Well, here we are. No, wrong here we are!
Welcome viewers, I’m Vivat Veritas and this is a bit of a different video than usual.
Well, I’m still talking about Undertale and Deltarune, so I guess it’s not that
different. Today, rather than looking at an overarching theme about these games, I wanted
to talk about something that is a little more specific, and a little more personal than
usual. It’s no secret that Toby Fox makes some
absolute bangers. Megalovania, Battle Against a True Hero, BIG SHOT, THE WORLD REVOLVING;
you name it, and someone’s probably played it in front of the Pope. As I use a lot of
UT/DR music in my videos, I’m frequently going through the soundtracks and picking
the most fitting, or my favourites, from them to use. One song in particular has stood out
to me for some time, and it almost feels like it’s “my” Undertale song as no one else
really seems to talk about it. Since it’s been on the mind, I wanted to give it its
own special video as a treat for both it and me. And yes, it’s going to be playing for
the whole video. Today, I want to talk about It’s Raining
Somewhere Else. For those uninitiated, or who haven’t played
Undertale in… 8 years? God… anyway, It’s Raining Somewhere Else is the music track
that plays when talking to Sans in the MTT resort restaurant. It’s a relatively infamous
scene, with such iconic lines as “you’d be dead where you stand” coming from this
adorable little confrontation. The music, though, is actually a calmer and jazzy version
of Sans’s normal theme, aptly named sans (which in turn is a slowed down version of
Song That Might Play When You Fight Sans). It also plays in Sans’s workshop, though
at a 20% slower speed than normal. If the connection to Sans isn’t strong enough for
you, the music file is called mus_sansdate so… yeah. Pretty comprehensive evidence
that this song isn’t just for the restaurant, but for Sans himself.
So, what does the song itself represent? Well, there are a couple of things we can break
down – the song and its surroundings. The latter is actually probably easier, as I don’t
know anything about music apart from when things sound good.
The song itself, as previously mentioned, is a calmer version of sans. This is well-suited
for the more serious tone that Sans takes in this scene. When people think of serious
scenes with him in it, the ones that obviously come to mind take place in the Last Corridor.
There, though, the songs do not have a connection to him – aside from Megalovania, and even
that is disputable. His role as judge, jury, and very rarely (though more than he would
like) executioner is irrelevant to his personality, most of the time. Even if you kill Papyrus,
as long as you don’t kill everyone, he lets you past. Some could say that it is this very
impartiality and lack of care that is why Sans does the job that he does. However, I
believe that this is, truly, just another job to him, so it makes sense that there isn’t
really anything else there that actually relates to him in the ambience of the area.
The restaurant scene often goes without mention, however, and I feel like that’s not doing
Sans’s character justice. This scene really highlights his strange moral code, his ideas
of duty and promises, and his relationship with Toriel. Most of the scene is taken up
by him explaining a promise that he made to a lady on the other side of a large door (who
we know as Toriel) due to the bond that they had formed through telling bad knock-knock
jokes. It’s relatively humorous, as are most of Sans’s interactions, but the whole
time there is this undercurrent of something bigger at play. This undercurrent pays off
when he mentions the promise to protect humans – you – who come through this door, when
the music cuts off completely and we get the famous ominous line.
You’d be dead where you stand. For this section, you don’t have the relaxing
song playing in the background. You don’t have the nice jazz music intertwined with
the familiar tune of Sans’s theme that you likely heard for the first time when you met
him just outside the large door he’s talking about. The same place where he claims that,
if he hadn’t made that promise, you’d be dead where you stood. This deliberate invocation
of this original scene, with the music’s mix of calm and familiarity lulling you into
a false sense of security only to snatch it away to emphasise the true threat that Sans
is, is one of the things that makes this scene so memorable to me. We’ve had a look at the setting that the
song plays in and how it and the song work together to form particular emotions, let’s
have a look at the song itself to see what we can glean. The name of the song is surprisingly
important for a pretty major reason. Now, there isn’t any particular evidence to suggest
that the song titles of Undertale are diegetic, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any
meaning in them. As Undertale is, well, a tale that is under, it takes place underground,
a place quite absent of rain due to there being no sky. I did a semester of geology
so trust me on this one. Invoking rain in a song makes a bit less sense in that case,
but obviously the fact that it’s raining somewhere else is also important here.
