You said in an earlier post that first borns tend to get cursed (I say as I am a first born XD) and I wanted to know if there was a reason as to why they get more cursed and some examples of what some of those curses would be
Well there’s the prototypical bartered firstborn - a witch or a fae or a ~something or other~ demanding the firstborn child as payment for a service or gift (think Rumpelstiltskin),
as well as prophecies about firstborns that lead their parents/grandparents/kings/~whoever~ to try and kill them to circumvent it.
if you want a very specific example, there is actually a firstborn curse on my own family - “Firstborn daughters marry their fathers and firstborn sons become them.” My great great grandmother (yeah she’s still alive, she’s like 95) recites it all the time, though i havent taken the time to grill her on it’s origin
which was deeply and viscerally terrifying to me as a child, as i am the firstborn and my father is Less Than Pleasant, but seeing as i am both nonbinary and aromantic i think thats exactly the kind of fairytale loophole abuse that saves me lol
(and honestly this sounds less like a curse to me and more of something someone made up to justify the cycle of abuse, but she insists its a curse, so [shrug])
as for why - this one is so old, theres probably no way to know for sure. Cursed firstborns are a motif thousands of years old - the tenth plague in Exodus, Abraham and Isaac in Genesis, Perseus and his mother Danaë, Leto and the twins Artemis and Apollo - all examples of cursed firstborns (though obviously in the case of Artemis and Apollo, first and second)
I’ve seen a number of theories though, so i’ll list a couple- child mortality used to be MUCH higher, and children (specifically heirs) were very valuable - but children were also expensive, to house and to feed.
So having one or two children (often derisively called “an heir and a spare”) put you at risk of them possibly dying and leaving you with no heir at all, but having a lot made them difficult to care for. This made the first few children very important, but later children often overlooked. this especially applied if you were already poor
another one is “woman bartering her firstborn for selfish desires to a witch” sounds an AWFUL lot like a demonized version of “women getting abortion from a wise-woman” which i admittedly have absolutely no academic basis for but like. come on.
