Lucia Caminos, properly: what Rockstar has actually shown us about the first woman to lead a GTA

Fair warning before we start: this one is opinion, mine. Where Rockstar has actually said or shown something, I say so. The rest is me, reading a woman I have spent three years looking at in trailers and about ninety seconds actually hearing speak.

Let me say the obvious thing first so we can move past it. Yes, Lucia has a lot of outfits. I wrote a whole guide about them. A month before launch, that is still most of what people want to talk about when her name comes up, and I understand why. Rockstar has shown her in more looks than GTA V gave its three leads in a whole game, and the sequin dress is very good. I have already decided it is the first thing I am buying her.

But clothes are not a character. So this is the other piece: what Rockstar has actually told us about who Lucia Caminos is, and why I think she is written differently from any woman the series has put on screen before.

What is confirmed

Rockstar's own character page gives us more than people remember. Confirmed: her father taught her to fight. Confirmed: fighting for her family is what put her in Leonida Penitentiary. Confirmed: she spent her early years in Liberty City, got out of prison through a stroke of luck, and intends to make nothing but smart moves from here. Confirmed: she wants the good life, and she is the one who gets things done when Jason hesitates.

Read that list again, because every line of it is doing work. She did not end up in prison for being reckless, or for a man, or for the kind of chaos GTA usually hands its leads as a backstory. She went in for her family. Every woman I know has a version of that story, smaller and without the prison, and we all recognised her in about four seconds. The first words we ever hear from her, in Trailer 1, are about bad luck, and she says them in prison scrubs, to someone questioning her, without flinching. That is the whole character in one shot: she has already paid for something, and she is not sorry about the thing, only about getting caught.

Then there is the Liberty City line, which nobody talks about. She is not from Leonida. She is a girl from the city who ended up in the swamp end of a sunshine state, and she wants out and up. Every GTA protagonist wants money. Lucia wants a life, and the game keeps using that exact phrase. I do not think that is an accident.

What she does when nobody is holding her hand

The Extended Look is where she stopped being a poster. Confirmed, because it is on screen: she gets away from a man by using a stiletto heel as a weapon, which is the single most relatable thing a GTA character has ever done, and I say that as someone who has walked home holding one. She base-jumps. She sets fire to a getaway car to destroy the evidence, calmly, like someone who has thought about this before. And when the two of them are together, she is the one moving the plan forward while Jason stands there being handsome and uncertain. Bless him.

That last part is the one I keep coming back to. Rockstar's bio for Jason says he came out of the Army wanting an easy life. Lucia's says she wants the good life. Those are not the same wish, and the game seems to know it. He drifts. She decides. In the showcase's final mission their text messages float on screen, and even in a few lines you can hear who is managing whom.

The women GTA wrote before her

This is the part that is mine, not Rockstar's, so take it as that.

GTA has had women in it for twenty-nine years, and almost all of them fell into one of three jobs. The girlfriend you phone (Michelle, Kate, the dating system in San Andreas). The woman who betrays you (Catalina, who did it twice). The woman who is the joke (Amanda De Santa, Tracey, half the strip club). A few got to be more than that, and I will always have time for Mercedes Cortez and for Elizabeta Torres, who was the most interesting person in GTA IV and got about four missions. But none of them held the camera. They were in Niko's story, or CJ's, or Tommy's. The game was never about them.

Lucia is the first one it is about. Not a selectable skin, which is what the 1997 original offered, but a lead with a past, a reason, and a point of view the camera takes seriously. Rockstar has said the romance with Jason is optional. Rob Nelson told IGN they will not foist it on anyone, and that the story keeps the two of them together as partners whether or not you let it become more. I love that detail, because it means she is not the reward at the end of his story. She is in the story on her own terms, and the relationship is something the player builds or does not. That is a very different place to put a woman than the passenger seat.

What I hope, and what I worry about

What I hope is that the writing holds. The bio promises someone who makes smart moves and then, because this is GTA, makes several unwise ones, and I want to watch her be wrong sometimes, be funny, be selfish, lose her temper, pick the wrong man and know it while she is doing it. GTA's men have always been allowed to be a mess. The test of whether Lucia is a real lead is whether she gets to be a mess too, and still be the one you root for. Women do not need her to be perfect. We need her to be allowed.

What I worry about is smaller and older. Rockstar has a habit, in trailers and in the shops, of filming her from behind. Some of that is Vice City, where everyone is filmed from behind. Some of it is a tell, and every woman reading this knows exactly which kind. The second trailer and the Extended Look were better about it than the first, and the Vintage Vice City looks are styled by someone who clearly adores her rather than just looks at her. The curls alone took somebody an afternoon. I would like the game to keep going in that direction.

The bottom line

Confirmed: a fighter, a daughter, a Liberty City girl in Leonida, a prison record earned for her family, and the one in the pair who gets things done. Reported: nothing I would hang a sentence on. Unknown: how much of her story is hers, and whether Rockstar lets her be as flawed as it has always let its men be.

One month from now we find out. For the first time in this series, I am going in to meet her, not him.