Krampus

Spoilers for Grimm Fairy Tales’ 2014 Holiday Edition and Robyn Hood’s 2015 Holiday Special. Krampus has a pretty vicious idea of justice in the Grimm Universe, and his origin makes it worse because he starts out as someone who genuinely cares about being fair. Before he’s a monster with horns, hooves, and mouths opening across his body, he’s Andrzej, the lord of a village called Lidich in Myst. He has a daughter he loves and a firm belief that the law should apply even when the person standing in front of him has done something terrible. Anne Toole and Butch Mapa’s story in the 2014 Holiday Edition gives us that history while Belinda tells the Arcane Acre students about Krampus. Sela is trying to give everyone a Christmas together, especially Skye, but she knows there’s something outside that could take that away. In Andrzej’s village, a stranger tries to abduct a child. Andrzej saves the boy, and the sheriff, Elis, helps catch the kidnapper. She wants to kill him before he can hurt anyone else. Andrzej stops her. She even offers to lie about what happened so nobody will know, but he refuses. He would know, and that matters to him. The man is sentenced to work in the fields. Elis resigns and leaves. Months later, during the village’s Festival of Ice, the kidnapper escapes and takes Andrzej’s own daughter, Marg. That’s where the village’s sense of community falls apart. Andrzej asks for help, but people are afraid of Koteus, the creature believed to be lurking in the forest. Even the father of the boy Andrzej saved won’t go with him. He has his child back, and he won’t risk losing him again. Andrzej goes alone. When he catches the kidnapper, he discovers that the children were being taken to Koteus. The man claims he was feeding the creature to keep it from coming for everybody else. Andrzej wounds him and uses him to draw Koteus out, then kills the monster after being bitten himself. He also kills the kidnapper, abandoning the law he previously defended. But he’s too late to save Marg. The bite changes his body, and the loss changes what he wants from everybody around him. He returns to the village blaming the people who refused to help. Their children will pay for their parents’ failures. The Guardian of Myst eventually banishes him, but by then Andrzej has become Krampus. That’s a horrible turn for someone whose first major act in the story was rescuing another person’s child. He knows what it means to lose a daughter, and he starts using that same pain against other families. His grief explains where the cruelty comes from, but the children he targets didn’t abandon Marg in the forest. The scenes with Sela bring that right into the present. While Belinda is telling the story indoors, Sela is outside fighting him because he’s come for Skye. She asks him to punish her instead and appeals to the father he used to be. His daughter was stolen from him. He doesn’t have to take hers. And he listens enough to give her one year. That moment matters because it shows there’s still something in him that can respond to another parent’s fear. It also leaves Sela living under a deadline. Skye’s life is still something he believes he has the right to judge. Pat Shand and Manuel Preitano’s Robyn Hood holiday special takes that same problem into Robyn’s life. In the story’s flashback to an earlier Christmas, Krampus comes after her for the people she has killed. He knows she has been fighting evil and trying to do good, but he insists that her past can’t be wiped clean. At the same time, he encourages Timothy Ott, whose shelter has been shut down, to use blood magic against the businessman responsible. Ott’s revenge unleashes creatures into a house full of people, including children. Krampus then confronts him over the innocent people he has endangered. He helps push a desperate man toward vengeance and turns around to judge what that vengeance does. Meanwhile, Robyn is trying to get people out alive. She even tries to save Gerald Gusman, the man whose actions started the whole situation. Krampus kills him anyway. When he finally has Robyn helpless in the snow, he examines the ring her mother gave her and lets her live, telling her that sometimes suffering is enough. There’s a lot going on in that decision. Earlier, he says people can’t escape what they’ve done. Then he makes an exception according to what he sees in Robyn. He can recognize pain and show restraint, but everyone around him is still at the mercy of his judgment. That’s what makes this version of Krampus more complicated than a Christmas monster who shows up to kill people on a list. There’s a father inside that creature who remembers losing his child, and there are moments when that memory reaches him. He also carries that loss into other people’s lives and gives himself permission to decide who deserves to suffer for it. His origin gives those later encounters a different weight. Whenever he talks about justice, there’s the memory of Andrzej standing in the snow, refusing to kill a prisoner because he would have to live with knowing what he’d done.