YMMV / The Electric State

• Anvilicious: American consumerism and militarism are destructive to the American mind, body, and spirit, something the story emphasizes through both unsubtle symbolism and through very literal text.
  • The military industrial complex killed all three of Michelle's relatives; her father died in a pointless war likened to a military exercise, her grandfather contracted the Incurable Cough of Death that killed him while building military vehicles in an unsafe factory, and her mother's brain developed a chemical dependency in the course of military service that the government refused to help her with after it used her up and threw her away, leaving her literally mining Fantastic Drugs out of rusting old military vehicles before her body gave out. The Mode Six technology that proves America's doom was originally built for military use, and literally caused the next generation of its users' children to be stillborn. And unable to actually do anything about the actual creeping disaster, the one thing we see a government agent try to do is murder a child.
  • Commercial slogans and mascots blanket the rotting corpse of America, draped everywhere and on everything. Advertisements for the Mode Six technology by Sentre are everywhere, their neurocast towers and power supplies humming and maintained even as everything else falls apart. Every single consumerist character is shown to be an unpleasant and unempathetic person, rejecting American ideals of freedom and individualism for comfortable conformism. The same "thirty kinds of cereal" praised as a triumph of American prosperity are shown rotting on the shelf as stimulus addiction takes hold, Americans literally choosing a pleasant dream-world over reality unto death as they turn into drooling zombies, their minds, souls, and very bodies warping into something horrible and alien like the giant robots they literally build out of symbols of consumerist decadence. And it's shown that the dangerous side effects of Mode Six stimulus were well-known to the government before it was made available to the general public, meaning profits overrode all good sense unto utter destruction.