The sad thing is that a lot of those fetishes are actually just cartoon tropes. If you actually look a the scenes that they claim that 'messed up them when they were children', the scenes themselves are completely mundane and ocile at best, absurd at worst. There is nothing 'hot' from being a living balloon.
Then again, when you find people having fetishes of cinder blocks o Ripto vomiting, I say tha they were messed up from the beginning.
From the perspective of an adult, yes. Most of those cartoon tropes weren't originally created with children in mind, but rather adults, at a time when western animation wasn't ghettoised as "children's entertainment". Adult minds can understand exaggeration for comedic effect. Child minds may not.
The sight of a character's heart leaping from its chest, or some other extreme physical exaggeration for comedic effect (extreme deformation, inflation, physical transformation, hypnotism and so on) can be traumatic to a child, or even a young teen, who doesn't necessarily understand that it's not real. By that I mean it can prompt an extreme fear response, even if they don't necessarily express it externally.
Now here comes the fun part. Fear is emotional arousal, to which the autonomic nervous system responds in particular ways: elevated heart rate, increased blood pressure, shortness of breath and so on. This can often be misattributed to
sexual arousal, which uses many of the same pathways and produces many of the same autonomic responses.
Recall that most of these people describe the formative events of their paraphilia as taking place in childhood or early teenage years, rather than much later in their lives.
A teenager, on discovering their sexuality, may compare their current experience with previous experiences to try and understand what is going on, and may recall previous events where their body behaved in a similar way. Or they may experience it directly, while their bodies are flooded with hormones and doing new things, and not be able to properly distinguish between fear and sexual arousal. With that confusion in play, they lean into the fetish for sexual gratification and it becomes part of their personality.
This misattribution of arousal seems to be the reason behind a lot of paraphilias. Certainly it must explain some disgusting behaviours like coprophilia or necrophilia, because both of these are paradoxical: appearing to enjoy something that should generate disgust and revulsion.
This is not to say that every weird fetishist and their kinks can be explained this way. Maladaptive responses to sexual abuse, trauma, or plain old anxiety can also play a part, but misattribution of arousal would fit the bill for a significant chunk of these people.
