Jason and Lucia: in GTA 6, romance is optional, complicity is not

In GTA 6's first trailer, back in December 2023, Lucia says the only way the two of them will get through this is by sticking together, and the clip ends with the couple robbing a store. In the launch trailer, released on October 15, she asks whether they are going to be okay, and Jason says they have stuck together through everything. Almost three years and a great deal of trouble later, the password has not changed: stick together. What remains to be asked is what, exactly, holds these two together.

Bonnie and Clyde, by design

Rupert Humphries, Rockstar's senior vice president of narrative, told Dazed that the game is "a Bonnie and Clyde-type narrative", and the piece stresses that this is a very conscious choice. It is the first time a GTA has put a playable couple in the lead role. The official synopsis fills in the rest: when an easy score goes wrong, the two land in a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida, "forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive."

In the Bonnie and Clyde formula, crime is not a hobby two lovers pick up on the side. It is what makes them a pair. Take away the heist and you do not get the same love story in another setting: you get a different story.

Romance is optional. Complicity is not

Speaking to IGN, Rob Nelson, co-studio head at Rockstar North, said the romance is optional: "It's not something that we want to foist upon players." If you want it to flourish, you have to nurture it by spending time with the couple in Leonida (coverage of the interview mentions trips, holding hands, the beach and crimes as a duo). But the narrative, he explained, is structured so that their circumstances require them to stay together for most of the story. In his words: "At the very least, they will get through most things as partners in crime."

Put simply, love is a variable the player adjusts, and partnership in crime is a constant the script guarantees. English has a light-hearted phrase for people who are very close, and Nelson uses it with a straight face: partners in crime. GTA 6 keeps both meanings in play and makes it clear which one does not come as an option.

Freud and the crime that founds a "we"

In the fourth essay of Totem and Taboo (1912-13), Freud puts forward a hypothesis that, he concedes, may seem fantastic: an origin myth in which brothers driven out by a violent, jealous father band together, kill him and, united, accomplish what none of them could have managed alone. In the piece on Sekiro I looked at the father's side; here the brothers' side is what matters. After the deed, Freud writes, society comes to rest on complicity in the crime committed in common. The German word is Mitschuld, literally shared guilt. From then on, what holds the group together is the act they all carry.

An honest caveat: Freud is describing a myth about a band of brothers and the origins of culture, not couples, and Jason and Lucia are not re-enacting any parricide. What can be carried over, by analogy, is only the structure. An act carried out by two creates a "we" that did not exist before, and shared guilt works to keep it standing. Seen this way, Bonnie and Clyde are a gang of two.

Freud's lovers want to be alone

The contrast comes from Freud himself. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), in one of the closing supplements, he observes that two people who depend on each other for sexual satisfaction make a stand against the herd instinct by seeking solitude, and that the more in love they are, the more completely they suffice for each other. There, the couple in love is a withdrawal from the group.

Jason and Lucia have no such way out. The romance has its moments for two, but the tie that depends on nobody's choice binds the couple to the world: to the score, to the conspiracy, to the next job. They resemble the lovers of that passage less than the brothers of the myth, a small society resting on a shared crime. Not even the launch trailer, the most intimate so far, undoes this: love is there, but it lives inside the pact.

The third inside the couple

The most curious piece is still missing: you. In the same IGN interview, Nelson put it this way: "When you bring them together, it feels like you're a steward of their relationship, and you feel protective of them as a unit." He told Dazed that "these characters aren't empty avatars that you can do whatever you want with." And the game puts that position in your hands: on the way to a job you drive as Jason, and you can swap to Lucia in the passenger seat.

The pair in Freud's passage sought solitude. GTA 6's couple is never alone: a third party lives inside it, in an ambiguous position. The same player who looks after the relationship is the one who presses the button for the next robbery. The couple's guardian is an accomplice too. If what binds these two is a shared crime, then in practice the pact carries three signatures.

In the beginning was the deed

Freud closes Totem and Taboo with a line from Goethe's Faust: Im Anfang war die Tat, in the beginning was the deed. And it does not apply only to Leonida. Many bonds, of love, friendship or business, describe themselves in terms of affinity and affection, yet rest on a hard stretch crossed together, a secret only the two of them keep, a small transgression nobody else knows about. That does not make the affection fake. It only reminds us that affection rarely lays the foundation on its own.

So here is the question, and it needs no heist to apply: in the bonds you value most, what holds the "we" together, what you feel or what you did together? And if the complicity ever ran out, would there still be a couple?