Ice Palace

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
The Icecrown Citadel

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

Literature

Newspaper Comics

Tabletop Games

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.

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