The Electric State - Blog Posts
HEAR ME OUT-
The electric state is the best movie i've seen in a while..
(idk ANYTHING abt the og)
A silly beast. Will you let it paint your house?
Electric State self insert I guess…? It’s a funky little robot that was built for painting houses, but after the war it completely disregarded all of its previous jobs and replaced its paints with deadly chemicals and toxins capable of killing both humans and robots.
Ouuuuueueue more …ideas
Shoutout to @legendling for helping me figure out the design for Buddy the bulldog!
For your troubles, an edit I did of my wifey.
Oughhh PLEASE watch The Electric State it’s so so good and it made me cry I love robots
Have a PC for your troubles 🫶
Watching The Electric State and it’s so good oh my god.
Send requests, I wanna draw them. I love these goobers.
please tell me you guys have watched the electric state. you are the literal target audience for this. bro confesses his undying love to a robot. go watch.
Short story written on Herm/Keats cuz once you watch this movie you can't get away from these two no matter what.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/65033335
Fandom: The Electric State (2025)
Relationships: Herman/John D. Keats (The Electric State), Michelle Greene & Herman (The Electric State)
Characters: Herman (The Electric State), John D. Keats (The Electric State), Michelle Greene (The Electric State), Christopher Greene (The Electric State)
Additional tags: Fluff without Plot, Found Family, "I love you... More than a friend", Herman (The Electric State) is bad at expressing emotions, Taps as a way to say "I love you"
Summary: Herm isn't quite sure if Keats knows he loves him until Michelle teaches him a way to show his love.
Damn. Just watched The Electric State movie and was wondering- “man I wonder what tumblr thinks of this!” Apparently y’all have some real strong feelings about this.
I wish I saw more art that's reminiscent of what was in the book. The awe inspiring vistas of abandoned war machines being dismantled in a field, bleak urban decay, the shambling hordes of those ensnared by the Neurocasters... it's a shame that the famous thing about this book now is that it's the source material for a movie that is the exact opposite in tone...
Reblogging this so people get reminded
Reminder: Michelle in the book is a lesbian. They erased that part of her in the movie adaptation for no reason at all. Fuck Netflix and the Russos.
FR cutesy art is not what I expect to see when I search this tag up and yet here we are 😭
the electric state's tumblr tag is damn near unusable if you're based and bookpilled. damn that movie and the fandom it rode in on godDAMN
i thought the reaction was over-critical (having watched it with my expectations low because no way the russos would get it right) but that movie has irrevocably damaged how people view stalenhag's art. seriously, it's like book fans and movie fans are living in a different world
Reminder: Michelle in the book is a lesbian. They erased that part of her in the movie adaptation for no reason at all. Fuck Netflix and the Russos.
You just hate fun /s
I fucking hate some of the people who try and push the idea that it was fun so it's okay for it to be soulless product slop made by out of touch execs who are too money-brained to try harder.
Netflix is going to fund the production of a 1984 movie remake but instead of it being about a nightmarish oppressive government regime it’ll instead be about a cool survivalist girl partnering up with a quirky robot named Big Brother and together they fight other robots. And the biggest online criticism against the movie will be that the main character is a girl.
Inserting this into The Electric State tag to get people to read the book. So many cool scenes in the book that weren't included in the movie. Such a shame.
thrashing violently Simon Stålenhag designed Cosmo! Not those bastards at Netflix! RARARARABRABAGBJHBGEKGBAILUGBLIU
the Electric State (2025) concept art. Courtesy of How The Electric State filmmakers built the character of Cosmo (Netflix Tudum)
it’s been over three weeks since the electric state came out and i’m still tweaking over the fact michelle’s girlfriend wasn’t in the film 💔💔
my little lesbian i love her 👩❤️💋👩👩❤️💋👩👩❤️💋👩
This... is everything I was thinking of about this whole thing. Thank you for writing this, I couldn't have put it better myself. It pains me to see people try and defend this movie so it is a relief to see some people here with some sense and competent media literacy.
Edit: also, extremely glad to know that you're a fan of the book
Here lies my full thoughts on the Electric State movie adaptation released earlier this month. I knew it was going to be bad, but this is almost impressively so.
Mild spoilers for both the book and the movie, though the book isn't overly plot reliant and the movie is eminently predictable within five minutes of watching
Let me begin by saying the fucking up of the film's source material is a feat not easily accomplished. Simon Stålenhag is a brilliant artist and writer. His illustrated novels are at once sinister and sentimental. They deal with childhood wonder and the broken promises of the real world; with humanity as society and individual. They are about love and loss and the blurring of those lines. All this is depicted in some of the most gorgeous, haunting art I have ever seen. He has written five books. I recommend them all.
