
And even when he and the Plantars apologize for not being able to do well in the course, it’s really cool to see Anne say that her basically expecting to put them through intense training rather than letting them slowly ease into their own strategies wasn’t the best route. It shows it’s not fully their faults for not doing so hot.
They still need to keep account of themselves and the fact they’re in a new environment, but they also need guidance and a helpful hand rather than punishment when it comes to understanding her world. And I love that.
Like I don’t see what Matt said in the Q&A to be a full confirmation of his neurodivergency, but it’s really cool that the crew had something in the writing itself that showed they weren’t just saying this out of nowhere.
