#online fandom

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: people online are writing fanfiction about the players in the National Football League kissing on the mouth and then posting it on Archive of Our Own.

Now, if you know anything about online fandom communities, you might not be surprised by this. Honestly, I should not have been surprised by this. I know how the Internet works, I know how online fandom works: two hot men making eye contact cannot be ignored. But the idea of the NFL having a stereotypical online fandom on AO3 and Tumblr was just completely baffling to me, because like… that’s the NFL. The National Football League. The piece of media lauded as the highest echelon of manliness in the United States of America. In my mind, the Venn Diagram of people who spend a lot of time on AO3 and people who spend a lot of time watching football are not even close to touching. 

And yet.

There are 1,340 works on AO3 tagged “National Football League (US) RPF” as of December 2nd, 2025. 

And over a hundred of those are just Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase kissing.

This fascinated me because it exists in such stark contrast to my previous—albeit quite narrow—perception of people who are really tuned into the NFL. Which led me down a two day rabbit hole that resulted in not only discovering one of the most baffling pieces of fiction I have ever read (which isn’t even related to this topic), but also kind of maybe shipping Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase now. So. Let’s talk about this I need to talk about this.

NFL Real Person Fanfiction (RPF) exists for the same reasons that all sports RPF exists: it’s popular and easy-to-watch media where hot men hang out with a bunch of other hot men, and those men can be shipped together and it’s fun because it’s ridiculous but also because there’s an overwhelming amount of content to feed it. None of this is out of the ordinary. And, to get this out of the way upfront: I am not interested in debating the ethics of RPF as a fanfiction genre in this article. It is a very nuanced topic, and it can absolutely cause real life harm to the people involved. I do find that to be both an important conversation and an interesting subject, but for the sake of brevity let’s just table that for another time, as I don’t believe that there are any major cases of the fanfictions impacting the actual players in the NFL specifically.

The reason I find NFL RPF more interesting than other sports RPF is because it’s not a fringe sport like others we often see these fandoms pop-up around (hockey and Formula One being the biggest examples I can think of). It’s an incredibly mainstream sport, arguably the most popular in the US, and is the domain of primarily cishet men. So why did it spawn so much gay fanfiction?

If you look at the history of the tag “National Football League (US) RPF” on AO3, you’ll see a major spike in posts starting in March of 2020. Prior to March 21, 2020, there were only 343 total posts in that tag—yes, I counted—with a majority of them in the early days being by the same handful of people.

The first post ever made under the tag is from May 1st, 2004, and is a Tom Brady/Drew Bledsoe fanfiction written by a user named “anonymous_sibyl.” This person would then go on to write the first 24 fics under the tag before they’re joined on December 18th, 2005 by a user named “Lazarettos,” who appears to be one of their friends, as they mention “anonymous_sibyl” in the notes of their first fic (a Joey Harrington/Original Male Character smut one shot, for the record). There’s a wider variety of users after that, but it just goes to show that it appears to be a relatively insular fandom for the first fifteen or so years of its existence on AO3. 1,000-ish fanfictions in five years doesn’t sound like a lot, and it wouldn’t be a lot for some fandoms, but compared to the popularity pre-2020 it is a significant spike.

I believe that this can be attributed to truly one thing: quarantine.

We were stuck inside of our houses with nothing to do except for dwell on the state of the world. It is completely unsurprising to me that the quantity of posts in this tag would increase in 2020 because the quantity of people who were suddenly given a bunch of free time to write fanfiction drastically increased. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the quantity of posts on AO3 as a website overall drastically increased in 2020, but I have no idea how I would even begin to find those statistics. 

So we’re all stuck inside and suddenly a lot of people who maybe normally wouldn’t find themselves entrenched in online communities have no choice but to be in online communities. Combine that with a healthy dose of the escapism and emotional relief that interacting with fandom provides, and you have a large group of people who might’ve been on the fringes of stereotypical “fandom” now searching for an outlet. It’s not a stretch to say that fans of more mainstream media that typically wouldn’t be super relevant on websites like AO3 and Tumblr would find their way over there, because those are widely popular sites for fan communities.

The perfect storm of de-stigmitization of fandom culture, lack of ability to go outside, and increase in desire for community being found online creates the perfect environment for a boom in a fandom like this; something that is mainstream, but still carries all the potential hallmarks of a classic Tumblr/AO3 fan community if you look at it the right way. Which is to say, hot men on TV that can be shipped in almost unlimited different pairings.

And you might be thinking: “Alexandria, you haven’t talked about Taylor Swift yet! Alexandria, you’ve been talking about the NFL for almost two whole pages and you haven’t mentioned Taylor Swift!” Do not worry! I did not forget! I cannot! But the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce RPF isn’t the side of NFL RPF that I find particularly intriguing. People have been writing RPF about musicians for probably as long as fanfiction has existed (that’s a rabbit hole for me to go down another day). While their relationship has certainly caused an increase in the popularity of the tag, it’s still not as noticeably drastic as the 2020 boom is. Taylor Swift is only tagged as a character in 95 total fics, with her and Kelce’s relationship only appearing as a tag in 94. However, if you sort by either hits or kudos, the first fics that will come up are all going to be Taylor/Travis, meaning that the most popular fanfictions in the tag are all of that ship. This should not be surprising.

