I absolutely can elaborate, yeah. Beyond the birds that I mentioned in the original post, the school in the afternoon specifically is, like the judgement hall, quiet. It’s almost eerily so. You and Susie are alone in this place, and I think it nails the atmosphere really well. Which is to say, it recontextualizes the same atmosphere we know (walking up to Sans in the judgement hall in UT, getting the speech about LV and EXP. But of course, more memorably, the Bad Time quote) aka one of relative dread, to one that is overtly… peaceful.
Don’t get me wrong, I still think it’s eerie. Any space alone is, but after all of Chapter 1, you’re left alone in this near-silent space. But it isn’t oppressive. It isn’t angry, or dangerous. It’s just… lonely. Isolated.
Uncanny is the word I’m looking for. Of course, devoid of the context of the UT Judgement Hall, I think a lot of the power of the atmosphere is lost. But with that context, with the foreknowledge of such a pivotal place in the story of that game, one naturally asks oneself: “What’s the connection here? Why is this place calling my mind back to the judgement hall?”.
Of course, I can’t definitively explain that because I’m not Toby, but I can guess. The end of the chapter(s) is itself important story moments, points of downtime. And, crucially, moments where important things happen. While comparing the story of DT and UT is probably meaningless, I think it bears some weight that right after you are in an environment eerily and intentionally similar to Judgement Hall, you are given the game’s first look into a shakeup of the traditional rules or formula. In UT, Asgore breaks your mercy button. In DT, the end of Chapter 1 shows us the first clear indication that something is awry between Kris and the Soul. Something to consider.
Backpedaling for a moment, the comparison between the school and the judgement hall isn’t just, y’know, musical or audio-based: this environment does literally look like the judgement hall. The yellow, checkered flooring, the light coming in through the windows. It’s very, very reminiscent, and as I’ve said many times at this point, Toby clearly meant this.
(Also, point of intrigue that is not entirely relevant to this discussion, but is interesting: the Dark World closet door looks suspiciously similar to a number of doors in the True Lab)
As for who I think a “judge” might be…
I think if there were one mechanically, we’d probably have to wait until near the end of DT as a whole to see. Given Sans/the Judgement Hall’s placement in undertale, if there were an analog to that in DT, we probably aren’t far enough along in the story to have seen them.
I think that the Secret Bosses (Jevil and Spamton so far) serve a similar purpose as Sans narratively in DT that he did in UT.
Sans was written to be a very rounded character. He was never important, and that was the point: he’s a watcher, really. A judge. He takes the sum of what you’ve done, and displays it to you in a succinct package, both during the Judgement Hall sequence and the post-neutral run phone calls. He serves as almost a summary to the player, an in-universe perspective on what your actions mean for others. And, of course, his role as a Judge (being almost reactive to your own as player) takes on a new meaning in the no-mercy/kill everything run, being your final challenge before world domination, and universal destruction. He puts up a good fight, as we all know. But he isn’t doing it because he wants to kill you: he knows he doesn’t truly have that power. As Sans says himself, he is trying to make you bored. Stopping you by being such an inconvenience that you, the player, will give up. That is to say, he knows more than most of the cast either lets on (Papyrus may have a similar level of timeline-knowledge, I don’t know enough about it to say for sure) or genuinely is aware of.
That’s the key point of similarity: Sans serves the role of somebody (other than Flowey, the main villain) who, in some part, understands your actions and your agency. He’s somebody to bounce off of, I think.
And this is reflected in the secret bosses, most obviously in Spamton. He is, in the end, the single character we have met in DT who understands Kris and their relationship with the Soul (aside from MAYBE Noelle in Snowgrave but. It’s just speculation at that point I think). He is himself a puppet, and recognizes Kris as a kindred spirit, somebody bound to their strings as he is. Both the bosses, him and Jevil, share one attribute with eachother: amongst other things, they seek or believe themselves to be “Free”. Jevil believes he is the only one outside the cage, that he can do anything he wishes. Spamton yearns for freedom, to be cut from his strings and let loose. He wants your Soul because he knows it can set him free from his strings.
All of that is to prove what I said before: that in UT, Sans, and in DT, Jevil and Spamton, are almost… reflections of the player. I hesitate to use the word foils, but I think one could make a case for it.
All of that aside, if I had to guess, from our current list of characters, who a “Judge” might be?
My inclination is to say Susie. I think it would be impactful writing-wise to have her, a character Kris actively works at being friends with during chapter 1 and 2, end up being a force of karmic confrontation in regards to the actions of the player.
But if we’re thinking about this in terms of Sans’ role in UT, the “judge” character probably won’t be particularly central to the plot, and Susie absolutely is. Maybe Asriel? As a character established in his UT incarnation to have an understanding of timeline malarkey, and as the closest thing to a peer within that game to the player, he could provide a good way of being that in-universe perspective of karma that Sans was in UT.
I’m also somewhat apprehensive about him, though, given how important he is to Kris, and how important him coming to visit from college will/would be.
Again, I don’t think any Judge character (if we’re going off of a similar framework as Sans) will be somebody crucial to the story.
But I could be wrong. Ralsei presents a compelling case, I think, because he also knows something is up with Kris and the soul. We see both in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, each time we (the player) shift perspectives from Kris to Susie, we return to Kris just as Ralsei finishes talking with them. It’s suspicious. It’s intriguing. It’s never touched upon, never mentioned at all, but it is an element of the story that I think will be important going forward. If anybody is to confront the Soul, other than Kris, I think it will be Ralsei, or maybe some plan put in motion by Ralsei.
Not that I think Ralsei is, like, oooh an evil mastermind and all that like some theories do. But he’s… smart. Smarter than he lets on. And he absolutely knows more than he gives willingly. (As a side note, even before thinking about him in this capacity, on my first Chapter 2 playthrough, I got weird vibes from Ralsei. The changed sprite, and a few instances of changed demeanor seemed… off, to me. Something has absolutely changed about him between chapters).
I’ll leave this post off with one more thing that I’m sure you’re well aware of at this point:
The only other location with the sound of birds from the Judgement hall.
The only other specific location with a direct audio link to Undertale.
And the one place, I’d say, most associated with Gaster in the Deltarune world.
It’s this. This sort of thing, this kind of mystery, that I love Deltarune (and Undertale) for.
Why are the same birds out here, and (to my knowledge), nowhere else but the school?
Why is Gaster’s Entry 17 emanating, like a dying cry, from behind the closed doors, and beneath the earth?
Why does the sound of the birds cut out when you approach the bunker, leaving you in total silence but for the ragged memory of something you were never supposed to see?
That’s the question, I suppose. And the questions that I love to think about in UT and DT.
Gods, I love the mysteries in these games.
