Blockbuster young adult (YA) dystopian novels invite readers to explore questions of identity and agency in fictional societies impacted by familiar concerns, such as increased social and political violence and state surveillance. As young people navigate similar issues in their own lived experiences, these texts can serve as transformative literature by sharing storyworlds that "name injustices while orienting towards desired futures" (Enciso, 2019, p. 85), and inviting discussion and actions that work toward social change. In this article, the authors examine the imagined futures of these storyworlds in relationship to contemporary social order, investigating what is held constant and what is imagined differently. The authors contextualize patterns of representation and describe how they discursively establish, maintain, or challenge pervasive norms, intentionally adopting a queer stance in order to pedagogically address a "vital need to disrupt normativity and the essential need to develop and understand norms--even if only to disrupt the norms again" (Waite, 2017, p. 121, emphasis in original). A critical analysis of these stories recognizes the oppressive elements of these texts, creating opportunities to play, resist, transgress--in other words, to read with and to read against these narratives, and to imagine more expansive, humanizing futures.