Talk:Ken Kaneki/@comment-27276334-20151124171500/@comment-26967758-20151125200103

Thank you for convincing me to read this analysis, Zer0. You've perfecly described something I can relate to here. What is love? Is a thought or a feeling? I think you've hit the nail on the head with his. Kaneki wanted love so badly, he failed to love himself. Like Banjou said, he needed to save himself, by loving himself. The self-destructive paths he's taken is proof he doesn't know love, and to be fair, he's only acted out in anger and hatred, in a sense, they are to him, what love is. He hated when his mom hit him, but he saw it as love. We don't really know why she hit him to begin with, it might be because she thought he wasn't considering that she's already done a lot to just raise him, taking on multiple jobs, and yet he somehow didn't feel grateful. As children, we seek a lot of attention from our parents, and sometimes we don't even know why we bother them as much as we do. Since all he's ever gotten was abuse, he came to accept it as "love", but of course, he knows how society views the concept of love.

The story started with him wanting to go on a date with Rize, because he thought that could lead to love. Coincidentally, it lead him to hate, which he has mistaken as love as a young child, and probably is planted into his subconcious mind, which is why he thinks he doesn't deserve "real love" to begin with. In a sense, Kaneki was conditioned to be content with the way things is, because he feels like love can be forced, it has to come out in some way or form by itself, and he seems to have taken the most extreme form of physical expression (abuse) as love. Maybe that's why he thought his mother cared about him.

To overcome the ego, one has to stop thinking so much, and to really feel love, one has to simply... well, feel it without thinking about it, but what if one doesn't know it's initial feeling their whole life or has overlooked it? Much like how he overlooks Touka's feelings when she's angry him, he thinks it's not "real love" when she's angry because it triggers an alarm in him that he might have done something wrong. He just really wants to be cared about in a tender way, much like how a child wants to be hugged and loved by their parents. But since he grew up without that, he's accepted that's not what he deserves, so he avoids it, which is why he became socially withdrawn.