@entrenous88 sent me the rest of the passage in chat since Tumblr character limits suck. It’s from In Babylon, and to save the space of pasting it here, I’ll just tell you it starts at “The first time Zach sees him dance…” and goes through the next four paragraphs, ending with “Maybe next week he’ll go straight home after work, watch TV, and then drop off to sleep with no trouble, without some stripper’s smile imprinted on the insides of this eyelids.”
And eeeee, I could say so much about this I’ll have to rein myself in. Honestly the first paragraph is emblematic of the reason why, when @suedescripture first prompted stripper!Chris, I was like, “I can’t write that.” Because there was (and maybe still is) a part of me that thinks strippers are kind of cheesy and not hot, and I didn’t think I could write it in a way that would make it hot. But then I started thinking about why kind of stripper Chris would be if he were a stripper, and suddenly it seemed to work after all. I just thought he would be a little ~classier (and more reserved) than your average stripper, so I got this image of my head of Chris-as-Sinatra, and then I imagined him taking it all off, and then I went and screamed into a pillow for an hour (not really, but metaphorically), and then I started writing, haha.
Once I could picture him like that, it was easier to picture him doing more Magic Mike-style stripping too. And I was particularly proud of the little tidbit of playing guitar in the nude like Jenny. I mean, can you imagine?? How any of those fictional club-goers lived through it I do not know.
It was pretty effortless writing Zach’s reaction to it all. I project myself into Zach and Chris allllll the time in my writing, but in this fic it was particularly easy. Zach’s rules for himself–sitting far away, leaving before the end of Chris’s dances–are the kind of self-preservation I think we can all relate to. That Pinerage feeling might become deadly if it goes on too long, you know? It was also just fun to explore a more repressed version of Zach–and now that I think about it, this might have been my gateway drug to writing Fearfully and Wonderfully, which also deals with a repressed Zach. I just really enjoy subverting established fanon tropes when I can. Not that I don’t like the fanon versions, because I do, but it’s a fun challenge to write things differently every now and then. That’s a big reason why I’m glad I was finally able to get to a place where stripper!Chris made sense to me, because everything else about Suede’s prompt had me screaming YES. It just took me a little while to totally get to a place where I was ready to write it.
