Basic Trope: Santa knows how to kick ass.
- Straight: A robbery occurs the night before Christmas. When Santa drops by, he busts up the criminals and calls the cops over.
- Exaggerated:
- Santa takes it upon himself to arrest every wrongdoer he finds, as well as getting all the presents delivered.
- Santa defeats Satan and the Krampus at the same time with one attack.
- Downplayed: Santa tries to remain peaceful, but still has to pin the robbers down until the authorities come.
- Justified: Christmas is a holiday devoted to Jesus, and the Ten Commandments clearly state "thou shalt not steal."
- Inverted: Poor, defenseless Santa is being held hostage by the Big Bad, so now Badass Bob has to save him.
- Subverted: Bob tries to team up with Santa to take down a gang of arms-dealing elves in the North Pole workshop...But Santa completely whiffs his punches and nearly gets killed in a fistfight with just one elf.
- Double Subverted: ...But Santa borrows a pistol and starts dropping elves by the dozen. It turns out that Santa might be no good in a fistfight, but he's the fastest gun in the North.
- Parodied:
- Santa spends so much time beating up jaywalkers and litterers that he has no time left over to deliver presents.
- Santa gets a job as an undercover cop, but only because he's bored to death 364 days of the year.
- Zig-Zagged: Santa's bad-ass skills fade in the spring, every year, but they return in full every winter.
- Averted: Nobody is supposed to see St. Nick in the flesh, so he waits for the robbery to clear up before he goes into the house.
- Enforced:
- An action film is re-tooled for a Christmas version.
- The writers of a Christmas B-Movie have to work with Jason Statham being cast as the lead. Jason Statham can do sensible, but there's no way they'll be able to remake Miracle on 34th Street with him. So action sequences and a Handwave for a fat suit being concealed body armor have to be added.
- Lampshaded: After seeing Santa gun down terrorists in the North Pole, Bob looks surprised and tells an elf that none of the Christmas Carols mentioned him being such a bad-ass.
- Invoked: During Christmas, a superhero borrows a Mall Santa outfit before he beats up some bad guys, because they heard the bad guys say they didn't believe in Santa.
- Exploited: A robber pretends to be the victim, and acts as if multiple intruders entered his house. Santa beats up the innocent family and gets brought to court.
- Defied: An offender holds Santa at gunpoint, and gets him to exit the house without telling anybody.
- Discussed: "Doesn't it feel kind of wrong, though, to rob this family blind right on Christmas? If Santa was real, he would totally kill us."
- Conversed: "How come every time I see Santa in a film, he's trying to chop someone's head clean off?" "Seriously? Do you only ever watch action movies?"
- Deconstructed: Santa Claus used to be a bad-ass, but he has to admit that eating so much and getting a belly "like a bowl full of jelly" is enough to slow him down a bit.
- Reconstructed:
- But he still has a plethora of construction, computer engineering, and stealth skills he can use to outmaneuver his enemies.
- He still is fit enough to drop a grown man with a single punch, may have access to firearms, and has lost absolutely nothing of his strength of will, delivering a Care-Bear Stare that is more of a Death Glare. He also prefers to be The Strategist or an engineer for social change these days, which require a differing, more passive type of badassery.
You'd better not cry!
