Apocalypse Debra
(Spoilers)
Debra McAllister, the least sensitive character in Apocalypse 1999, owes her existence to a sensitivity reader.
For most of the early drafts, Debra was just a bully who got curbstomped early in Part 2. She interacted with Nick, Jenny and Hardy at their graduation ceremony, but I didn’t intend for her to have an arc.
Her death never sat right with me. There’s a tradition in horror of killing the hottest girl first, punishing her for the crime of meeting our standards, and that’s always seemed just as misogynist as the stock character of the High School Queen Bitch; a way to invent a powerful woman, then rip her apart or vilify her for having power. (I hadn’t been subtle about it, either; even Debra’s name signifies “girl who is hotter than Jenny.”) Debra clearly had more to say: Your worst enemy is just as important as your best friend, and Nick and Jenny mentioned Debra every few pages even when she was dead. I needed more than one female character, and in the few lines of dialogue I’d bothered to write for her, Debra was good at busting on Nick in a way that made me want to see them interact. Debra had a dark backstory, and even in a story that necessitated the deaths of most major characters, I didn’t think an abuse survivor should be killed off in a way that gave her no agency.
I knew this, but I had resigned myself to not doing anything about it. Then Nathaniel Glanzman turned around the first sensitivity read and saved Debra’s life.
“Sensitivity reads” are still faintly controversial — the idea is that it’s “censorship,” and that authors who aren’t #ownvoices are being put through an endless series of hoops, forced to mutilate their work and sacrifice plot and characterization to provide more Educational Value. Apocalypse 1999, of course, has almost no educational value — if you don’t know that being gay or trans or disabled or a woman or a survivor are fine things to be, this won’t be the thing that convinces you — and in my experience, a good sensitivity reader is more like an editor who reads specifically for character beats. If there are places where the character rings false, or where you’ve written them in a cheesy way, they’ll tell you. When the character works, you’ll get that feedback as well. Nate reads for both trans men and autistic characters, which meant he could cover both Nick and Hardy; Nick is such a specific person that he didn’t need much rewriting, but Hardy needed a lot of work. We went back and forth on specific places where Hardy’s autism would be informing his character — what are his sensitivities? The end of the world is a fairly major disruption to his routine; how does he feel about that? And so on — but the most useful piece of feedback he gave me was about who lived and who died.
The characters I killed off were often marginalized, he reminded me, which sent the message that they were disposable. I should either stop killing people — which I was not going to do —or kill off a major character with privilege, so that the suffering was spread around. Thus, without giving me any feedback at all on how I’d portrayed women, he managed to make the book a lot more female-friendly — for who, in Apocalypse 1999, is more privileged than Debra?
The High School Queen Bitch is a useful trope because it represents our ambivalent relationship to power: “Everyone wants me for a friend or a fuck,” Heather Chandler tells us, and everyone is also terrified of how cruel she can be if she doesn’t like them. Even as adults, we lust for the approval or attention of high-status people, even as we resent the power they have over our lives. Debra, as the character closest to power, is also the character who best represents how bleak 1999 was for people like Nick and Hardy. She complicates the feminist politics of the book by showing how privileged women can oppress certain men: She thinks being gay and trans are the same thing. She thinks you can “fix” gay people by sending them to prayer camp. She’s the person who uses the r-word for Hardy.
Making Debra into a major character required finding some humanity in her. It’s fun to write the terrible things about Debra — her eye-rolling contempt, her blithe ignorance, the fact that she can never remember anyone’s name — but feminism demands that women be more than cardboard cut-outs. Our willingness to see women as people often depends on whether we like them; a survivor is called a “survivor” if she accuses our enemies and a “liar” if she accuses our friends. Meanwhile, TERF logic hinges on the idea that, if a (cis) woman has been oppressed by men, she cannot possibly oppress anyone else. Flattening any woman into a moral caricature, making her all victim or all villain, keeps women from ever being accorded full humanity — and shelters them from the full accountability that comes with it.
