The GTA VI trailer puts Lucía Caminos, a Latina, beside Jason Duval. El País, 16 October: part of the fan base, online, jumped. Too dominant. The guns, unrealistic for a woman. Comparisons to Marines. A tweet from August: “wokeslop”. That is a corner of the internet. It is not the whole audience. Wired wrote separately that the anti-woke right cannot work out how to stop the game. The reaction exists. The game has not been cancelled.

Enya Aguado Martín, EnyusTV, 31, on Twitch. GTA V roleplay for two years. Her character, La Chusti, a former addict, a body not from the catalogue: long arms, large hands, a crooked face, one lazy eye. When she is a woman, she hears “ugly”, “she’d look better with makeup”. When she is a man, “loser”, nobody says ugly. Lara Croft was an icon. She was also, Aguado says, pretty, voluptuous, sexualised. Boys played her, with other connotations. The complaints come when the woman leaves that ideal. Abby, arms too big. Aloy, ugly. Ellie, the same file.

Gisela Vaquero, Jellyworld, Women in Games, 2017: secondary, rescued, submissive, sexualised. Spain’s Institute for Women, February 2025, cites research on hypersexualisation, perpetual adolescents, more emotional dialogue. Vaquero: part of the audience is used to the man who decides. When a woman is at the centre, some do not see it as normal. Others, she says, have welcomed Lucía. We do not generalise.

Rockstar: you can control both, switching by mission and story. The relationship, optional; partners in crime, either way. Each keeps a thread when you are not holding them. It is not a seat taken from Jason. Elisa Peña, Elisa Waves, 28: anonymity on a forum holds the extreme comment. It is not the shop floor. Aguado: a Cristiano avatar, rarely a face. Sometimes two children in the profile picture.

AEVI: 48.5 per cent of players in Spain are women, of 22.8 million in 2025. Vaquero: many do not feel represented. Lucía might bring some to GTA VI even if they never played the series. When a woman in a lead role is no longer news, all three say, then it is normal. Until then, it is news. Sexist pressure, if representation holds, shrinks. That is their hope. It is not a Rockstar poll.

Until release, what remains is the trailer and the tweet. After that, what remains is whether Lucía is still a topic or only a stick. Between them, some arcade cabinets, not Vice City.

Image: George Hotelling, arcade machines, 14 July 2005, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The photograph is of an arcade, not the GTA VI trailer.

Sources consulted: From Lara Croft to Lucía Caminos: Why does a female lead in a video game still provoke backlash? — El País; The Anti-Woke Right Can’t Figure Out How to Stop ‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ — WIRED.