Now, although this “somewhere else” is important, I’d like to take a look at the
underground we actually see first. See, although rain is definitely not realistic underground,
we do still see it in Undertale. It may not be a literal rain, but if it acts like rain
and looks like rain, then I reckon we can count it as such. The interesting thing is
that the place where we do see rain in Undertale is Waterfall. Honestly, due to the fact that
it specifically mentions “somewhere else” in the title, if it was raining anywhere other
than Waterfall, I probably would have dismissed it. However, Waterfall does have a couple
of quite salient connections to Sans. Firstly, we meet Sans in Waterfall at his
sentry station here, where he takes us out to dinner to Grillby’s. Boy, he sure does
have a habit of this, huh? This is another example of Sans being a combination of ominous
and friendly that cements him in our mind as such. The second, and honestly probably
more important, connection between Sans and Waterfall is, of course, our good friend W.
D. Gaster. I know I find an excuse to talk about him in every video I make, but this
one is particularly important. Gaster’s room is in Waterfall (again I am going to
make it clear that this is mystery man and might not be Gaster but like at this point
I think we’re long past that) and cements the pre-existing link between Gaster and Sans
even more. Gaster, obviously, has something to do with Deltarune with the Introduction,
the Bunker, the Windings prophecy, and more. Sans is, well, also here! In Deltarune! Sans’s
appearance, seemingly with the same pseudo-fourth wall breakage that he’s known for, in Deltarune
sparked a lot of discussion about where he is actually from. As Deltarune is another
world, another potential home where we see that it can and does rain, it is incredibly
relevant in the discussion when talking about how It’s Raining Somewhere Else ties into
Sans’ otherworldliness. If we go back to the restaurant scene, Sans
talks a lot about you (and he) going home. Since it’s towards the end of the game,
it makes sense why Sans is talking about your journey being over and looking forward to
going home. He then says “Hey, I know the feeling, buddo. Though, maybe sometimes it’s
better to take what’s given to you.” He talks about the good things Frisk has down
here, but there’s this feeling (especially after he asks Frisk to forget it after a suspiciously
long pause) that maybe this is something a little more personal. It’s a fact that,
in this scene, Sans expresses that he at some point wanted to go home as well. We know from
his No Mercy fight that this home he speaks of is distinct from the overworld. It seems
like Sans has given up trying to go back, so he’s trying to convince Frisk to do the
same. It also helps that the song plays in his laboratory as well, with the broken machine
heavily theorized to have something to do with otherworldly transportation, if not Deltarune
specifically. I think it’s no accident that the song that explicitly mentions “somewhere
else” plays in this strange, hidden area that is so different to the rest of the game.
The title of this song, invoking both Waterfall and “other places” such as Deltarune really
cements the idea that this song centres around Sans’s melancholy of being presumably stuck
here in Undertale, the familiarity becoming tiring rather than relaxing, but he’s learnt
how to live with it in relative happiness. I think it’s really cool how two parts of
the same song title can both lead to this feeling of homesickness through different
means, and it really strengthens the emotive thrust of the song that it’s trying to achieve
by having it placed just before your final dungeon. So, now that we’ve rummaged around for some
lore tidbits of what this song could mean in the grander scheme of things and why it’s
important to understanding the song, let’s dive deeper into the song. All of these points
that I’ve used, talking about Sans, Waterfall, and restaurants all come together to talk
about why this song just absolutely slaps. As mentioned previously, the calm jazz style
of the song evokes a feeling of calmness and relaxation, mixed with the subconsciously
familiar tune of Sans’s theme. The small transformation here both adds to the complexity
of the song itself, as well as reinforcing the themes that I have mentioned so far – home,
ominousness, and comedy – themes that are used in the text very heavily in the scene.
