An X account posting under the handle @Wokenessisevil watched a clip in which Lucia Caminos asks her boyfriend to help pick an outfit, watched him shrug at the choices, and announced that “GTA 6 is a humiliation ritual for all male gamers.”
That is the whole scene. A woman holds up some clothes. A man isn’t especially invested. Any sitcom of the past 50 years could have aired it.
In certain pockets of the internet, though, it now counts as proof that Rockstar Games burned more than a decade and upwards of a billion dollars building a feminist psyop.
From corrupting kids to allegedly converting them
Through most of its run from the late 1990s into the early 2010s, nobody ever accused Grand Theft Auto of political delicacy. Parents and activists condemned the series for dropping children into a sleazy world of sex, violence, crude humor and unchecked crime. Elon Musk even said he couldn’t get into GTA V because he was mortified to play a character who shoots police officers.
Moral panics come with an expiration date. Across the 13 years fans spent waiting on Grand Theft Auto VI, which finally lands November 19, the American right-wing grievance machine drifted from fearing kids would take up larceny to fearing they’d turn out “woke.”
Armed with very little knowledge of the actual game, that crowd has decided it must be an undercover operation to dose 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 first mandatory female protagonist the series has had, and her relationship with Jason Duval develops according to the player's choices. That’s the premise that short-circuited a particular kind of brain.
One X user claimed recently that Jason has a “gay vibe,” on the grounds that no straight man would know what sequins are or use the word “cocktails,” as he does in the clip. The clip depicts, 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 fumed that a separate scene showing Jason shirtless was Rockstar courting women and gay men. “Gone are the days of edgy based masculine GTA games,” he posted on X. “I could be wrong but right now it’s looking like it will be a woke fest.”
Another YouTuber has talked himself into believing the game will subliminally brainwash players with “bisexual lighting.”
A stakeout that began in 2014
None of this materialized out of nowhere. Ever since Gamergate peaked in 2014, an angst-ridden slice of the male gaming audience has kept paranoid watch for what it regards as the creeping influence of women and LGBTQ developers in games.
GTA VI’s long gestation and repeated delays handed them a decade of runway to assemble a preemptive backlash against a game that was going to be enormous regardless — 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 already surfaced 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 front and center. Even with that much on the table, the would-be detractors are visibly straining for reasons to call the thing dead on arrival.
Some drop 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.” One AI enthusiast fed 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. Rockstar’s 2022 remastered version of GTA V cut a number of gags and non-playable characters that critics had described as transphobic, which drew complaints from some fans.
The year after that, once the GTA VI trailer dropped, trolls floated the groundless theory that Lucia was a transgender woman. Last month, when Mark Kern — a former video game executive known for his crusades against “woke” content — said he found Lucia attractive, his own followers turned on him with openly racist and misogynistic replies.
Much of the anger is aimed squarely at the developers, who have 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 alongside 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 pile on. Zack Hoyt, better known as Asmongold, and white nationalist Nick Fuentes have both taken a wait-and-see stance rather than trashing a game they haven’t played.
Fuentes went further, mocking 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 in for a rough November. According to one third-party data analytics firm’s estimate of preorders, Rockstar has already moved 5.28 million copies of GTA VI and pulled in more than $500 million in revenue. It is likely the most expensive game ever made, carrying a budget somewhere north of a billion dollars, and the studio looks set to recoup that easily — possibly on day one.
You’d think numbers like those might prompt some reflection among the culture warriors. But admitting you’re this far outside the mainstream, with no say over what other people like, is a hard thing to do.
Fresh objections will surface once the game is actually in players’ hands. And when GTA VI starts breaking records, the crusade will quietly stop mattering, because the next manufactured controversy will already be loading.