Anders Loves Maria is a webcomic by Rene Engström about the lives of Anders von Silfersked and Maria Holm, starting from the time they decided to have a baby. Take Finagle's Law, dial it up, toss in a Love Dodecahedron, and as a finishing touch sprinkle Swedish royalty on top. Began 9/11/2006, ended 2/5/2010. The website is currently under maintenance and cannot be read, though the pages are being redrawn and uploaded to tumblr here.
It can be found here. Spoiler Alert!!!
This webcomic provides examples of:
- The Baby Trap: Tina does this in an attempt to hold onto Anders, hiding the fact that she's miscarried.
- Dead Guy Junior: The younger Maria is named for her mother, who dies after giving birth to her.
- Death by Childbirth: Maria does not survive giving birth to her daughter.
- Distant Finale: The sequence with Maria's daughter finding a baby bird out in the woods. Also happens to be a Call-Back an early part of the story when a similar event from Anders' childhood was described.
- Fan Disservice:
- Anders sleeping with Little Shit. It seems implied that they don't actually have sex; Anders just needs to cuddle. Still.
- Anders' aged mother sitting around without a shirt is certainly not put in for titillation.
- Funetik Aksent: In flashbacks, Maria's thick northern Swedish accent is represented in English by a phonetic representation of a Yorkshire accent.
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Averted: Tina goes through with the procedure as a teenager. According to Rene, Maria also had one with Bjorn.
- Hand on Womb: See page image.
- Identical Grandson: Aside from Anders's hair color, Maria looks and has a similar mannerism to her mother Maria. Enough that her first appearance was essentially Hidden in Plain Sight for the audience, in a sequence that seemed to be a flashback to her mother's childhood but was really a flash-forward to the Distant Finale.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Johan and Bjorn are classic examples. Anders (usually) means well, but poor impulse control paired with worse personal judgement gets you here.
- Knight Templar Big Brother: Johan to Maria, having had to look after her since childhood.
- Longest Pregnancy Ever: Maria is pregnant for nearly all of the comic's run.
- Noodle People: A single character example: Anna is unrealistically thin compared to the other characters.
- Social Services Does Not Exist: Averted; Johan and Maria were placed in a foster home as children due to neglect.
- Twist Ending: Anders does love Maria, his daughter. He does truly love Maria, his girlfriend, it's just... complicated.
- Wham Episode: The ending, in which Maria dies in childbirth, and the Maria in the Flash Forward scenes from earlier in the story is her and Anders' daughter, caught a lot of people off guard.
- Wham Line: The obstetrician visits Anders after the birth of his daughter and tells him, "Maria never woke up."