It’s a beautiful cocktail of the emotions that Undertale perhaps best represents, and
thus the song is deliberately nostalgic, wistful, and melancholic. It’s a song that’s meant
to make you reflect on how far you’ve come from this point, gazing into the final hurdle
to climb before Asgore, and see how you’ve been taken care of up to this point. It’s
kind of nice that it gives you this respite while also telling you that Sans could destroy
you in an instant. That’s something I love about Undertale – you never know what is
going to surprise you next, much like the song itself.
Speaking of being surprised, slowing down the tempo even more gives it an even more
ominous hint, especially as when you do get to hear the slowed down version in Sans’s
lab, it is after this scene when Sans has shown his hand in a way and is clearly pointing
at something bigger going on. In this case, it is the type of transformation that occurs.
The original one, transforming Sans into It’s Raining Somewhere Else is one with a significant
amount of musical design behind it, actively trying to make the original something new
to invoke different feelings while remaining familiar. When slowing it down for Sans’s
lab, though, there is none of that delicateness. It is slower, more frightening, and gives
the very strong sense that something is wrong. The calmness is now stretched uncomfortably
long, giving such a sense of uncanniness that you can tell whatever this song is meant to
mean, its meaning and feeling has been warped by being in here.
The song slaps hard, no surprise there. I think we all know by this point that whatever
music Toby Fox makes turns to gold like some kind of auditory Midas touch. The feelings
that it invokes are very personal by nature, especially the sense of homesickness that
I’ve been highlighting in the video so far, and so I’d like to talk a bit about my own
experiences with the song. When I first played Undertale back in 2015,
it was the last year I spent in the home I had lived in for most of my formative years.
Getting fully consumed by Undertale was one of the last things I did there, really, and
at the start of 2016 we moved house. It was a pretty weird time for me, to be honest.
I didn’t really go back to Undertale much in that time, mostly because I was busy getting
invested in Homestuck which I’m loathed to admit, but another big reason was that
I didn’t want to spoil the ending and memories that I had with the game. They were frozen
in time, perfect in my memory, and since so much had changed in my life I held onto them.
Eventually, though, I did go back. About six years later. With the Undertale fugue state
that the internet (and myself) was in mostly subsiding, it was interesting looking back
on it with a different lens. It was this playthrough that It’s Raining Somewhere Else really
stuck out to me more, now I had heard Megalovania and Death by Glamour a thousand times since.
Pretty much everything I’ve mentioned in this video were things that I noticed back
then, and there’s a reason I’ve been highlighting the homesickness that the song deliberately
invokes because boy howdy did it Invoke It in Me when I came back to it. How much Sans
talks about not being able to go home really resonated with me, but not in a fully literal
way. Coming back to a game that you played six years ago means that you’re naturally
going to reflect on your first playthrough. Not only could I not go back to the home I
lived in when I first heard it, but I couldn’t go back to the person I was when I first heard
it either. The song itself took on a second meaning upon this second experience – while
I reflected on my in-game journey the first time I heard it, it was my real life journey
that I naturally reflected upon when hearing it again.
The way that your reading and experience of the text can and will so naturally change
and adapt over time is one of the greatest strengths of Undertale and its writing, and
I think that’s reflected very well in this song. Although for some people it’s Home,
His Theme, or Megalovania, It’s Raining Somewhere Else is a perfect encapsulation
of all of my feelings about Undertale. The nostalgia, the secrets, the love both that
I extended to the game and that was extended to me within it, all of it perfectly fits
into this song. Just a simple tune, a remix of another song, but still one that speaks
to the listener in an entirely different way. It’s not raining where I live now for the
person I am now, but maybe, just maybe… it’s raining somewhere else. Well, that’s all.
Thanks again for watching, everyone. I know this one was a bit less conventional, but
it’s a video I personally really wanted to make. I hope you all enjoyed watching it
as much as I enjoyed writing it. I love talking about video game music even with my limited
understanding, so maybe I’ll do a little bit more of it in the future! I’ve still
got plenty in the tank regarding Deltarune, but I’m also hoping to widen my scope a
little bit. Anyway, not much from me this time! I’d love it if you left a like and
comment as always; I do read all of them, so it’s always very much appreciated. That’s
about all though. Until next time, I’ve been Vivat Veritas, and I’ll see you again
soon.
