The commitment to futurity is a cruelly optimistic attachment to the idealized narrative of progress that drives queerness into invisibility which causes psychic violence to queer bodies.

But such a reading of Life is Strange (2015) would be incomplete. This application of cruel optimism works as a personal critique that emphasizes Max and Chloe’s character flaws: they both need to learn to accept what they cannot control—particularly to accept what is fated. The impulse to deny the inevitable is crazymaking. This lesson of compliance may not seem dangerous on the surface, but it brings to mind one question: How should queer people address oppression? Surely not through acceptance. Maybe Max’s experience with cruel optimism is not exclusive to her desire for Chloe but also applies to her potential to adhere to heterosexist reproductive futurity. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, critical theorist Lee Edelman (2004) asserts that queerness is the antithesis of reproductive futurity, which is the habitual reiteration of oppressive practices that hold up hegemonic structures throughout time. Reproductive futurity imposes “an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations” (Edelman, 2004, p. 2). Because so many of our society’s institutions— especially the financial—rely on and benefit from the heterosexual, nuclear family configuration, the idea of queerness is systematically driven into invisibility. Even attempts at justice that aim to assimilate LGBT-identified people into cisgender and heterosexual society succeed only in recreating the nuclear family with slight changes. Edelman says this assimilatory practice does nothing to rectify the unjust expectations of heteropatriarchal society. Max is surrounded by pressure to comply with gendered expectations, which is exaggerated by Max’s nightmare in episode five, “Polarized.” In the dream, her teacher mentions Max was once “pure and innocent,” implying this is no longer true, likely as a result of her same-sex attraction. Her principal calls her a bad influence. Warren, a male friend who is the other romantic option aside from Chloe, is also present in the nightmare, guilt-tripping her for not loving him. This reveals the subconscious psychological impact of misogyny and heteronormativity on Max’s perception of herself and on the world with which she must interact. She is aware that she must uphold certain female expectations, like purity and emotional availability, in order to achieve the goals she had before gaining the ability to time travel. This is where cruel optimism strikes In “Cruel Optimism,” Berlant analyzes three literary pieces in terms of her theory. The first is an untitled John Ashbery poem about a secret, ephemeral queer moment in a suburban, religious neighborhood. She says the following: Cruel optimism about imminence[...]grows from a perception about the reasons people[...]do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to. Or perhaps they move to normative form to get numb with the consensual promise and to misrecognize that promise as an achievement. (Berlant, 2011, p. 23) The cruel optimism in this case is about suffering discontent or even damage in order to conform to the hegemonic system in which one is born. There are psychologically and physically enforced incentives to comply with what is “normal.” It is an achievement to comply so effectively that nobody notices that one is actively self-assimilating. Berlant is fascinated by Ashbery’s poem because it is the documentation of an “impasse” within the systematic regime of cruel optimism—of reproductive futurity. She writes, “Queerness substitutes itself for religious affect’s space of reverence: in the end, life is at the best imaginable of impasses[...]where the people are now lost but alive and unvanquished in their displacement” (Berlant, 2011, p. 25). The same can and cannot be said about Max and Chloe. The two are not damaging themselves or corrupting each other through the act of queer desire but are actually grasping for control under an oppressive heterosexist regime with little success. Berlant (2011) says that Geoff Ryman’s historical novel, Was, contains several stories that are all about “the cruelty of optimism for people without control over the material conditions of their lives and whose relation to fantasy is all that protects them from being destroyed by other people and the nation” (p. 33). Max has no control over what must happen, but she attempts to subvert the impending devastation by trying to gain the upper hand on fate. Her fantasy is that her time-traveling ability came about for the purpose of saving Chloe as proof that Chloe deserves to be saved. The “other people and the nation” are the systemic force—futurity. In Life is Strange (2015), cruel optimism on a macro rather than interpersonal level is the supernatural realm of endlessly forward-marching temporality which comes to represent Edelman’s systemic reproductive futurity. Max’s resistance against this forward-marching temporality is her ability to travel time. She reaches back to the past in an attempt to alter the present, opening up a kind of queer impasse in the now, and she procrastinates the reproductive future she expects to soon inhabit in favor of the love and commitment that she has for Chloe. But the universe gave and the universe has taken away. Her timetravel ability turns out to be catastrophic. The impasse must fail.