Let's admit it: snowflakes are beautiful. They look like very intricate six-branched stars made of ice. The problem is that they are tiny teensy things that can hardly be distinguished with the naked eye, and they often fall in aggregates.
In some fictions, though, snowflakes are much bigger, allowing the viewers to see them individually even from far away, in their full six-points glory. Some works also features them as characters or enemies, typically in Slippy-Slidey Ice World settings.
Interestingly, some works take liberties with the number of points each snowflake possesses (see the top image, where they have eight), despite snowflakes that don't follow sixfold symmetry being incredibly uncommon. One would also be hard pressed to find a fictional snowflake that doesn't have a starry pattern, despite the fact that snowflakes can take pretty much any form — as long as it does follow sixfold symmetry. Some examples can be seen here
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Unrelated to Special Snowflake Syndrome and Cast of Snowflakes.
Examples
- Once you build a Snowmam in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, she will ask you to gather oversized snowflakes with a bug net and bring them to her, as she collects them. They emit a glistening sound when coming near them and hover aimlessly above the ground.
- An easily missed example from Bayonetta 2: when someone is frozen in a block of ice, several Sizable Snowflakes will be emitted from the ice.
- The second level in Big Fun in Furbyland's minigame In the Cloud is snow-themed, and static snowflakes are the only thing decorating the background. They seem rather far away and yet they are nearly as big as the Furby!
- In Dont Starve Together, the Crab King has an attack that considerably decreases the temperature around it, emitting many sizable snowflakes around it.
- Humongous, beautiful snowflakes appear are hazards in the Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze level "Forest Folly". Touching them will hurt the Kongs. And then at the end of the level, even bigger snowflakes drop from the sky, and these even destroy the platforms.
- Huge snowflakes are emitted when Felicia throws daggers at enemies in Fire Emblem Fates, to emphasize her powers over ice.
- The snow falling in the icy world in Iggle Pop! consists of big, detailed snowflakes.
- Kirby:
- Such snowflakes appear all around Snow Land in Kirby's Epic Yarn, although they mostly are part of the platform and background settings instead of fallen like, well, snow. Taken to ridiculous extremes in the "Frosty Wheel" level, where the titular ferris wheels are positively humoungous snowflakes approximatively six times as big as Kirby.
- Big snowflakes approximatively half the size of a little Kirby fall in the wintry levels from Kirby Mass Attack.
- Francisca, the Frozen General in Kirby Star Allies, is surrounded by a faint aura which constantly emits giant snowflakes. She also wields a huge staff adorned with one.
- Big, sparkly snowflakes appear hovering over the frozen room in which Blizzeta is fought in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
- King Ping, the giant penguin boss of Chillydip Cove in The Legendary Starfy, has an attack where he sends positively humongous snowflakes at Starfy. To put in perspective, these snowflakes are four times bigger than Starfy himself.
- Sentient cyclopean snowflakes named Crystals appear as enemies in Miitopia, along with their purple variant. They also drop the Iceberg Salad grub, which is decorated with an enormous snowflake as well. Snow in the Powdered Peaks can also take the form of individual snowflakes.
- In Octogeddon, the Penguin tentacle shoots gigantic snowflakes which freeze enemies, slowing them down.
- In Ōkami, when Amaterasu is running around in the frozen Kamui, she leaves behind a flurry of big fancy snowflakes instead of the flowers she spawns the rest of the time.
- Such snowflakes fall over the arctic locations in Pizza Frenzy.
- Pokémon:
- The Pokemon Cryogonal, which debuts in Pokémon Black and White is a giant snowflake with an aggressive-looking face. It is, as one could expect, a pure Ice type.
- In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity, the main antagonist is a giant icy formation that looks like an enormous snowflake named the Bittercold. It is a dreadful Eldritch Abomination that is the embodiment of all the negative emotions of Pokemon and tries to destroy the world.
- The Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town video game features giant snowflakes as collectables, with the gold ones as power ups.
- In Spongebob Squarepants Battle For Bikini Bottom, the Villain Containment System containing Prawn in the Mermalair, which freeze the villains solid to trap them, constantly sheds big starry snowflakes. Even when Prawn is de-iced, snowflakes continue to fall.
- Super Mario Bros. series:
- Such snowflakes fall gently upon Shiver Snowfield in Paper Mario 64.
- Giant detailed snowflakes fall in the foreground in the region of Fahr Outpost in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Although the ones falling further are merely seen as dots.
- Similarly in Paper Mario: Sticker Star, the snow falling in World 4 consists of big starry snowflakes.
- In Super Paper Mario, enormous snowflakes appear during Bonechill's boss battle anytime he uses an ice attack.
- In the 3DS remake of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, starry snowflakes are seen hovering in the air in the frozen Joke's End.
- In Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, such snowflakes are seen in the background when Fawful transforms Midbus into Blizzard Midbus.
- Big six-branched snowflakes occasionally fall in the foreground in Mount Brrr in Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam.
- An occasional Sizable Snowflake falls amongst the snowfall in the Super Mario 3D World-themed snow levels in Super Mario Maker 2.
- The Winter Interior in Tomodachi Life looks like a frozen tundra with every possible arctic cliché, with giant snowflakes gently falling down.
- Homestar Runner: Whenever it snows in Decemberween cartoon, the flakes in the foreground are big—large enough to see they look like construction paper cutouts.
- Baman Piderman: In the Happy Winter Friends episode, the snowflakes are larger than any of the characters.
- The snowflakes falling in Danny Phantom's Christmas Episode all are Sizable Snowflakes.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Sonic Rainboom", when the main characters are taking a tour of the Cloudsdale weather factory (where the weather is produced), one station features pegasi hoof-carving snowflakes the size of small dishes. This is notably inconsistent with the rest of the series, where snow is depicted as the uniform white mass it looks like in real life, with none of the plate-sized snowflakes the weather factory apparently manufactures visible anywhere.
- The snowflakes seen in The Owl House are as big as Luz's palm. Given the circumstances behind their appearance, it's entirely possible that the island itself deliberately made them that large to teach her the Ice Glyph.
- During Poppy's travel montage in Trolls, she passes through a frozen landscape where giant, black and glittery snowflakes are falling behind her. While trolls are depicted as equivalent to the size of the real life toys, this is still quite exaggerated.
