Jason and Lucia: what Rockstar has actually said, and what fans have filled in

Rockstar published biographies for both protagonists after Trailer 2. They're short — a few hundred words each — and considerably more specific than the version of these characters circulating in fan discussion, where a decent amount of invention has quietly calcified into accepted fact.

Here's what's actually on the record, and where the record stops.

Lucia Caminos

She's the first playable, voiced female protagonist in a mainline Grand Theft Auto. That's a real first. Earlier games had female characters and GTA Online has had customisable female avatars for years, but a named, written, performed woman carrying half a campaign hasn't happened before in this series.

What Rockstar establishes:

• She grew up in Liberty City before ending up in Leonida
• She served time at Leonida Penitentiary and got out. Rockstar attributes her release to luck rather

than anything she engineered, which is a pointed choice

• Her motivation is framed around her mother — she wants the life her mother dreamed of during their

Liberty City years, but where her mother had half-baked fantasies, Lucia intends to act

• Rockstar quotes her as intending only smart moves from here, a line the trailers are visibly setting up

to be tested to destruction

What Rockstar doesn't say: what she went in for. The official material describes the offence only in terms of fighting for her family. Unofficial 2022 material suggested a robbery, which is where the confident online claims come from, and which is exactly the sort of detail that gets repeated until it sounds sourced.

Jason Duval

Jason is the more unusual character, and the more consistently flattened in summaries.

• He has a military background: he did a stint in the Army trying to shake off his troubled teens. He's

not the series' first soldier, though; Vice City Stories' Victor Vance was one too

• It didn't work. He ended up in the Leonida Keys running errands for local drug traffickers
• He lives rent-free in a house owned by Brian Heder, a veteran trafficker, in exchange for help with

local shakedowns

• The arrangement includes stopping by for sangria made by Heder's third wife, Lori
• His friend Cal, a fellow associate of Brian's, feels safest at home monitoring Coast Guard radio

That last cluster is the whole point, and it's what gets sanded off every time someone writes "Jason, a former soldier turned criminal."

Rockstar hasn't written an action hero. They've written a man in his thirties doing favours for his landlord's drug operation, paid in free accommodation and home-cooked cocktails, whose life is small and provincial and comfortable and completely stuck.

Which makes the dramatic engine obvious once you see it. He isn't a criminal mastermind meeting his match. He's someone at ease in a rut meeting someone with no interest in staying in one.

The two of them

Rockstar's framing: they've always known the deck is stacked against them, and when an easy score goes wrong they end up on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America, caught in a conspiracy spanning Leonida, dependent on each other to get out alive.

The Bonnie and Clyde comparison has trailed this game since Trailer 1 and Rockstar hasn't exactly waved it away. I'd hold it loosely, though.

Bonnie and Clyde is a story where the relationship is the engine and the crime is how it expresses itself. What Rockstar has described is closer to two people whose lives are bad in different ways becoming each other's best available option. That's a different story, and a considerably harder one to write well.

Everyone else

Rockstar's character material also names Boobie Ike, Dre'Quan Priest, Raul Bautista, Real Dimez, Brian Heder and Cal Hampton.

The bios for these are much thinner than the protagonists'. Almost every detailed claim you'll read about their role in the plot is extrapolation from a sentence or two, and some of it is extrapolation from unofficial footage.

What two protagonists implies

GTA V had three and let you switch between them nearly freely. It produced enormous variety and a story that never quite gave all three a complete arc — Trevor in particular kept threatening to eat the game.

Two is a tighter proposition. Material shown so far suggests you can see the other protagonist's position on the map, which would be a change from GTA V, where the other characters were effectively off-screen until you switched in.

Read the smaller cast as intent rather than reduction. Two protagonists in a relationship means switching stops being a convenience feature and starts being a way to show you both sides of the same relationship from inside it.

Whether that actually lands is the most interesting open question about this game, and no trailer can answer it. That takes eleven weeks and a finished product.