It triggers when you first step foot on Rivington and talk to her. There's no exclamation point so you might've missed it if you went straight to the circus, but yeah, it should be there regardless of approval :3
So I do have that conversation available - but I hadn't been back to camp to make my usual round of the companions. My motivation to play dropped *significantly* at the beginning of Act 3, when the Emperor reveal makes an incoherent mess of the story. I don't think I've played more than 20-30 minutes at a time since.
Barring some unmentioned magical intervention, the adventurer is dead, and the Emperor is either deceiving itself or telling the most obvious lie in the history of the realms.
Except things simply continue as if the Emperor wasn't making one of the most controversial claims imaginable about the foundations of the story.
I looked ahead for some limited spoilers, and the story seems to double down on the nonsense, unfortunately. The writer for Act 3 doesn't seem to understand ceremorphosis.
I'll get to the end eventually. Probably. Maybe.
Oh, I see. I mean my point was that because she's brainwashed, any decision she made back then wasn't related to how she truly felt. All that mattered to her was serving the Absolute, and I think when you play as a Lolthsworn drow, she actually refers to them as "vermin" in Act 1. When she did serve Lolth, keeping a spider was more of an obligation as they're sacred animals and harming or killing them is often punishable by death.
So yeah, in any circumstance, I don't think she kept them due to affection - as endearing as that would be lol.
There's definitely a warping of perception - Minthara describing it as being "ecstatic to serve" - and direct commands are impossible to resist (not being perceived as something that *should* be resisted in the first place). But some degree of autonomy exists in terms of the execution of their service/devotion, and True Souls don't seem to be in direct two-way communication with the Absolute or each other most of the time, else the player character would be outed rather quickly. I get the impression that "You're still you but completely devoted to the Absolute." (But I might have the wrong impression, and I'm not sure the story is coherent or consistent in this regard, anyway.)
Whatever the case, if she calls the spiders vermin, that puts a different spin on the matter.
She's very underrated imo, it's a shame she hasn't been getting the attention she deserves from Larian :'3
She's been a highlight of the game for me!
