Somebody announced a video game, and within 48 hours a faction of the internet was demanding a boycott over the shape of a woman's face. We have been here before, roughly every three months since about 2016, and it never gets more dignified.

The game is God of War Laufey, and the offense this time is Faye, the mother at the heart of the story, played by Deborah Ann Woll. A player decided her design was too "feminist," which as near as I can tell means she looks like a person who has carried logs and borne children rather than a lounge act at the Riviera in 1962. The call went out to boycott. You can read the whole dust-up over at Level Up, and it's a lovely window into how we spend our cultural energy now.

Then Vincent D'Onofrio waded in. The Kingpin himself, a man built like a walk-in freezer, stood up for Woll, his old Daredevil co-star, and told the mob to go home. Good for him. There was a stretch in this business when an actor's colleagues went silent the second the pile-on started, checking with publicists first to see which way the wind was blowing. Skipping that step and just defending his friend is more old Hollywood than anything Hollywood has produced lately.

My read, as a woman who has watched fandoms throw these tantrums for a decade, is that the complaint is never really about the design. Faye in the actual God of War games was a giant, a warrior, a woman who terrified gods. The game told us so. Cast an actress who looks capable of it and somehow that's a manifesto. These fellows want their Norse mythology, apparently, just with the women airbrushed to 1958 standards, which is an odd request to make of Vikings.

Woll is a fine actress, besides. Karen Page was the best thing in Daredevil's weaker seasons, and I'll die on that hill happily. She doesn't need me to defend her, and she clearly doesn't need it from a boycott thread either.

The boycott will fail, as they always do. The game will sell millions, the aggrieved will buy it anyway, and in four months we'll do this whole dance again with a different game and the same complaints wearing a new hat. Beau keeps telling me his gaming world is exhausting, and for once I won't argue with him.