by marathemara​

Note: Since most of the information in this post comes from Openbound 1 and Openbound 3, I have linked instead to mirrored walkthroughs on Youtube so that I could get timestamps for specific references.

Porrim Maryam is my favorite of the Alpha Trolls. My reaction to reading her dialogue in Openbound was “oh my god I want to be her.” Mostly in the cosplay sense, though my enthusiasm for knitting her sexy black dress has since faded. But also in a more concrete sense, because Porrim, to be blunt, has her shit together.

Of all the Alpha Trolls, Porrim is the only one who isn’t a total asshole. (Well, it’s possible that Latula and Mituna are only partial assholes, but Porrim isn’t one at all.) She’s chilly to people she doesn’t like, but beyond that she really seems to be a nice person. She helps Meenah orient herself in her search for an army to take on Lord English. She teaches Kanaya what it means to be a Rainbow Drinker and how to control her powers, and defends her from Damara’s creepiness and Meenah’s rudeness and kleptomania.



Porrim is also well put-together in terms of romance. While the “well-greased revo+lving do+o+rs to+ [her] quadrants” were probably a source of the tension and drama that ruined the A1 session, in the eons since then she’s been able to examine herself and her relationships critically, end the ones that weren’t working out, and be frank with everyone else about all this. And some of the other Alpha Trolls respect her for it. (More of them should. I certainly do.)

Another thing I admire about Porrim is that she’s a feminist. Some readers may say that trolls don’t need feminists because Alternia and Beforus were matriarchies, but Porrim is reading between the lines and thinking a little more critically about the situation she sees before her. While Alternia is ruled by an empress, and Alternian women can get away with being much more aggressive than Alternian men, the fact remains that the Empress’s regent on land is the male Grand Highblood, and that the planet’s entire society was shaped by Doc Scratch and Lord English (whose teenage commitment to prosogony may explain why women appear as powerful as they do in Alternian society.) Even on Beforus, a world free of Lord English’s influence, the majority of the aristocracy was still male, and the only castes whose roles in life were restricted were the all-female ones. Porrim sees all this, and while she knows she can’t change any of it on a large scale, she’s determined to make the future better.

Here I’d like to stop and point out that Porrim’s feminist interpretation of the problems with Alternia is a great example of how the Alpha Trolls each see their post-Scratch world (not to mention Earth) differently. Meulin sees opportunities for shipping. Aranea sees her alternate self at the forefront of radical historical change and decides to be more like her. Meenah sees what she missed out on by not becoming empress. Cronus sees new ways to get attention, and so on. Porrim sees a problem that she can partially solve and decides to advocate for the people she sees as victims of oppression.

Which brings me to yet another thing I love about Porrim: she is not only nice, doing good things for people because it’s socially appropriate, but also kind, doing good things for people because she wants to and thinks it’s right. And she is capable of being kind to people who don’t deserve her kindness, like Kankri Vantas, who slut-shames her regularly and expostulates on every social justice issue except the one that really matters to her.

Yet she takes the time to keep an eye on him, to pull him out of trouble of his own making (though he rarely lets her), and even to make him a sweater. I would not knit a sweater for someone who treated me like that, and who hates wearing the sweater to boot. Even though Porrim probably alchemized that sweater, it’s nice to imagine her knitting it since she claims to have worked hard on it, and either way the fact that she went out of her way to do it is a testament to her patience and compassion, and I respect and admire her for it.

Oh, and did I mention she’s a sexy vampire troll? Porrim is officially everything I want to be, except maybe the vampire part.