The Electric State book is his third work, and to me, his most compelling. That stands for both the art and the actual prose. While Stålenhag's visual pieces are undoubtedly what he is most known for, I've found myself enjoying his written word more and more, even in translated English. The book speaks to abandonment, to the disenfranchised, to the consequences of unchecked consumerism and mindless entertainment.
Speak of the devil...
It would almost be funny (if it weren’t so depressing) that Netflix took such a story and ground it into the Marvel-blockbuster mold, eviscerated any remaining shred of ethos or emotion, and drowned it in Hollywood prestige. Electric State, the movie, is a 320 million dollar shit taken directly on its source material, and I mean that in multiple ways.
PLOT
The first and most egregious transgression was the butchery of the story. The two iterations are related only in the most basic terms; Michelle, a young orphan, goes on a journey to find her long lost brother. Stålenhag's themes of childhood disillusionment, the cataclysmic effects of rampant consumerism, of a society that turns to mindless stimulation instead of dealing with their problems, and the world that attitude creates? Gone.
I struggle to comprehend the boneheadedness of whoever rewrote the plot for the movie. I understand that if you’re trying to make a movie as widely comprehensible as possible, the mysterious worldbuilding of Stalenhag is not compatible (perhaps something we should have thought of before, hmm?). He explains very little about the state of the world, except for how it affects our characters.
But there is concrete worldbuilding if you can infer it. I can only conclude that the writers simply didn’t. Instead, they gutted the entire plot in favor of a bland Robot Revolution Blade Runner schtick that has been done to death and back. And don't even ask if they did a compelling twist on it... because you know they didn't.
The plot details are so catastrophically assbackwards that my gorge becomes bouyant thinking about them. They are also so plentiful I would never finish this post. Instead, I am going over the central aspects of Stålenhag's work that Netflix fucked over.
WHITEWASHING THE MILITARY
In the film, Michelle is an orphan because her family died in a car accident. This is actively sanitizing her origin in the books, removing not only complexity but also Stålenhag’s criticism of the military industrial complex. In the book, Michelle's mother was in the US Air Force, and served as a neurocaster pilot during a global war where the technology was first used. As a side effect of the experimental tech, she (and hundreds of other pilots) developed an addiction to a chemical called neurine. The army fired her without compensation or help for the affliction they gave her, and she eventually died of an overdose, leaving Michelle and her brother orphans. They stayed with their grandfather until he, too, died of chemical exposure from his job assembling war drones, at which point the siblings were forcibly split up by CPS, and Michelle was sent far away to be fostered, while her brother was kidnapped and experimented on by the government. I struggle to conceive of what the purpose of removing this backstory could possibly be, apart from relieving the story of its commentary in order to be more digestible. Because that's what art should aspire to be, after all.
WHITEWASHING CONSUMERISM
The dystopia we see in Stålenhag’s book is not a typical nuclear wasteland. It is generally still as functional as it ever was. It is simply that consumerism has progressed faster than in our world. People have checked out with neural headsets that drown their brain in formless pleasure while the world slowly decays around them. Cities are silent. Gargantuan corporate machines lie in ruins. There is no “Robot Revolution,” no “Electric State” as they claimed in the movie. The war was one fought by world powers that left their countries devastated, and capitalism swallowed up the remains.
The neurocaster headsets were kept in the film, but became a cheap “phone bad” metaphor, again scrapping a far more interesting concept. In the book, it becomes something else; something far stranger and more silent. The eeriness of the apocalypse Michelle travels through is that it’s full of people. They’re just not doing anything. Humankind has checked out, sending their minds to be entertained in gigantic server farms in the Rockies. And slowly, a hivemind emerges from this neural coitus occurring on a planetary scale; a kind of ur-sapience that is entirely beyond human minds...yet fundamentally human. Hordes of people move silently through the dark, their headsets connected to strange new machine gods in the night. The people are notably smiling, at peace. Perhaps it’s better this way is a thought that comes to mind, after going with Michelle through the cruelty of the world before.
WHITEWASHING QUEER RELATIONSHIPS
One of the rare few things I see people enjoying about this movie is the implied relationship between Chris Pratt and his male robot companion. And I am all for more representation! If representation was the goal, however, what's baffling is that they entirely removed a far more integral queer relationship: that being of the protagonist, Michelle!
