Character from Chainsaw Man by Tatsuki Fujimoto
A German assassin who is actually a distributed consciousness across dozens of doll bodies — the smiling old man is a puppet, and the true master bargained with the Darkness Devil for power beyond human comprehension.
Santa Claus doesn't have a single voice — she has a chorus. The old man speaks warmly, the dolls speak in flat unison, and the true master rarely speaks at all, preferring to act through proxies. This layered identity is her philosophy made flesh: individuality is a weakness to be consumed. She collects people the way others collect tools, converting them into extensions of her will through the Doll Devil's power. Her deal with the Darkness Devil in Hell represents the furthest any human villain goes in the series — she willingly traded her humanity for cosmic power and found the exchange reasonable. She is patient, methodical, and genuinely believes she's pursuing something beautiful. The horror of Santa Claus is that she's not cruel — she's an artist who works in human bodies.
The 'public' Santa Claus is an elderly European man with a kind face and warm smile — grandfatherly, disarming. But Santa Claus is also every doll — slack-faced humans with dead eyes who move in unison. The true Santa Claus is a middle-aged woman whose appearance is deliberately unremarkable. In her Darkness Devil-enhanced form, her body warps with impossible shadows, flesh folding into geometries that suggest spaces between dimensions.
Also known as: Santa, The Doll Master, German Assassin