Archonex posted:

I mean, if you want to go into a really deep lore dive then you could argue that it is in fact Caine in a darkly hilarious "This man is terrifyingly powerful yet also an utter gently caress up at everything he tries to do." sort of way. Since I think it's Demon that suggests that Caine's gently caress ups go far outside the realm of VtM itself, one of the bigger examples being introducing the concept of murder to reality by offing his brother Abel. That lead to like maybe a little over half of Lucifer's allies going AWOL (Some of them were genuinely heroic. Others...not so much.) during the whole war in heaven thing that was meant to uplift humanity and (allegedly) keep the loyalists from screwing with them.

Said AWOL angels ended up setting up their own often hosed up fiefdoms with ideologies that ranged from "humanity should serve us as slaves" to 'Hey, human experimentation is great don't you think?". A rough TL;DR of all of that is that as a result the rebels all promptly got their poo poo kicked in when the revitalized opposition decided to either use this new thing called murder to curb stomp the rebels or simply zerg rush them, slaughter their followers, and put them in chains.

At which point they subjected all of the rebels (save Lucifer) to unending torture so horrific that by the time the playable segment of Demon rolls around even the ones that could have been called good had turned into insane demons without a human host to stabilize them. Meaning the Gehenna-esque apocalyptic Demon scenarios (along with the slow decay of humanity due to not only all sorts of other assholish stuff being able to run rampant, but also the former angels turned demons themselves once they get loose) are at least partially Caine's fault as well. And all this doesn't touch on the stuff about Wycks or the Wyrm. The latter of which I very vaguely recall there being some tiny blurb suggesting Caine could have had a run in with it at some point.

Note that this is kind of a theme in Caine's life too. Nearly all of his possible backstories have him repeatedly barreling into situations he knows nothing about, assuming being nigh omnipotent is good enough to handle any issues that come up, and then poo poo just going sideways as a result of him not taking a second to think about the consequences of his actions or restrain himself for the greater good. Failing that, they have him just backstabbing and/or enraging every ally he could have had, up to and including one angel that took it upon itself to warn him that in no uncertain terms should he ever turn someone into a vampire because bad things would in fact happen as a result of it.

Basically, there's a good case to make that the penultimate villain in the OWoD is the setting's version of God for being a self aggrandizing (but ultimately kind of lazy) malicious jerk. Whom is trumped only by Caine due to him being the living incarnation of that "Local man ruins everything." meme on account of his constant habit of repeatedly doing the performative equivalent of running into his own fist on an often literally cataclysmic level.



Edit:And to be clear, i'm not joking about Caine being a walking, talking, accidental catastrophe producer to the point where people started producing memes about it.



If the old novels are anything to go by though, he gets over this habit of his and is genuinely regretful over how much vampires (and his mistakes by proxy) have made the world a lovely place to live in. So like with a lot of other stuff in VtM there's some moral complexity there, I guess.