Gatecrashers Interview with Leah Williams - Highlights on Akihiro
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 fuck you. It is a different situation now, when it’s not being used as a fuck 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.