A guy on X who calls himself @Wokenessisevil watched a clip of Lucia Caminos asking her boyfriend to pick out an outfit, watched him shrug at the options, and concluded that “GTA 6 is a humiliation ritual for all male gamers.”
That’s the scene. A woman holds up clothes. A man doesn’t care much. It could have come from any sitcom of the past 50 years.
But it’s now evidence, in certain corners of the internet, that Rockstar Games has spent more than a decade and north of a billion dollars building a feminist psyop.
How GTA went from corrupting kids to converting them
For most of its run from the late 1990s through the early 2010s, nobody accused Grand Theft Auto of being politically delicate. Parents and activists denounced the franchise for dropping children into a seedy world of sex, violence, crude humor and wanton crime. Elon Musk even claimed he couldn’t get into GTA V because he was mortified to play a character who shoots police officers.
Moral panics have a shelf life. In the 13 years fans waited for Grand Theft Auto VI, finally out November 19, the American right-wing grievance machine drifted from worrying that kids would turn to larceny to worrying that they’d turn out “woke.”
And knowing very little about the game itself, that crowd has decided it must be a stealth campaign to poison the youth with gender equality, LGBTQ acceptance and racial diversity. Rockstar did not immediately return a request for comment.
Reading a cocktail order as a gay panic
Lucia is the series’ first mandatory female protagonist, and her relationship with Jason Duval evolves based on the player’s choices. That’s the setup that broke a certain kind of brain.
One X user recently claimed that Jason has a “gay vibe,” reasoning that no straight man would know what sequins are or use the word “cocktails,” as he does in the clip. This is a clip depicting, to be clear, a heterosexual couple.
“The script is definitely written by a woman who has no clue what a man thinks or how he talks,” they wrote. “Jason is written as a caricature, much like what a delusional woman thinks a ‘man’ should be.”
A gaming YouTuber seethed that Rockstar was courting women and gay men by showing Jason shirtless in another scene. “Gone are the days of edgy based masculine GTA games,” he wrote on X. “I could be wrong but right now it’s looking like it will be a woke fest.”
Another YouTuber has convinced himself the game will subliminally brainwash players with “bisexual lighting.”
The vigil that started in 2014
None of this came out of nowhere. Since the height of Gamergate in 2014, an angst-ridden subset of male gamers has kept a paranoid watch for what they see as the creeping influence of women and LGBTQ developers in games.
The long wait for GTA VI and its repeated delays handed them a decade of runway to build a preemptive backlash against a game that’s going to be enormous anyway, not unlike the failed furor over supposedly “woke” elements of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Multiple leaks and a 27-minute “extended look” preview on Netflix have revealed key details, and Rockstar creatives have said they intend to realistically portray the diversity of the Miami-inspired setting and put a fleshed-out female character in the spotlight. Even with that much on the table, the would-be detractors are visibly straining for reasons to call the thing dead on arrival.
Some skip the pretense of analysis entirely. There are complaints that Lucia’s breasts are too small because of “they/thems” working at Rockstar, and jokes along the lines of: “female lead in GTA 6? i thought the whole point of GTA was to be able to drive.” An AI enthusiast ran the game’s cover through an image generator to swap a woman of color in a crop top for a white blonde in a bikini.
The grudge is older than the trailer
The tantrums predate every frame of footage. In 2022, Rockstar’s remastered version of GTA V removed a number of gags and non-playable characters that critics had described as transphobic, which drew complaints from some fans.
The following year, after the GTA VI trailer dropped, trolls floated the groundless theory that Lucia was a transgender woman. Last month, when former video game executive Mark Kern, known for his crusades against “woke” content, said he found Lucia attractive, his own followers turned on him in openly racist and misogynistic replies.
Much of the anger points straight at the developers, who’ve been blasted for allegedly embracing “identity politics,” for reportedly making efforts to avoid punching down against marginalized groups in the storyline, and for letting women contribute to the franchise at all. A photo of female staff at the company’s Scotland studio, posted in 2019 for International Women’s Day, still circulates with sneering comments about how they probably ruined GTA VI.
When Nick Fuentes is the voice of restraint
A few prominent streamers on the right have declined to join in. Zack Hoyt, better known as Asmongold, and white nationalist Nick Fuentes have both taken a wait-and-see approach rather than trashing a game they haven’t played.
Fuentes went further and mocked the people complaining about its creative direction. “Just go outside, touch grass,” he told a viewer who raised the topic in his live chat.
Anyone nursing fantasies of a boycott or a commercial flop is going to have a rough November. According to one estimate of preorders from a third-party data analytics firm, Rockstar has already sold 5.28 million copies of GTA VI and taken in more than $500 million in revenue. It’s likely the most expensive game ever made, with a budget somewhere north of a billion dollars, and the studio stands to easily recoup that, possibly on day one.
You’d think those numbers might prompt some reflection from the culture warriors. But it’s hard to admit you’re this far outside the mainstream and have no say over what other people like.
They’ll find fresh objections once the game is actually in players’ hands. And when GTA VI starts breaking records, the crusade will quietly stop mattering, because the next fake controversy will already be loading.
