Quest
Explanation
This comic parodies the romanticized notion of knightly quests by filtering it through modern existential malaise.
In the first panel, a child excitedly spots a knight: "Oh wow! A knight! Are you on a quest?" The knight sighs.
The knight explains: "Yes, but I'm a late-modern literary knight. I don't really believe in quests, but I maintain the feeling of fruitless obligation." This is a direct reference to literary modernism and postmodernism, where characters are aware of the meaninglessness of their pursuits but continue anyway -- think Beckett's "I can't go on, I'll go on."
The knight continues: "Probably I don't even have a quest, or if I do, it is futile, or it is wicked, because of the cruelty of my earlier desires." This layers on more existential doubt -- not only might the quest be meaningless, but the original motivations might have been morally corrupt.
"Sure, there might be some realization that I must not fulfill my quest but balance against the darkness of justice, but in the end there's only a vast immorality and a princess with a big butt." This mocks the literary convention of subverting quest narratives while still relying on their basic structure -- the knight deconstructs everything but still ends up with a princess (though described crudely).
The child responds: "Oh Jesus, see, I'm summarizing it ironically, but I'm honestly not even doing it on purpose." The punchline is that the knight's self-aware literary deconstruction has become so automatic that he can't tell the difference between sincere expression and ironic commentary anymore. The child tells him: "Please go quest somewhere else." The comic satirizes over-intellectualized, self-referential storytelling and the exhausting modern tendency to ironize everything, even genuine emotional experiences.