Talk:Ken Kaneki/@comment-114.108.203.10-20150802142754/@comment-25047329-20150802154107

There really is imo. Sen is a horror novelist who writes about things like loneliness, despair, hopelessness, and tragedy. Even before the whole Rize incident, Kaneki could relate to her books because he's life had already been shit for a long time. As much flak as pre Aogiri Kaneki gets sometimes for being a "wimp", he was already accustomed to a certain level of tragedy in his life that attributed to how he would become later.

As Sasaki, while he certainly has his fair share of problems, he doesn't seem to have faced any real tragedy in his short three years of existence. Akira already expressed concern for it and the newest chapter indirectly further hints at it, but Sasaki isn't emotionally fortified at all if something really bad happens. As Kaneki, he had multiple bad things happen throughout his life from a young age and often had to deal with them by himself or little support, so Sen's stories connected with him on a deep level. Sasaki doesn't think Sen is a bad writer, but he finds her books too hard to get through because they're laced with tragedy and hopelessness and he can't connect on a personal level.

There's probably a lot more that could be read into it, but my interpretation of it is that it indirectly shows a major difference between the lives of Kaneki and Sasaki; of someone who experienced a lot of bad in their twenty year life and coped by reading stories that related to them versus someone who had a short but relatively happy existence.