Of Course!

I've had a revelation! A CLONE SAGA-RELATED REVELATION!

You all remember Kaine right? He was a character introduced in the Clone Saga, who turned out to be -oh, stop reading if for some insane reason you want to go back and read it and be surprised one day- okay, who turned out to be ANOTHER clone of Spider-Man in a way that ended up being pretty clever in hindsight.

He was a typical "badass" 90s villain. Y'know, mysteriously lurking in the shadows and talking in riddles, beating thugs to death and not even really caring about the victims. A pretty boring character, I never really thought much of his "personality." That is, until, I heard an episode of Clone Saga Chronicles.

Y'see, I, at one point, reviewed "Web of Spider-Man #121," in which Kaine kills some thugs harassing an old lady, then steps on the old lady's treasured photograph, because he doesn't care about anything maaaaan. In the "Clone Saga Chronicles" review of the issue, however, they joked that Kaine's internal monologue was something like "MUST BE BADASS" before smashing the picture, and that's when it hit me:

Of course Kaine's a cliched, crappy villain! Because he's Peter Parker, trying to be a supervillain! He just doesn't have the heart for it! He acts like a cliched comic book villain, because that's Peter Parker's frame of reference! It's like that scene in Spider-Man 3, when he goes "evil" but he's just kind of a douche, because that's as evil as Peter Parker can get. Kaine is trying to play the part, trying desperately to convince everyone that he's this broken, super serious man, but, at the end of the day, he's Peter Parker and just can't do it.

Awesome.