Daken Akihiro Appreciation 2021

[9th.]

Discuss away...

[pkingdom]

Still here, still sexy

[gealach]

Today Gatecrashers published an interview with Leah Williams. You can find it here: https://supersons.libsyn.com/x-facto...-leah-williams
I transcribed everything that was said about Daken:

Gatecrashers: How do you think Daken’s relationship with his papa bear Wolverine informs the character in the present day?
Leah: I think it’s a lot better than it has been in ages past, because Krakoa is a place that provides --- their survival needs and fulfillment needs are being taken care of first --- so I think that Krakoa is a really healthy environment for a lot of people with difficult backgrounds, like Daken or Aurora or Polaris, to finally explore themselves and their relationships with other people, and really start to self-actualize. So, I would say that Daken and Wolverine are not close, but they are open to the potential for now, which is a new thing.

Gatecrashers: With characters like Daken, who are working through some past trauma and even their own sins, we see art as a major coping mechanism in your writing. Do you think characters like Quentin (Mysterio, NdT) and Daken are expressing their own self-worth through creation?
Leah: Daken’s relationship with art is still probably [laughs] in his head he thinks that he is a very gifted killer [laughs] I do not think he has the same kind of relationship with art that Quentin does, I think that when we see him sketching on his wall, it’s more like a hobby kind of thing, because he’s like ninety years old, he is old, and has been around since the 1940s, I think was when he was born, so I imagine over the years he has picked up some underappreciated skills such as charcoal sketching, and he’s got a good eye, a steady hand, so of course he’s going to have some innate ability in this arena, but I don’t think he’s at a place yet where he feels comfortable expressing himself through art --- I think this is one of the things he’s learning about himself right now, he’s still kind of relying on his old habits of... I don’t even know how to call it... He doesn’t care what other people think of him, but he also doesn’t care to correct people when they make snap judgments about him, like, he gets slut-shamed a lot in the first three issues of X-Factor, and it’s not gonna get addressed until X-Factor #7, it’s the first time that he actually speaks up about how it makes him feel, because Daken is not a “talk about my feelings” kind of person, he just has never had that kind of life, and it has a lot to do with the way that he was groomed into being a killing machine, as he was a kid, so these are things he’s discovering about himself very slowly now, and he’s not even yet concerned with the need to prove his worth to the world --- he’s not there yet.

Gatecrashers: From @lucario2405 on Twitter “Two Daken questions: How do you handle his two names? He is widely known only as Daken and most characters & profiles use that, but in #6 Northstar calls him Akihiro. Given his traumatic history with both names which does he personally prefer? Why does he sleep in a guest room?”
Leah: So going back to what we were talking about earlier, in terms of Daken’s self-actualization and the fact that he’s, you know, for the first time thinking about these things, I think his name is very much going to become an aspect of this. It’s a name that he chose out of rage and spite, back when it was a slur being used against him and his mixed-race background, but it is different now, asking somebody to call you by this chosen name when it could also be making them uncomfortable. We know he’s anestetised to it and it doesn’t have the same meaning to him than it did once when it was being used to hurt him: he has reclaimed this, it’s canon, it’s something he did as a **** you. It is a different situation now, when it’s not being used as a **** you, it is being used as his mutant name. So the opportunity to re-evaluate that and kind of take a look at it and being like, “Is this really the legacy that I want?”, is for sure a part of his Krakoan journey, he’s figuring out all of these things in relation to himself. He’s never had the kind of peace where he can ask himself these questions and take a look inwards at himself and his feelings. But he has that now. And for the other question, the guest room question, both he and Aurora were treated as “temporary crushers” at the Boneyard, so they’re both inhabiting the two guest rooms, taking over these spaces as their own, except in Daken’s case it’s because Northstar and Lorna didn’t trust him and they just assumed he would get bored and leave and flake out.

Gatecrashers: Terrible roomate habits?
Leah: Daken is very clean, fastidious about cleanliness.

[WildR]

I'm pleased with how Williams explored him in the newest XFA

[Alphaxman]

I really hated him when he first debuted, but he's grown on my. My favorite moment was his "questionable" with Johnny Storm. Was they genuine friends or was Daken using his pheromones on the FF and Johnny was hit the hardest; I don't remember, but I doubt it.
I kind of want him to be Bobby's toxic friend with benefits that's only there for a hot sex. Like Bobby wants to hate him but Daken puts it on him too hard to give it up. LOL

[WildR]

I kind of want him to be Bobby's toxic friend with benefits that's only there for a hot sex. Like Bobby wants to hate him but Daken puts it on him too hard to give it up. LOL

I like the dabby relation too, but apparently their affairs have already been a history since Grace left Marvel, and no writer seems to like to build Bobby as a serious case ever since.

[DAHX]

Marvel Voices Pride



AIPT: What made you want to write the character or characters featured in your story?

Steve Orlando: Possibility! Being new to Marvel, any character is full of possibility. But Daken is someone who always resonated with me, myself a stubborn, erratic, sometimes-difficult bisexual who doesn’t mind pushing buttons. So when it came to this book, there was only one character to climb to the top of my list, and possibility continued to drive the creation of Somnus. It was a challenge — how can we craft a new character that speaks to Daken’s bisexual identity, and is brand new, but also has a history with him to explore in the future. How could we craft a character for him to bounce off of, that knew Daken when he wasn’t his current, more hardened self? From unraveling the traits that make Daken iconic, came the possibility of someone like Somnus.

AIPT: What made you want to tie Somnus and Daken together?

Steve: The place their paths intersected, most of all. For Somnus, his mutant powers offered him a chance to live his fantasy one night at a time, out both as a mutant and as a gay man. When he meets Daken, who has yet to wrestle with all of those concepts fully, Somnus seems confident, he’s an escape, and it’s intimidating. But on the other end of Somnus’s life, in the advent of a mutant utopia on Krakoa, it’s Daken who can now offer a moment of freedom, and experience, like Somnus never thought he would see. It’s a loop that opens when Somnus gives a young Daken one night of unbridled exploration and joy, and closes when Daken offers Somnus the same opportunity, but on a grander, Krakoan scale.

AIPT: What your favorite take on Daken by a fellow writer has been? He has transitioned a lot between being a villain, an anti-hero and now more of a heroic character in the Krakoa era — but which one of them is the best Daken for you?

Steve: In all honesty, I try not to name favorites amongst my peers. So I wouldn’t say I would name a take that’s best, per se. But what I love about his character motion from villain, to antagonist, to anti-hero to something beyond that, is how complicated, messy, and to that end, real, it all is. Through a comic lens of course. But Daken has not been one thing throughout his existence as a character, he’s been many things, made many mistakes, and his path to progress and growth is full of starts and stops. To me, that makes him incredibly relatable, perhaps because of how imperfect I am? He’s living a grandiose comic book life, but his rocky road to redemption, with all its wild deviations, twists and turns, is what makes him so intriguing to me.

[WildR]

I'm optimistic to Orlando's Somnus story involving Daken.
He seems to have considered a lot about Daken and this new chara's dynamics instead of to simply use Daken to promote him.

[pkingdom]

I'll wait to read it, but I'm a bit suspicious of a retcon boyfriend for any character. Feels cheap.

[gealach]

What did you all think about Orlando's story?
I genuinely loved it. It was very soft.