firstborn
Explanation
The comic presents a dark fairy-tale scenario. In the first panel, a robed, horned figure (resembling a devil or dark lord) announces: "Behold, Lord Bozmodius, the Vile! I have claimed my firstborn soul to be yours in the land of shadows and forgetting!" In a subsequent panel, the claimed firstborn -- now grown -- laments that they were promised to the dark lord before they could consent, and reflects bitterly: "When I was young, forgetting this was hard. If my parents had put me in a technical field, I would have a serious economy. Instead, they gave me to the dark."
Later, the firstborn confronts their parents: "You can't punish me with your restrictions because I want my own decisions!" The parent fires back something about the child wanting to stay in the darkness being their own choice. A final panel suggests the firstborn actually wants to remain in the dark realm.
The joke transposes the "overbearing parents who decide their child's career" trope onto the fairy-tale motif of promising your firstborn to a supernatural entity. The humor comes from treating being condemned to an eternity in the "land of shadows and forgetting" as just another parental career decision -- one the child resents in the same mundane way real children resent being pushed toward law school or medical school. The twist that the child may actually like it there plays on the common outcome where children rebel against parental expectations but then end up sort of doing the thing anyway. It satirizes both helicopter parenting and the fairy-tale trope simultaneously.