#Look Marian didn't need a man but also good for the girl that gets introduced to us as the ugly sister

[the-busy-ghost]

Love that Wilkie Collins apparently kept getting letters from guys who were convinced that Marian Halcombe must have been based on a real woman, begging him to introduce them because they were desperate to marry her

[shipcestuous]

Lately I've been thinking back to Guy of Gisborne, the Sheriff of Nottingham's right hand man, and Isabella, from the 2006 BBC series Robin Hood. They were played respectively by Richard Armitage and Laura Pulver, both of them equally gorgeous and a pretty good choice to play siblings imo, and they had a really messed-up familial history AND a pretty messed-up history on the show, too.

See, Isabella was an original character introduced in the third and last season, alongside Kate, a feisty peasant girl who joined the Merry Men (or just "the outlaws"/"the gang" as the series called them) to make up for the lack of female characters after the end of the second season, when the main heroes and villains travelled to the Holy Land to either save or kill King Richard and the show let go of both Marian and Djaq, the traditional Saracen member of the Merry Men who in this story also happened to be a woman. Djaq got to choose to stay back with her people and live a peaceful life with her lover Will Scarlett instead of going back to England to fight, but Marian was caught in a twisted love triangle with Robin Hood and Guy, where her true love was Robin but she also felt some affection for Guy because she thought he was capable of becoming a better man and knew how much mistreatment and abuse he got from the Sheriff any time he failed to carry out his plans succesfully or catch Robin, while Guy himself was desperately in love with Marian and was torn between his own power-hungry, violent ways and wanting to do things to please so she would love him back... she tricked him into doing things to her and the Merry Men's advantage but then started to encourage him to defy the Sheriff, he threatened her father and burnt her house down so she'd be stuck under his "protection" in the castle of Nottingham but then started actually looking out for her and her safety. Until the season two finale, when things escalated to the point she essentially screamed in his face that she would only ever love Robin and he never really had a chance with her, and he flew into a rage at that and killed her.

So yeah, Guy started out in a VERY dark place in season three, torn and guilty over what he'd done to Marian and with any hope of redemption seemingly shattered. And then Isabella came in. She was introduced claiming to be a servant who'd taken on the identity of her mistress as a decoy to help her flee from some bad men and needing to get to Nottingham to be reunited with her, and obviously Robin offered to help her... but then the truth came out during an unexpected encounter with Guy, and painted him in an even bleaker light: she was his sister and the men she was running from were sent by her abusive husband, a nobleman Guy had sold her to when she was just thirteen. You'd think Isabella had travelled to Nottingham to meet her brother and ask him to rescue her, but no, she was just looking for a place close enough to flee to with only the small bag of coins she'd managed to save for herself. She didn't even know about Guy's role in Nottingham or the part he played in oppressing the people there, initially addressing him as her "sweet brother" upon meeting him again, but of course she was in for a rude awakening. Later, she tried asking him why he hadn't kept her with him, and his only explanation was that her husband, Sir Thornton, had paid him well to have her.

At first, it seemed their dynamic would lead to cementing Guy's tole as an out-and-out villain and and insert Isabella as a new ally of the Merry Men who knew him well and could offer some insight on him, sort of like a new Marian: the writers even played with making her a new love interest for Robin, though there was also a love triangle going on with Kate. But there was also a persistent distrust for her among the Merry Men, and even somewhat in Robin's mind, though he was allegedly more hang-up about her lying on their first meeting (when she didn't know him and wasn't sure he'd be kinder or more reliable than the other men in her life!), and all of it because of their perception of her as Gisborne's Sister. Like she would eventually turn out to be the same as him because they were family.

