ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the necropolitical dimensions that inform the creation of YA culture and demonstrates how frameworks on the speculative contest these elements. Drawing from the video game concept of permalife developed by Bo Ruberg, a mechanic/rule that prevents a character from dying within the fictive universe of a video game, it examines the relationship between death and life as present in Anna-Marie McLemore's transgender YA novel When the Moon Was Ours (2016), Supergiant's video game Hades (2020), and Patrick Ness’ meditation on suicide in More Than This (2013). This chapter examines how these texts and media infuse queer YA narratives with logics of death and life and considers the reparative potentialities of the speculative.