In the book, a large portion of Michelle's reflections goes to her first romantic partner: another girl named Amanda met in foster care. Amanda and Michelle's connection is one of the few moments Michelle remembers feeling safe and happy after her family was torn away from her. She has a few months where life seems tolerable. They are each other's refuge against the world. And then Amanda breaks up with her, after it is implied she was forced to undergo conversion therapy by her father, an abusive priest. This is the moment that made Michelle who she is in the present day, a huge turning point for her character, and it's just... erased in the film. Interesting that they removed a clear, central, complex queer relationship to replace it with a barely mentioned implication between secondary characters. This is a deliberate and fucking cowardly change. They straightwashed the protagonist, removing core events and character aspects so that bigots in the audience won't be challenged.
DEFENSE & FINAL THOUGHTS
There is sparing defense of this movie; most equate to “it’s not great, but it’s just fun! Can’t a movie just be fun?” And I say, absolutely. Simple fun is not a sin. Entertainment is not a sin. If this were the latest Marvel movie, I would not be writing this.
I am pissed because Netflix specifically adapted a work whose entire message is the dangers of mindless entertainment; of formless pleasure, and absolutely especially mindless entertainment peddled by powerful corporations!! It is about the lethal flaws and base cruelties of humanity; blind greed and misery; and fighting for love in the face of it all. The movie ignores all of that; assassinates the characters and completely bastardizes the story and themes. It at best utterly stupid, and at worst malicious.
I hold no delusion that the Russo brothers actually cared about being true to the vision of the artist. They fundamentally did not understand the book, and admitted as much themselves! This is a direct quote: "We just looked at the images, and the story that he unfolds in the graphic novel. It is very opaque. It’s kind of hard to understand it. You get it in glimpses." Dear lord, its almost as if... as if... It's being subtle with its storytelling! God almighty, make it stop! The board is going into conniptions!
There’s also the fact they used AI for voice acting work, or that they've stated that generative AI is "inevitable" in creative industries, or that they neglected to even mention Stålenhag in trailers until public backlash. Simply put, Netflix and the Russo brothers don't give a shit about respecting, elevating or adapting art. They don't give a shit about creating something that makes the heart resonate or breaks the brain out of its mold. They don't care about voyaging into the burning core of the soul, about evoking things too difficult or powerful to describe outright. They aren’t interested in saying anything at all.
What is even the point of all this? There's a simple answer. It’s in the promotional articles surrounding the release of the film (the ones before it came out). They vary, but there’s one fact you cannot avoid:
The Electric State is one of the most expensive movies ever made. It is the most expensive Netflix movie ever made. That is what headlines latch onto, because there is nothing else this movie can flaunt to justify its existence. Three hundred and twenty million goddamn dollars.
There is a world where money equals passion. A world where it equals skill, pathos, and most of all, where it equals good goddamn art. It is a world inhabited solely by streaming service CEOs and Disney execs, and is therefore to be avoided like an outhouse with a wasp hive down the hole.
The Electric State is a wonderful book. It is resonant, it is beautiful, it is dreadful and melancholic. It speaks to the dark, heavy seabed of the soul. It drips with fog and fear, whispers about monsters of our own making and sends you spiralling into the dark with only the dimming ember of love to tell you where or what you are. It is a haunting dirge for humanity.
The Electric State is a repugnant movie. The blind idiot forces of greed which Stålenhag decried have stripped his story bare, ran it through algorithmic filters and focus testing until what is left is a pallid mass-market blockbuster wearing the flayed skin of an artist's passionate work. It is notable only in that it is symbolic of the "art industry," (a phrase I find near antithetical), one where stories are marketed on their prestige, their price tag, where content is dully manufactured according to standard, packaged and shipped out to be half-watched at two times speed. Because this is not about art, about stories, about people. For them, it never was.
Fucking- THIS! So disappointed when I learned that they stripped so much of her important character traits from her. Absolutely vile what they've done to this book
The Electric State made my blood boil for a lot of reasons, but chief among them was the straightwashing of the main character. In the Simon Stålenhag book, Michelle's first love is Amanda, who she meets at wilderness camp. Amanda's father is an abusive priest, and she ultimately rejects Michelle after what is implied to be conversion therapy. Michelle's queerness, in other words, is inextricable from the shrug she gives the United States as it slowly dies by consumerism. In the film, the country isn't dying (and slowly, horribly transforming into something else), it just needs less screen time. Nothing a rousing battle scene can't fix! Amanda is entirely absent, but hey, at least we're getting headlines like this!
Every review I've seen of the Electric State movie doesn't mention Michelle being queer like in the book so I assume the movie didn't have that as part of her character. Does that count as queer erasure? Specifically lesbian erasure?
Edit: Thought about it a little and maybe they didn't wanna tackle the part in the book where a lunatic priest converts her lover and Michelle breaks down at her feet. Too cowardly to portray a priest as an asshole.
