#and minthara's past as a cleric should make her more skilled in magic than most

[trappedinafantasy37]

I too always give her swords over the maces cause I always spec her as a Rogue Paladin which requires a primary Dex stat. It is also interesting to note that the two finesse long swords in the game both tie back to elven dieties that Lolth hates (with Phalar Aluve being Eilistraee and Larethian's Wrath being Correlon).

I love your point about how the maces symbolize who she used to be and who the Absolute wanted her to be. And by dropping the maces, she gets to become her own person. When you first meet her, she does have the Xyanyde, a mace she probably had with her when she left the Underdark. And the only way to get it is to loot it off her (either by killing or knocking her out) and you can ONLY get it in Act 1. You can only get her signature weapon while she is a thrall of the Absolute. Once you get into Act 2, it is gone for good.

When you recruit her, she is unarmed (she may also have a standard knife depending on if you fight the Questioners). Her title for the longest time also used to be "Minthara: True Soul of the Absolute" and as of Patch 7, it got swapped out to "Minthara: Menzoberranzan Exile". The moment she is freed from the Absolute, free from Lolth, she can be whomever she wants to be now and does not have to live to such strict expectations. She will always carry a piece of Menzoberranzan with her as she never denies her heritage. But she can now decide that it isn't who she has to be anymore. From here, you can give her a sword, a mace, a dagger, a bow, just about anything really.

But she also has another little trinket that she also brought from the Underdark, the Spider Lyre. Minthara and Nere are the only ways to get this lyre as it is very useful in getting Kar'niss to escort you to Moonrise. Despite Minthara vocally expressing disgust in Kar'niss, he too is a symbol of her home and her past. And despite Kar'niss being sworn to the Absolute now, he too will answer to the spider lyre, a symbol of the home he is no longer welcome too. Between Kar'niss, Minthara, and Nere, Nere is the only one who even seems interested in returning to Lolth and returning to his old life. Kar'niss on the other hand is mad, but clearly has no allegiance to Lolth. Minthara despises the Spider Queen, but also expresses not knowing who she really is without Lolth.

She even mentions how she was raised to be a soldier of Lolth, so her life path was already dictated by cultural and family burdens. In which her going down the path of a cleric would eventually end with her being a Priestess and potential High Priestess of House Baenre. But at some point, she went down the path of a paladin and it is unknown why she chose that path. But it was probably the first real significant choice she made in her life, but it still had to fit the expectation of being a soldier.

In many ways throughout the game, she acts in the ways that you would expect any other drow of her station. But in many other ways, she's a refreshing surprise. It's a slow start for her, but she does begin to deconstruct the way she views the world, society, and the people within it. But there are also so many things that she is holding onto and struggling to let go of.

The Misunderstood Blunt Instrument

Two Minthara posts from yesterday (this one about the glorious new wallpapers and this one about her weapons and armor) got me thinking about The Mace as her weapon of choice. If I recall correctly the fandom has touched on bits of it already, so I won't go too long on this (and forgive me if it's been mentioned already), but other than the two cited above my brief searches haven't yielded anything new. And what I got thinking about was how ditching the maces upon recruitment is almost essential.

Personally I never retain them as her melee weapons, for both mechanical and RP reasons. For the first it's because I routinely respec her to a Dex-based build and of course maces are Str-based. The second reason is because (and forgive me if I’m late to the party here) that as a paladin she’s a blunt instrument for whatever deity she’s sworn to: Lolth, the Absolute, etc. And once she’s free of both, she’s free to choose how to defend herself and/or her friends/lovers among the companions.

As noted here, the mace itself may be two fun call-backs in one—both to her EA version as a cleric and, as dual-wielded by an exile, to Drizzt's "draa velve" fighting style (and I'll take their word for it because I may be the only over-40 D&D fan who hasn't read Salvatore's books). But representing this with maces feels specifically like a reductive and more brutish or ugly choice—and the perfect encapsulation for what she's become while enthralled.

The Absolute (and/or the three Chosen) has sanded down all the complexities of Minthara's character into the "mad dog" epithet Ketheric dumps on her during her trial. I'd add (based on much better arguments by much smarter fans) that for the casual BG3 player this is all she is and all she'll ever be, especially if (as she notes after Orin's death) that if Tav/Durge had killed her, that would indeed be her fate.

The mace is also a symbol of Minthara's pre-tadpoled hubris of privilege, arrogance, and elitism in that it's the deadweight of how her life up to that point had sculpted her to precisely this outcome. A symbol of her trauma. "How the mighty have fallen" is a cliché, sure, but it's a cliché precisely because it's true and happens so often. The schadenfreude that fellow envious Lolth-sworn might feel when encountering this manic, raving caricature of their own culture! The shock that anyone who knew her from her previous life might feel about how she's changed for the worse! She candidly later admits that pride is one of her sins.

The mace is a great choice for an enthralled Minthara, but that makes it (for me) necessary to abandon when she's a companion. The mace helps further that convenient, simplistic, reactive, and reductive way of writing her off as just another male-hating Drow dominatrix. It helps any player confirm lazy priors about her, which might be why she's both blithely dismissed by some and jealously policed by others.

So that's why I always ditch those weapons and re-arm her with Phalar Aluve. It may be just as reductive, but I think it fits, because 1) it's a fab finesse weapon for Dex-based builds, 2) fuck you Lolth, this is a weapon of Eilistraee and Minthara will wield it at you if you come for her and anyone she loves, and 3) fuck you Absolute, she is not your blunt instrument anymore, and she will smite you with something entirely different and with extreme prejudice.