Finding the humanity in a bully doesn’t mean excusing her, though many bully-redemption stories do. Consider the tale of Laura Lizzie, the racist bully played by Christine Taylor in The Craft: Laura is racist, the Black witch Rochelle curses her, Laura is sad and now the Black woman is the villain for not tolerating racism. It was important to me to redeem Debra without letting her off the hook. Her abuse, and her trauma, are just as horrible as they would be if they’d happened to a nicer person — but her cruelty is just as harmful as it would be coming from a happier girl.
Still, there are some very enjoyable redeemed villains in ‘90s horror. In Scream, Gale Weathers is introduced as an antagonist — a sleazy, unethical true-crime “reporter” who wants fame at any cost — but she saves the day and becomes the secondary protagonist of the franchise. On Buffy, Spike was a Big Bad before he was a love interest. Those characters never become kind or cuddly. They’re fun precisely because they’re not nice: They can cut through the crap, do and say things others won’t, move the plot forward through sheer rudeness. (Debra pretty much never thinks about what she’s saying, but that doesn’t preclude her from saying some very useful things.) Yet their struggle toward redemption is also moving, in that they’re genuinely trying to be better, but don’t know how. When you’ve been taught your entire life to do the wrong thing, it can be hard to identify the right one, and in 1999, transphobia and ableism and fatphobia and all the other awful things that come out of Debra’s mouth were not widely debated social problems. They were what “normal” looked like; they were how most people were expected to behave.
Bringing Debra back to life required seeing her, not as a bad person, but as a person who deeply wants to be good and has never been given the tools to do it. Her abusive, Evangelical family has taught her the exact wrong lessons about morality. She has already experienced the cruelty the world shows to outsiders, during her assault, and instead of thinking about ways to make the world better, she found ways to make herself safe. A repressed church kid with a bad home life, who’s been humiliated and hurt and finds her power by hurting people back… who doesn’t recognize that monster, or see themselves in her? Carrie, if you’ll recall, also terrorized her entire high school.
Debra’s playlist is just as deeply informed by the movies as Nick’s was, but from a different direction; if Nick is a guy who’s built his sense of self around horror movies, Debra’s worldview is 98% teen rom-com. I find it funny how vicious, cutthroat people manage to convince themselves they’re soft and sentimental — the past few years have taught us quite a lot about church-girl bullies, after all — and I imagine that Debra sees herself less as a relentless tormenter of the downtrodden than as a plucky romantic heroine who has to clear all the extras and also-rans out of her shot. Fittingly, there is also a fair amount of Christian rock, and sometimes, the two even intersect: “Kiss Me,” from the She’s All That soundtrack, was possibly the biggest mainstream hit by a Christian rock band that wasn’t Creed. Still, as with Debra herself, there’s more good than you’d think. Debra, the normie pop fan, would have been the first person in this very white suburb to know who Beyoncé was, or listen to basically any hip-hop. The best song released this year was initially written off as vapid teen-girl garbage: “My loneliness is killing me / I must confess, I still believe” is perhaps Debra’s truest prayer to her God.
I think Debra finds peace with God, by the end of Apocalypse 1999, or at least, an honest relationship with Him. She becomes an exemplar of Christian virtue — or maybe athletic virtue, or maybe just someone who’s really internalized Titanic. Romantic movies and Christianity and high school sports all teach one core lesson: Self-sacrifice, being willing to see yourself as part of something bigger and, if necessary, take one for the team. It’s not sacrifice that redeems Debra, though. It’s that she’s able to redefine who “her team” is. May we all do so when the end comes around.
This week, all proceeds from Apocalypse 1999 will be donated to the Transgender Assistance Program of Virginia, based out of Virginia Beach, an all-volunteer and trans-led organization “created to end homelessness within the transgender community in Virginia.” The organization was selected by sensitivity reader Nathaniel Glanzman.