Obviously RPF of one of the most popular musicians of our generation with one of the most aggressively online fanbases in the world is going to be the most liked and clicked on stuff in the tag. Just because it’s the most popular by metric doesn’t mean it’s the most pervasive, and it’s not emblematic of the thing about NFL RPF that I find to be the most interesting (a.k.a. “why did we do this, why must we play god, how can the NFL and AO3 exist in the same sentence and why did we decide to make it gay?”) even if it was. It is still important to talk about, though, because I think it shows that while a large majority of the people writing fanfiction in this tag are writing M/M (Male/Male) fanfiction, the large majority of people reading fanfiction in this tag are doing so for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. There are simply a larger number of Taylor Swift fans who are entrenched in online fandom than there are people who know who Julian Edelman is well enough to want to read fanfiction about him. However, she did undeniably bring a lot of new fans to the NFL, especially new fans who interact with fan culture in a different way than we’d typically see in sports fandom.

So we understand where this came from, and my personal theory about why the tag became so popular in the 2020s specifically. Now, allow me to give you an idea of the kind of fanfiction you will find when browsing “National Football League (US) RPF” on A03.com.

It’s gay. It’s all super gay.

The M/M category is by far the most popular, with 1,088 fics being tagged as such. There is some F/M (Female/Male) fanfiction in the tag, as well as fics that are just tagged “General” or “Other,” but it is a noticeable minority. And while some of those are just Original Female Characters getting to kiss Joe Burrow — because it’s always Joe Burrow, he’s dorky and conventionally attractive and everyone either wants to kiss him or wants him to kiss his teammates — most of them are the aforementioned Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce fanfictions. The top two most popular ships are Joe Burrow/Ja’Marr Chase, and Danny Amendola/Julian Edelman. While smut isn’t hard to find, the most popular additional tag you’ll see is “fluff.” A lot of the fics are extended slow-burns following these men from college to professional, or very well thought-through scenes about the potential public backlash that would come with being an openly gay NFL player, or conversations about overcoming internalized homophobia. It’s honestly very similar to the types of fics you’d see in most fandoms, except instead of the One Direction boys going through inner journeys that result in them kissing, it’s these men who are held up on a pedestal of masculinity by probably every single one of our dads.

And that’s what makes it all so much fun, isn’t it?

This is something that most of us in America grew up watching, or at least hearing in the background of our childhoods. There’s an emotional connection there, a nostalgia that maybe carries over into our adult lives. It’s regarded as necessary to understand in order to facilitate a social life, but also too complex and manly for all except the toughest dudes. Taking a piece of media like that and stripping it of all its potentially toxic societal associations by allowing the characters involved to be more than just the boxes that they’re expected to fill is so powerful. Looking at something that has been the domain of mostly cishet men for a majority of its existence and saying “no, actually, the boys are going to kiss now and have deep conversations about internalized homophobia and toxic masculinity and the perception of LGBTQ+ people in sports” is so much fun. I’m not necessarily trying to make the NFL RPF fandom deep, but… there’s something inherently interesting there. It’s cool to watch LGBTQ+ people take back narratives that we’ve been left out of for so long, even if it is in the form of Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase kissing on AO3.

There’s also something undeniably homoerotic about most sports, but that’s neither here nor there. I don’t think I need to argue my point on that, I think that’s a statement most people can agree upon. Go look up NFL commentators out of context if you don’t believe me.

While the initial thing that got me spinning towards writing this essay was complete and total bewilderment at the existence of the NFL as a fanfiction category, my initial surprise and confusion has melted into something close to fondness. Online fan communities will never cease to be fascinating to me, in both the ways that they morph and change the source material and the things that they show us about the wider world outside of the Internet. We are social beings, and our desire for understanding and connection influences everything that we create. Fandom doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it tells us something about the people who are participating in it. In this case, maybe it tells us that LGBTQ+ people will find ways to create representation, even when it’s within media that is often closed off to us. Or maybe it tells us that quarantine was a weird time for everybody, including NFL fans. 

Or maybe it just tells us that I’m reading way too far into all of this, and people just like to play with the silly little guys on their TVs like Barbie dolls and it doesn’t actually mean anything. 

Either way, this was a very interesting deep-dive, and I hope that you enjoyed and will never be able to watch a Bengals game the same way again.

And now, a list of the top five funniest tags that I saw while scrolling the “National Football League (US) RPF” tag on AO3:

“Gratutious use of ‘tight end’ as a punchline”

“No beta we die like the Bengals 2025 season”

“The romanticization of Detroit”

“Power Bottom Tom Brady” (< this one is only outstandingly funny to me because it was on a fic that was otherwise entirely in Russian)