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[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Akihiro [???], a.k.a. Daken. Because his creator is dumb, there's some confusion about whether Akihiro is his last name - when the name was initially mentioned, it was undeniably his first name (which was fine, because Akihiro is a legit first name), and then it started getting senselessly used as his last name. I'm going to assume this is a writer mistake, since Akihiro is a fucking first name, and that, since Daken hasn't used it himself, it's been a continuous misunderstanding by other characters.
FANDOM: Marvel (616).
CHRONOLOGY: After Madripoor but prior to the Los Angeles/DRUUUUGS arc.
CLASS: Villain.
BACKGROUND:
I apologize in advance for how incredibly dumb this is going to sound.
Daken was born in the 1940s in Japan; as a baby he was left on the doorstep of a childless couple, his biological mother having been killed (by the future Captain America, incidentally) before he ever knew her. As he grew up, he turned into a little bastard, at least partly because all the other kids treated him like an outcast ('Daken' was a nickname that people called him behind his back. The writer tells me that it means mongrel, but I'm suspicious, since that same writer can't figure out whether first names are first names or last names. ANYWAY). Since he had no friends, he developed a lot of respect for strength and power (as well as symbols of both, e.g. dragons, one of which he later got tattooed on his arm, and SPARTANS. He taught himself to read Greek, when he was like 12, so he could read about Spartans. Yes). Eventually his foster mother, who'd grown uneasy with him and decided that she'd never accept him as her son, had her first child. In a fit of what could be called jealousy and hurt and/or a psycho temper tantrum, Daken killed the baby. When she found out, his foster mother attempted to kill him right back. Unfortunately for her, mutant powers typically manifest during a traumatic experience while the mutant in question is an adolescent, and Daken's most obvious mutant power is claws. Ergo, he accidentally skewered his mom. His foster father told Daken that he could no longer go by his given name and immediately killed himself, leaving Daken without anyone to look up to or anyone to take care of him. But wait! At that specific moment, a mysterious benefactor appeared out of the woods and took Daken to Canada. That is literally what happened.
He was raised (the rest of the way) there in kind of a boot camp for psycho black ops types, but from then to near-present-day his exploits aren't really chronicled - he did what his evil mysterious benefactor told him to; i.e., lots and lots of violence. However, he was told that his biological father had killed his biological mother, and so after years and years of pent-up rage, he decided to track down his father and kill him. Because what this story needs is MORE DEATH.
Since his father was Wolverine, a.k.a Captain I Got a Bomb Dropped on My Face and Still Didn't Die, things didn't really go as planned. When Daken met him, he literally gutted him and left, and it was the first of several similar instances. They eventually found sort of a mutual goal: to track down the guy who'd been pulling the strings, the one who took Daken to Canada. Daken believed that this dude was preparing to hand over the reigns of his criminal network to a worthy successor (Daken, of course!!!); Wolverine just wanted to kill him for ruining everyone's lives. I guess at this point I could mention that the dude's name was Romulus, and that he was some kind of animalistic mutant in the same vein as Wolverine, but it doesn't really matter because he's about to die! Having found out that he had been lied to regarding who killed his mother, Daken also learned that Romulus hadn't really planned to hand him the reigns to anything: he'd expected Wolverine to be the tougher of the two of them. So with brand new fuel for his GOD I HATE MY DAD!!!! fire, and with the added sting of the knowledge that he hadn't really been worth much to Romulus, Daken killed him.
In an almost completely unrelated but still important storyline: Daken was sidetracked for a while by Norman Osborn (then basically the head of the superhuman cops/the Avengers). Osborn found Daken and asked him to be on his team, as Wolverine. Intrigued by the idea of trying to fill his father's shoes (and piss him off in the process, and get paid for it), Daken accepted and played superhero for a little while. His role in the team was minor; he came off as untrustworthy and disinterested in whether they succeeded or failed, and he was given no particularly important tasks. Instead he played half-baked mind games with his teammates and generally dicked around the entire time. It's worth noting that he was the sole member of the team who was there for absolutely no other reason than "well that sounds funny, what the hell." When the rest of the team was incarcerated for assisting in a violent unauthorized siege (per their orders from Osborn), Daken killed a couple of G.I.s, stole one of their uniforms, and escaped in their Jeep.
With that little side-project over, he was free to go back to screwing up his life. Yay!! His big plan was to take over Madripoor, a fictional South Asian city-state and requisite black market hub. He managed to do this ridiculously quickly via murder and extortion.
PERSONALITY:
Nearly everything about Daken has roots in a deep-set individualism. Being treated as an outsider taught him early that he didn't need friends, and reacting with violence got him what he wanted: respect. It didn't matter that it came in the form of fear. His subsequent upbringing in murdermachine boot camp reinforced both of those notions, and being told that he had been not just abandoned, but intentionally thrown under the proverbial bus by his biological father combined with all of those things created a psychological poison commonly known as NOBODY LIKES ME, EVERYBODY HATES ME, GUESS I'LL GO EAT WORMS. Except, in this case, 'eat worms' means 'be an enormous jerk, thus justifying the part where nobody likes me.'
Since he believes he doesn't need them, he has at least a little disdain for every kind of functional, healthy relationship; more for familial or romantic ones. He's cynical enough to consider love an illusion and caring a weakness, and he loathes sentimentality. He can fake caring about all of those things, and often does so as not to seem like a total heartless asshole; but most things that the average person cares about don't matter to him.
What he does respect is power-- or applied capability, more accurately. Regardless of how they view him, he tends to see capable and intelligent people as equals. He's contemptuous of them, as he is everyone; he picks out their faults and laughs at their failures; but on some level he wants them to look at him and be impressed. To that end, he's a little more self-conscious than his cavalier attitude would suggest.
POWER:
His canon mutations are as follows: three claws in each arm, a superfast healing factor and heightened senses, e.g./most notably smell, and the ability to influence emotions via pheromones. In CnC he'll be out the last one, since 1) he can only have three anyway and 2) it's creepy.