Winner's Room

Tropes and genres
Synonym(s)	Winner's Choice
See also	Hockey RPF, Dub-con
Related articles on Fanlore.

Winner’s Room is a Sports RPF fanfiction trope in which the winner — either a player or the entire team — is given the opportunity to have sex with a player of their choice from the losing team following a game. There are usually formalised rules that govern which players are eligible to be chosen for winner's rooms and what the losing player (or "forfeit") must do to fulfil the obligation.

The trope originates from the Hockey RPF fandom, but has since expanded to other sports RPF fandoms such as Formula 1 RPF and Professional Wrestling and fictional sports fandoms like Ted Lasso and Check Please!.

Trope

The concept of a winner's room was first imagined in How to Make Friends by Snickfic, a Tuukka Rask/Brian Rust (Hockey RPF) fanfiction posted on Archive of Our Own on 15 December 2016. In the fic, it is the player who scores the game–winning goal who has the opportunity to choose a player from the losing team to have sex with; this is a common scenario in winner's room fics, though it is also regularly the first star of the game who chooses the forfeit.

Winner's room fics frequently focus on worldbuilding, with various rules surrounding how winner's rooms are run and which players can be picked. For example, goalies and rookie players may be exempt from being forfeits. A forfeit's obligation in the winner's room generally ends when they have brought the winning player to orgasm however the winner chooses; though winners are often also bound by formal and social rules that limit what they can do to a forfeit, such as not being able to leave permanent marks or draw blood.

The level of consent within winner's room fics "runs the gamut from enthusiastically given to outright noncon", as one Fail-FandomAnon described. Many fans acknowledge that the premise of winner's rooms is inherently dubiously consensual in a similar manner to the sex pollen trope, as losing players generally cannot refuse being chosen or are strongly disincentivized from refusing with social or sporting consequences.

One FFA nonny comments on what they like about the trope and what it might be about hockey that makes it particularly popular:

I'm in RPF fandom for all the banging for liney chemistry, team gangbangs, winner's room, goalie nesting, and etc. tropes that put rarepairs and newly traded team members into the mix.

This. Professional team sports are uniquely suited for a lot of specific tropes that I haven't been able to find elsewhere. Not so much the goalie nesting, but all the stuff around weird cultural rituals turned sexual, the hierarchy within teams, formalized relationships between different player positions and by seniority - all that stuff is absolute catnip to me.

Hockey introduced me to a lot of narrative kinks I didn't even know I had and don't seem to exist in most other contexts. Maybe military fiction, like Band of Brothers and the like? But I'm deeply disinterested in military narratives, so that's out.

Re: What do nonnies like about hockey and hockey rpf, Fail-FandomAnon, posted 21 February 2022.

Archives and Collections

Winner's Room (Hockey RPF) works tag on AO3.

Winners Room Fest on AO3, a prompt fest focused on the 2023 Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Example Fanworks

• we can't accept (what we do not get to choose) by cokehead_zeroed (Hockey RPF, Trevor Zegras/Dallas Stars Ensemble)
• Sing Sweet for Me, Baby by discokonomi (Haikyuu!!, Meian Shuugo/Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi)
• all of the sinners the same by lemonfractals (Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Alternate Universe – Hockey)
• taste your silhouette by theshipstorulethemallwrites (Ted Lasso, Roy Kent/Jamie Tartt)
• that's the speed by fearnot (Formula 1 RPF, Lando Norris/Oscar Piastri)