Title card Grand Theft Auto 6: Mystery of the Sunscreen Fade in: indoors. Detective's office. Shutters block the light from the street lamps. A lone figure paces the room, kicking empty sunscreen cans that have spilled from an overflowing trash can. He mumbles to himself as he lights a cigarette. On a corkboard is a map of the Miami Beach Broadwalk and the path of the sun along the Atlantic coast. It's almost there. They can taste it.

This can only have happened at Reddit user ficerc's house. He wrote an investigation into the exact SPF factor used in a short 2-second clip from a recent trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 by a throwaway NPC with zero connection to the story. Aha, a throwaway joke, you might think, but you would be wrong.

Ficerc's thread on the gaming subreddit, titled "What SPF sunscreen is used in the 'GTA VI' trailer?" is an in-depth analysis.

"At this point, anyone would have noticed the man wearing sunscreen in the new trailer for 'GTA VI' and wondered, 'How many SPF is that?'" writes ficerc in the first of many assumptions that will carry the rest of their essay. 'Time for a game and a skin care survey!' .

The first step in their investigation is to refer to the Banana Boat table. Banana Boat, by the way, is an American sunscreen company." Every sunscreen enthusiast knows this table by heart, but I'll include it for those who have forgotten.

This is used to quickly determine a sunbather's skin tone by comparing it to the Fitzpatrick Skin Score developed by the dermatologist of the same name in 1975. This is then combined with von Luschang's chromatic scale (used in Nazi Germany for eugenics purposes) to create a custom-made table that can be properly compared to banana boat resources.

Let's step aside from the master class shitpost: I think it should be properly emphasized that both of these tables come from an unpleasant place: the Ficerc is trying to determine the SPF of sunscreen as a joke, and the original (Banana Boat's table) is designed to avoid the risk of skin cancer (and sell sunscreen). Still, it is worth noting.

In a feat of numerical wizardry, they compared the new table to the NPC in the trailer and found that she was most likely to have a "dark skin tone" and that Banana Boat recommended an SPF of 8-14 on the low end and 30 on the high end for an hour spent outdoors." Now comes the tricky part." From now on?

The second half of the puzzle is for Fisark to determine how many hours this NPC plans to stay outdoors. It involves charting the course of the Miami sun. [Does the SPF of a random NPC's sunscreen have anything to do with the plot of GTA 6?" No, it has absolutely nothing to do with it. Rockstar is notoriously detail-oriented. Rockstars are notoriously detail-oriented. They pursue the truth by any means necessary.

I'll leave you with this comment, which I think sums up my feelings on the matter better than my own. One user wrote: " As I scroll through, the sad reality that this must have taken hours to create overshadows the satire." BeerShitzAndBongRips, enough is enough.