I grieve alongside you
aw heck nah Netflix got to The Electric State noooooo 😭
Watched the Netflix trailer for the Electric State movie and a recap of the movie
And as expected, they don't seem to be following the book much... at all...
It's more like they glazed the plot and pictures and went off that
For those curious, the Electric State is a novel by one of my favorite artists ever, Simon Stålenhag. The original graphic novel is so calm, melancholic and dystopian. The best I can do to describe the plot is it's about a girl and a robot controlled by her brother as they travel across the almost post-apocalyptic Western Coast to find said brother; it has themes of hyper consumerism. Sadly, the movie has the typical "epic action movie" vibes starring Chris Patt and Millie Bobby Brown and treating the AI like they're friends and we're one in the same (in the book the robots were contributors to the hyper consumerism). Doesn't help that this over 320-million-dollar movie was directed by the Russo brothers, people who've gone on record to endorse AI, which is funny considering Electric State condemns it.
Heck according to the comments under one of the trailers, one of the trailers for this didn't even credit Simon.
I'd highly recommend checking out the graphic novel The Electric State, and shoot, check out Simon's other works too.
They're beautiful, but somber.
Here's some pics from the book and a video talking the book too if anyone is interested
The Breathtaking Horror of 'The Electric State' - Curious Archive
The only stuff that made it from the book into the movie are some of the aesthetics, Michelle's name, and her motivation to find her brother.
List of stuff down below of what the book had that the movie didn't have. Spoilers for people who haven't read the book. (Read the book it's great)
There is no AI.
All the robots are controlled by humans.
The USA had a civil war that was fought by drone pilots who wore older versions of Neurocasters which required them to use addictive drugs that also destroyed their ability to reproduce.
People who wear the Neurocasters too long meld into a digital hivemind.
Neurocasters keeps the mind alive as long as it is worn. It does not protect the body from harm.
Graphic description of someone's brain getting chunkified by an anti-matter round.
Michelle's bio parents didn't die in a car crash. Instead her father is unmentioned (if I recall correctly) and her mom was a veteran who died from a drug overdose after being abandoned by the government. (foster parents "died" due to the Neurocasters)
Michelle dyed her blonde hair black because she wanted to distance herself from the "popular" girls and to spite her foster mom (who Michelle beat over the head with a lunch tray after she mocked her for wanting to dye her hair). Kind of important to her character. They keep her blonde in the movie for some fucking reason.
Michelle had a girlfriend who broke up with her after a crazy priest converted her. Heartbreaking to read.
Michelle found her brother's body rotting away in a house while wearing a Neurocaster. Still alive and in control of Cosmo.
It is implied that she and him rowed out into the ocean in a kayak to be swallowed by the waves.
Cultist working for the hivemind hunting for her brother as well, possibly what Giancarlo Esposito's character was based on though I doubt it.
Yeah like the other person in the comments said they did have the aesthetics of the book. But the only other stuff they took from the book was Michelle's name and her motivation to find her brother. That's it.
List of stuff down below of what the book had that the movie didn't have. Spoilers for people who haven't read the book.
There is no AI.
All the robots were/are controlled by humans.
The USA had a civil war that was fought by drone pilots who wore older versions of Neurocasters which required them to use addictive drugs that also destroyed their ability to reproduce.
People who wear the Neurocasters too long meld into a digital hivemind.
Neurocasters keeps the mind alive as long as it is worn. It does not protect the body from harm.
Graphic description of someone's brain getting chunkified by an anti-matter round.
Michelle's bio parents didn't die in a car crash. Instead her father is unmentioned (if I recall correctly) and her mom was a veteran who died from a drug overdose after being abandoned by the government. (foster parents "died" due to the Neurocasters)
Michelle dyed her blonde hair black because she wanted to distance herself from the "popular" girls and to spite her foster mom (who Michelle beat over the head with a lunch tray after she mocked her for wanting to dye her hair). Kind of important to her character. They keep her blonde in the movie for some fucking reason.
Michelle had a girlfriend who broke up with her after a crazy priest converted her. Heartbreaking to read.
Michelle found her brother's body rotting away in a house while wearing a Neurocaster. Still alive and in control of Cosmo.
It is implied that she and him rowed out into the ocean in a kayak to be swallowed by the waves.
Cultist working for the hivemind hunting for her brother as well, possibly what Giancarlo Esposito's character was based on.
People who already watched the new movie and have read the artbook or seen the artwork, how much of the original made it into the movie?
My condolences for having to sit through it
I hate this movie so far