The tensions between Isabella and Guy and Isabella and Robin and his men worsened, no thanks to Guy alternating between "stay away from her, Hood, she knows where her loyalties are!" and "nah, I don't really care about her, I even got her a noble husband and she was so ungrateful about it" and Robin leading her on only to then hit her with "oh, sorry, I'm actually not over Marian yet, and besides it wouldn't really work between us, would it?", until, finally, she allied herself with Prince John (who had at one point already allied himself with Guy) against both. This culminated in her being appointed as the new Sheriff (the previous one having seemingly died by Guy's own hand) and arresting and preparing to execute her brother, but being narrowly stopped by the arrival of her husband. Thornton stripped her of her new role to take it for himself and resumed verbally and physically abusing her, his mistreatment of her escalating up to a scene with very uncomfortable implications in Isabella's bedroom, where she finally killed him... only for Robin to burst in right after, motivated partly by his still lingering attraction to her but also by the fact that he'd previously faced off against Thornton himself and told him to steer clear of Nottingham. Robin interpreted Isabella's very obvious act of self-defense as cold-blooded murder and proof that she really was as bad as he and especially his friends had feared, and completely wrote her off as a love interest, friend, and ally.

During the same episode as Guy's arrest and Thornton's death, a parallel storyline was also going on with a one-shot character, a young noblewoman named Meg. Her father had brought her to Isabella due to her refusal to be sold off in an arranged marriage, clearly expecting Isabella to act like any other Sheriff would have and force into obeying. But Isabella, of course, saw herself in her and decided to help her instead... only for Meg to be arrested anyway when Thornton seized power and she tried to help Isabella in return. In jail, she met Guy, and while she was initially hostile to him, she eventually saw the good side that had remained in him all that time and fell for him. To the point of trying to help him escape after Isabella, having killed Thornton, freed her again. Isabella, of course, didn't take kindly to the one person she still felt was on her side going behind her back out of sympathy for the brother that was the origin of all her troubles and had pretty much told her he didn't regret anything he'd done to her, and the episode ended with Guy narrowly escaping a double execution with a dying Meg in his arms, in an explicit parallel to Marian's death that finally moved Guy's conscience enough to kickstart his true redemption arc.

After that, the siblings's roles as hero with a dark past and not-entirely-honest ways and villain were suddenly reversed: Guy joined Robin's fight for justice, even if initially at least in part just to get revenge on his sister, and Isabella became the increasingly paranoid and ruthless villain. Guy's alliance with the good guys was also aided by another long-lost relative suddenly showing up: Robin's father, thought to have died many years before, who revealed to Guy and Robin to truth about an incident that happened during their childhood (and that was probably thought up/retconned into the story by the writers only in the third season...) that caused the death of Guy's parents, his having to flee his destroyed childhood home with only Isabella by his side, and his hatred for Robin. Oh, and also the fact that Robin's father had actually had a child with Guy's mother and brought him to another town when he was just a baby, thus giving them both a half-brother in common whom they had to find and inform that he wasn't actually an orphan and making them family, which apparently meant they had a solid reason to work together.

At the end of the series, in the build-up to the last battle between the heroes and the villains, Guy captured Isabella as a hostage and he gave her poison so she could kill herself with it. But Isabella escaped and, in a last fight also including Robin and the return of the original Sheriff, she wounded him with a blade soaked in the very same poison... shortly before dying herself in the destruction of the castle of Nottingham.

Now, I know this might not look all that shippable unless you're into particularly twisted shipping dynamics. But Guy actually did have some moments here and there, despite his words, when he did seem to feel remorse over selling Isabella to Thornton and shock over what his decision had led to. And there was also one early moment where Prince John asked him to kill her (for hanging out with Robin and protecting him, I think) and he couldn't go through with it so he told her to kill Robin (which she wouldn't either, at least not at that point) and if she did then he'd make up some lie to relay to the Prince to make it look like she'd been on their side all along. And before she came to the conclusion that their relationship was too far gone for her to forgive him, Isabella, too, genuinely seemed to still feel affection for her brother and just wanted Guy to apologize and show her that he understood what he'd done to her. Even his giving her poison in the series finale could be interpreted as a form of mercy, and after she finally managed to actually kill him, she looked like she felt regret, or at least sadness, over it. Which is why I think that, despite all the hatred and rage that were undoubtedly there on both sides, those two did still love each other on some level they just didn't want to admit to.

