It’s been a rough couple of days for video game enthusiasts who hate women and scream about things being “woke” all the time. According to a story on Bloomberg this past Wednesday, sources within game developer Rockstar are saying that GTA 6 will have a lady as one of the main characters.
Rockstar’s next game, Grand Theft Auto VI, will include a playable female protagonist for the first time, according to people familiar with the game. The woman, who is Latina, will be one of a pair of leading characters in a story influenced by the bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde, the people said. Developers are also being cautious not to “punch down” by making jokes about marginalized groups, the people said, in contrast to previous games.
I took a stroll over to the KotakuInAction subreddit, home to Reddit’s forever gamergaters, to see how they were taking the news.
Not so well, it turns out.
Some are worried that the new female protagonists will be some sort of preachy SJW.
Another commenter figured that Rockstar should go all the way and have three female protagonists at once. “I’d have loved it if they didn’t pussy out actually and went full Woke with GTA6,” wrote AboveSkies.
Just make it a Stronk Black Womxn, a SASSY LATINXA and a Gender Studies major and make their conversations be about the pay gap and what horrible misogypigs men are and how they hate white men.
Some worried that the inclusion of a woman protagonist, in a game where you can land helicopters on top of blimps and drive off of cliffs with no injuries and shoot up strip clubs with tanks, would make the game seem a little unrealistic.
Others were less concerned about a female lead character than they were about the game making its jokes more about “punching up” than “punching down.” Because making fun of marginalized people is genuinely funny while making fun of white men is unacceptable bigotry.
Well that makes perfect sense to me. Fuck those fucking puppies.
And then there was the guy with a bug up his butt about cartoon mouse Speedy Gonzales.
I just hope these guys don’t injure themselves boycotting this game SO HARD when it comes out in a couple of years.
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I think that last one does have a bit of a point.
It’s not exactly unknown for some people with white savour complexes to not only center themselves in other people’s struggles; but also attempt to the set the agenda as to what issues they think marginalised and oppressed people should be concerned about. Rather than actually listening to them.
What’s with all the links we’d have to click through to read what you’re commenting on, instead of screenshots or quotations?
“Women, even those who are involved in the criminal underworld, don’t typically do the types of things GTA protagonists do.”
Ignoring that video games (and action movies, for that matter) usually give a middle finger to realistic physics, the protagonists of most video games (and action movies) are definitely not normal people. So regardless of the “realism” of that statement, realism gets thrown out the window when it comes to fictional protagonists. Funny how that argument never seems to apply to men.
“I think the problem will come when they make her unappealing to male players”
I have no idea how many women play GTA games, but it’s annoying how often men like this treat men’s preferences as paramount and dismiss women’s preferences as being irrelevant. Also, this is speculation, not inevitability. There are two other characters; if you don’t like one of them, just play the others. The only thing I can imagine mattering is if there are unique quests for each character and you need to get all of them for a 100% achievement “award”; though admittedly, as someone who is neither a gamer nor has OCD I kind of find it hard to emphasize with that, but it does seem to be poor game design regardless of the gender of the characters. Regardless, I have no idea if GTA does that in general.
Yeah in GTA 5 there were 3 main characters and player switched between then troughout the game as their stories started to intertwine
I can see why, although developed by a UK company, they went with the American name.
Over here the offence is now known as ‘Taking without consent’ or ‘Twoccing’ in the vernacular.
They changed that from ‘Taking and driving away’ because that was abbreviated to TDA; so coppers and lawyers used to refer to the offence as ‘Touching the dog’s arse’.
Grand Theft Auto 1 & 2 had multiple playable female protagonists, because you were an agender low res avatar with an additional portrait selection. These fake gamer boys didn’t even play the originals. 🙄
https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Protagonists_in_GTA_(1997_game)
I haven’t heard anything about cancelling Speedy Gonzales b/c of his hat.
Nor have I heard anything about cancelling Slowpoke Rodriguez b/c of his poncho.
I mean, maybe someone is saying shit about this somewhere, but I haven’t heard it? But the fact that they’re specifying “for his hat” strikes me as complete bullshit. If anyone is going to call for the cancellation of SG, it’s not going to be because a cartoon mexican character wore a cartoon version of a mexican hat.
I rate this as 3 Pinocchios, with an option on 5 if there’s no cancellation movement at all.
@ crip dyke
Mexicans seem pretty cool about cartoon hats. There’s that example of the Mexican restaurant that took over premises that had formerly been a Chinese restaurant. So instead of redecorating they just drew sombreros on the pandas.
