To be honest, I feel like Minthara features, as a character, a huge potential both to be reedemed or to be drawn into the darkness.
On one side, she is clearly willing to harm innocents and acts really nasty towards her followers. She is really, really vengeful as well.
But, if we take look at her other character traits, she can show mercy, she does clearly care about the PC, shows him/her plenty of compassion and trust, while literally risking her life and position, 2 of things that she values the most, for us. But there has to be something specific, for this to happen.

When we mind-read her during the romance cutscene, we get to know that she suffered heavy lossess, when it comes to friends, lovers, family members. She depises the backstabbing and cruelty of Lolth too; we can learn that she is pretty cowardly as well. It's not really usual thing for a typical drow to actually care about someone, especially to the point where it might clearly backfire against them.

In one of dialogues, in the camp we get to learn, that the poor treatment of goblins/rest of her soldiers is due to Minthara saying that they need "strong hand" leadership. So there is another layer of depth here, with a clear explaination for her behavior, other than "just evil for the sake of it".

Looking at from where does the drow warlord come from, it's not suprising that she has trust issues or troubles when it comes to having friends. We get to see a change in this style of behavior though already, during the end of the Druid Grove questline.

She doubts the Absolute too, which you get to learn by selecting proper dialogue during the camp conversation after waking up.
The more you learn about her, the more it is shown, that there is heavy conflict in her mind, over what she has to do.

Basically the game portrays her as someone who isn't exactly inherently evil; the drow lady is simply a broken person, who due to upbringing and her personal history became a tragic villain. She tries to play someone "strong and powerful", a being who does not display any weaknessess. This is just a ruse, which we learn only if PC chooses to side with Goblins.
As for the reason, why the romance is going so fast, it's because:

Just like mentioned before, she did mind-read us. It certainly accelerated the formation of bond between us and her heavily.
On top of this, PC is potentially the first person since really long time, to show her genuine care and understanding, which causes her to actually fall in love with PC.

Just for clarification; it seems currently that the reason for her to spend the night with us, is because the Absolute wants us dead and it causes us to lose the ability to spot the potential danger.
Homever, she can't bring herself to carry out the order, if PC bothers to treat her nicely, she actually goes against it.
To sum it up; She is multi-layered, complex character, who features both bad and good traits. The reason for why though, the "evil" side does dominate, is written above. Personally, I think that she should feature possiblity of either becoming someone much worse/better; depending on the choice of player, simply because there is a good logical reason for this to happen.

EDIT: Just forgot about it; The whole character of Minthara is a good example why DnD alignment system is flawed. It's simplyfying the possible personalities way too much. For example someone can be mostly selfish, but will never harm others, lie, cheat etc. Basically all of things that make a character good; with exception that they are... selfish.

Last edited by TheOnlyRealTav; 21/01/21 09:16 AM.