I've also very briefly touched on the flashback episode about their childhood and Robin's, mostly because it was Robin- and Guy-centric episode and idt young Isabella even had one line in it. But the important thing about that (... at least for this post. I could talk about how people who shipped Robin/Guy and poly!Robin/Marian/Guy had a pseudo-incestuous "oh, those two actually have a half-brother in common!" randomly dropped on them, lol) is, on the one hand, that it somewhat ironically established family as a good reason to leave differences and grudges asides, even between people with a very difficult history together, in the show's values (why couldn't we have the same with the Gisborne siblings, then??), and on the other hand, that it gave some perspective to what had really happened in Guy and Isabella's past. They each were the only living family the other had, having lost their parents as children in the fire that also cost them their house, and when they lost the place they lived in, they'd had no choice but to wander the streets together until they found something better.

I don't want to justify any of Guy's actions, especially not when the show itself essentially decided to undermine all of Isabella's trauma and suffering as soon as it put her in the "villain" box and finally followed through with her brother's redemption, but I can absolutely him imagine him as a lost, scared (and guilty... this ask is already long enough as it is without explaining that whole subplot, but at the time, it appeared to him that their parent's death was at least partly his own fault) kid, with no land or money to his name, thinking that selling the little sister who'd suddenly fallen into his care and that he might have thought himself unable (or even undeserving) to take care of to a rich nobleman would fix both their problems... perhaps not realizing who he was really dealing with, or having suspicions yet dismissing them because if things went well both he and Isabella would be safer than on their own and not have to worry about food and other needs. I can also see him repressing any doubts he might have had after or forcing himself to ignore any news he might have heard, especially after he became the sort of man who'd be content working for the Sheriff of Nottingham: he was never all bad, but he was always good at denial and trying to shield himself from the consequences of his actions to cope with whatever he'd done, which would be expected for a man who was too bad for the heroes, too good for the villains, and eternally undecided on which path he should take.

Looking back, I wish Guy had managed to face his failures, evil deeds, and trumatic past sooner then he did, enough to tell Isabella "yes, I did hurt you, and even though I thought it was for the best at the time, that doesn't make it okay... but I still love you, whether you forgive me or not." I wish Marian, if she really did have to die when her actress left the series and couldn't just (idk) also stay back in the Holy Land to help Saracen families devasted by the Crusades, didn't die in a way that would of course make Guy a worse person and make him double on down on his worst traits, so he'd be more open to self-reflection and find his redemption sooner. And I wish Isabella herself had not felt so cornered, so out of allies and options and alone and angry, that she could only choose to be the one person on her own side and take her revenge on everyone else, but especially Guy, and that she hadn't stopped demanding a real answer from him or repressed the more positive feelings she still had towards him.

It's like that kind of tragedy that's simultaneously avoidable, because the characters would just need to TALK HONESTLY to each other, but also unavoidable because there's so much complex, twisted pain between them that you'd probably need to somehow dump a modern day therapist on their doorstep to get them to do even ONE right step in that direction.

... And of course, adding incest to all those layers that are already there would only make things more interesting to me. Again, just let Marian live in the Holy Land and bring her back in the finale to show her reunited with Robin, they were obviously the endgame couple from the first episode of season one and even in canon they find each other again in the afterlife after Robin dies heroically in his last stand! Then have the Gisborne siblings get over the two them and ride off in the sunset together to start again from scratch in a place where no one knows them! It's clearly the best option, lol.

I haven't watched this series, but I've thought about watching it seriously several times. I know I would ship Guy and Isabella A LOT, but I also know I would only be in for pain, so that's certainly holding me back.

Despite how twisted and toxic their relationship is, they've come up before. It seems like anyone incest-minded who see these two find them worth mentioning.

I really enjoyed reading your description of their storyline. I don't even need to watch the show now, lol. I got to follow their whole story. I deeply crave the alternate version you described.

Incest on top of Guy and Isabella's already complicated dynamic would be fire.