@alan
Best panda picture EVER.
@Alan
Did…did they just paint a couple of tacos in one of the panda’s paws?
This is amazing, and I have to know where this restaurant is….
Ridiclous to imagine a female as an action figure. Anyone familiar with the underworld milieu would realize the ‘molls’ or ‘frails’ simply ‘stash’ the ‘loot’ or ‘moolah’, or sometimes even a ‘gat’, for their preferred ‘gunsel’.
@Gaebolga
I just Googled it, and apparently the Mexican restaurant with the panda mural is El Sol in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
@galanx
A gunsel is unlikely to have a moll around, filling much the same role for men of different inclinations.
Complaining about Speedy Gonzalez being cancelled* as a white 1st world problem in a post where everyone complains about girl cooties in GTA is just…
These dudes are not self aware at all. I wish my biggest problem in life was a video game character being a different gender than me.
*Was he? I can’t remember the last time I thought of him or heard him mentioned by anyone.
“Fusion – It’s not just a province in China”
Oh, god. This got brought up on Wonkette and some cishet wanker decided to say that SURE they could use women playable characters and he’s not saying that’s wrong, but it does introduce real problems, because now the in-game system of spending money to hire prostitutes and regaining health after fucking is broken, and how will women characters regain health since obviously women characters can’t fuck prostitutes?
I was all, what are you even on about?
So he comes back with how the healing system just doesn’t make any sense anymore, but they could make it make sense, if they explicitly stated that the character was a lesbian.
I didn’t tell him to fuck off but i should have.
@Miss Pearl: I was about to say exactly that. I enjoyed those GTA games more as well, personally. But that is neither here nor there.
@Crip Dyke: I’m sure that if they’d make the character a lesbian that would result in more screaming of woke. Not to mention the biphobia implicit in their idiotic opinion.
@Alan: I also kinda see the point about Speedy Gonzalez, but the underlying assumption that that is the rule rather than the exception (if it is true to begin with, which I wouldn’t know) is also suspect. Similarly I know a lot of white dutch people who all claimed that their black friends (who they had never mentioned before, of course) had no problem with Zwarte Piet or saw it as a positive figure and therefore any criticism was invalid regardless of the source
Crip Dyke: Or you could gently refer him to Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, though he might find the premise impossible. Telling him to fuck off might hurt his feelings, which is even more cruel than showing him to be full of it.
@Nikki
Thanks!
Such snowflakes. And the majority of their whining is over things that exist only in their imagination, as they convince themselves of all the terrible, “woke” things that Rockstar is surely going to do.
I am loving the Mexican pandas. I also loved Speedy calling Sylvester “El Gringo Pussygato”* and Daffy “loco duck”. Also, he was on Cartoon Network until at least 2020, which makes him the opposite of canceled.
@Miss Pearl: perfect clapback.
@Crip Dyke: It’s like he’s never heard of gigolos and male prostitutes. Cis-het boys looove the concept of lesbians, so if the character is one, they’ll still get to ogle all they want.
Maybe the female protagonist has some other method of healing, like taking a warm bath (which the cis-het boys will also love). Perhaps she holds up a candy store and eats a lot of chocolate.
I’m sure the female protagonist will have giant gazongas like all the women in the more 3D GTA’s do. And supporting female characters definitely will.
*My cat looks much like him and doesn’t care for foods with chili peppers, so he is indeed El Gringo Pussygato.
The whole Speedy Gonzales thing started when Warner/Cartoon Network shelved him thinking the cartoons were offensive and Latinos complained they were showing them. Apparently the people who complained like Speedy because he was smart and fast. There’s a great AN disclaimer on the Looneytoons DVD collections about how they won’t edit classic cartoons in spite of some really outdated bigotry in some of them. You can probably find that somewhere on the internet.
If it were up to me, I ‘d cancel Papi LePew for being a total creep and date rapist wannabe.
As a female gamer and frequent Nerds of Color reader, NOC’s Jenn (an Asian woman) wrote an article about how she loves GTA except for its racism and sexism. Jenn, maybe you will finally be happy.
As a Latina I hope that she doesn’t drop random Spanish swears into her speech.
As a bi woman I just hope the female PC can still go to strip clubs 🙂
@Crip Dyke If he actually does that, then he is terrible, because the hooker thing is the least efficient way to regain health in the game and mostly there to be a funny way to spend money.
So, he’s not just all the things mentioned by the others, he’s also very bad at the game!