It's the insidiousness of Spankles that bothers me at first.
It's a small thing at first, of course. It almost always is. Even before you breach Union City's walls, there's a kiosk giving away free cans of the stuff - actually, there's a lot of vending machines that give away the stuff. "Wow!", you think, dispensing a can for gratis for the first time. "A benevolent government that gives away free refreshments? I'm in!"
And then you'll spot another ad. And then another. The Spankles mascot - a nightmarish hybrid of Ronald McDonald and the terrifying clown from Poltergeist that haunted my early years - leers at you from... well, everywhere. You start pondering why there are advertisements at all given they're issuing cans for free, anyway. Later, you might realise the tagline - "Explodes your mind!" - is a tad sinister. You wonder why they're pushing it so hard. A health scanner will eventually recommend it, and that's when it becomes impossible to ignore the distant alarm bell chiming in the back of your head.