Ice Palace

The ice palace tends to be a castle-sized and shaped piece of an Ice World. It may belong to a larger ice world, or it may be relatively self-contained...

It's a huge, foreboding building that seems as if it was once inhabited by normal people. However, it has now frozen over, and any people who currently live there are definitely not normal.

Expect any videogame boss or Big Bad who lives there to be An Ice Person. Snowlems might also be found living here.

Ice palaces tend to turn up in the mid-to-late story or videogame because of their nature. Also expect icicles, the occasional floor that's too slippery to walk on, and—if it's a videogame -- BlockPuzzles and various Malevolent Architecture.

A brick-and-mortar dungeon that's entirely underground counts as an Ice Palace if it is otherwise cold enough. But an ice palace has to be more, um, palatial than an icy cave.

May even be ruled by a Winter Royal Lady, or a literal Ice Queen.

Examples of Ice Palace include:

Anime and Manga

  • In Saint Beast, Zeus turns the palace where the Saint Beasts live into a freezing ice palace and imprisons them there as punishment for their disobedience.

Comic Books

  • Superman's Fortress of Solitude is, at least in modern comics, an Ice Palace. This largely comes from the Donner films, however; see the example under Films. It is true that the Fortress was located in the arctic since the Silver Age, but it wasn't depicted as being made from ice until the films.

Film

  • The depiction of Superman's Fortress of Solitude as an Ice Palace really comes from the Richard Donner-directed Superman films starring Christopher Reeve. Since then, that idea has migrated into the comics and into certain television portrayals as well.
  • Elsa builds herself one of these with magic in Frozen, which is what you'd expect from a story based on The Snow Queen.

Fairy Tales

Game Books

  • In the third Lone Wolf game book, The Caverns of Kalte, the ice-fortress of Ikaya is, well, an ice-fortress. The fortress of the Deathlord of Ixia is located in an arctic or subarctic region, but it isn't quite an Ice Palace.

Literature

Newspaper Comics

Video Games

Western Animation

Kim: Chillin' new lair, Drakken!
Drakken: Kim Possible?
Shego: [mocking] 'We'll build a frozen fortress, she'll never find us there!'

Real Life

  • There exist hotels and castles/palaces made of ice! Typically inhabited by paid guests, unless an Action Hero happens to be stopping by.
    • An episode of Dinner: Impossible had Chef Robert cooking for one of these ice hotels, forcing him to do his cooking outside lest the heat from the ovens melt the building.
  • Then there's the St. Pete Times Forum, home of the Tampa Bay Lightning, which used to be called the Ice Palace.
  • Not a palace, and never actually realized, but there have been plans to build various large and labyrinthine structures, most famously HMS Habakkuk out of a frozen mix of water and wood pulp.
  • The Cleveland Harbor West Pierhead Lighthouse looked like one waves of ice water covered it with frost.
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