My Life as a Drowid, 4: Honey? We need to talk about Minthara.

"Things don't have to be this way

Catch me on a better day"

 

Garbage - Fix Me Now

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That girl ain't right.

Well, come to think of it, she's right about a few things:

 

Though abandoning the alignment system (which is half the point of D&D) BG3 still banks on simpleminded good vs. evil conflicts with spoonfed correct choices. Business plan: validate the stupid for mass appeal. Sure, why not. It's a classic. And sure as superheroes punch ugly people, villains still get the best lines. Minthara, for the uninitiated, is one of your party's later additions, a drow paladin (remember, no alignments - even for classes defined by their alignment) who's defected to the story's main antagonistic cult, and can be re-defected to your side if you're willing to, errr.... prune a few branches in Act 1, so to speak. Of course, most of us will always remember her because her stellar voicing (seriously, chick could be reading the phone book to any number of effects) lends her a commanding presence in any scene where she pipes up. Plus her evil aristocratic background permits her to voice a great deal more sanity than the rest of the cast's constant whining, emotional diarrhea and trite little adolescent rebellions.

Unfortunately, while well written and performed line by line, her every quest interaction or even background exposition tend toward the obtuse, contradictory or just plain misconceived. While BG3 likes hiding half the recruitment options unless you read cheat-sheets, she's the only companion whose very introduction requires nuking multiple plot threads an entire act beforehand. Even picking her side in the first-act conflict requires siding with a random horde of goofy, unreliable goblins against a less numerous but organized and fortified enclave of powerful spellcasters and potentially useful civillians. Forget good vs. evil, the decision doesn't even make pragmatic sense, out of character for anyone willing to deal with drow.

Why would you join her? Presumably many, like myself, may play a Lolth-sworn drow and want the thematic and dialogue tie-ins. But again, her starting situation breaks any roleplaying justification. The problem is that drow actually have even more reasons to kill Minthara than other races, whether because:

1) You're a Lolth-sworn drow and she's an apostate. Make nice with spidey-mommy by offin' tha traitor.

2) You're a rebel and she's a high-value target from a traditionalist family, no matter her conversion.

3) You're any drow, period, and she's a high-value target away from her family's protection; her head would net you no small amount of favor from competing houses.

4) She's now probably enough of an embarrassment to her own clan that even they'd pay you to make her go away.

 

Basically, there's no way you'd actually make the choice unless you know ahead of time that she can be reprogrammed. You could draw a comparison with Heather Poe in Bloodlines, but there the chain of causality flowed naturally from a minor decision with a minor reward, through narrative intrigue into multiple follow-ups. Here, none of the steps in the process stand up on their own. Even the sex scene with her falls apart through political correctness, as no way in hell would she take no for an answer from a low-ranking or no-ranking male - but we can't promote pixelated rape. Then! - packing her off to her superiors after admitting she was ordered to kill you is flat-out idiotic.

Sadly she even lacks a personal quest like the other companions, and so aside from a few off-hand comments her greater potential is abandoned. But even the little she has to say is half refreshing sanity (like pointing out most self-appointed sapients are the sum of their impulses) and half out of character.

 

For example, she officially "disapproves" of me letting Shadowheart be taken by Shar's cult despite myself and Viconia, the only two other drow present, both agreeing on the matter. Only after the trade-off does she voice some unexpected antipathy toward Viconia for abandoning drow society and religion to become a cult leader to lesser races... which is exactly what Minthara herself did? And that realization is never explored?

In fact for all the effort put into her acquisition, she offers few or no approval-building opportunities, and even fewer workable ones. Some of her suggestions, like allying with a backstabbing, weakened ruler of a vulnerable surface city before he's had a chance to solidify power, are intended to sound like drow-ish powermongering but come across more as shortsighted, star-struck naivete. But the icing on the cake was her actually wanting to use The Emperor's proferred super-worm, despite her attitude upon snapping out of her previous bout of wormy brainwashing being "never again" as if she's learned nothing from her ordeal and experienced zero character growth. Again, you could draw a comparison to Wenduag from WotR and her compulsive backstabbing, but Wenduag was a socially inept bumpkin with zero political experience while Minthara's supposed to be a highly educated aristocrat capable of navigating one of her world's most insidious webs of unstable alliances. She should know when she's being played.

Both through under-development and being forced into nonsensical attitudes for the sake of cast balance, Minthara's one of the more interesting yet disappointing NPCs I've seen. I can't decide whether she's just a patchwork of miscommunicated design choices or she must've been written by a decent author with zero experience in organizing RPG scripts, but either way, quite the let-down.