Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios’ king-size role-playing game, has tons of intricate lore by virtue of being based on Dungeons & Dragons. Nearly three months after its August 3 release date, players are still discovering hidden information about the game’s mechanics, romanceable characters, and storied fantasy races. Some of these secrets are simply nice to know, like the fact that you can use a waterfall as a shower. Actually, most of them are nice to know, including the fact that women in the Drow race are pretty much all gay, like one Reddit user discovered earlier in the week.
u/drowfucker (they know what they’re about) posted dialogue between the devilish Tiefling Karlach and Minthara, a Drow who is also one of BG3’s potential Companion options, while wondering if “all female drow are inherently lesbian.”
“What’s romance like in the Underdark, Minthara?” Karlach asks in the screenshot dialogue.
“In Menzoberranzan,” Minthara responds about her underground hometown, “romance is commonly a luxury enjoyed between women. Men are mostly present for propagation.”
Based only on this, we can interpret that BG3 Drow women are romantically more interested in women, but Minthara, importantly, continues to say that “here on the surface, gender does not define one’s role so strictly.” Larger Dungeons & Dragons lore doesn’t take a definitive stance on the matriarchal Drows’ sexual orientation, but it does establish a couple of freaky details.
For example, when a Drow woman is pregnant with multiple children, the babies eat at each other in the womb. As she experiences their struggle, the pregnant Drow will feel something in her body that is, apparently, better than an orgasm. Drow priestesses can also summon scorpion-handed Glabrezu demons as their interspecies fuck buddies. As a reminder, D&D goes back to the ‘70s, when boy nerds were more brazen about exoticizing women in their tabletop sessions and beyond.
BG3 expands on that history gracefully, allowing Minthara to be, yes, a physically powerful woman, but, more importantly, an interesting character. But until our real world even barely approaches something like gender parity, I’m okay with Larian preserving some of the Drows’ frosty matriarchy for fun.
“If you use [communication spell] Talk With Dead on a male Drow,” a top comment on u/drowfucker’s post says, “and ask what his occupation was, he just says ‘…male.’” Sometimes that’s all you need to be, beautiful.
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