What If Eddie Diaz Is Basically Marcus Holroyd in a Different Universe?
I did it with Buck, so now it’s Eddie’s turn
A while ago I said Buck Buckley and Benedict Bridgerton are basically built from the same emotional blueprint.
So naturally, I had to ask myself:
Who is Eddie’s Bridgertonverse counterpart?
And the answer, to me, is not Anthony Bridgerton.
But Marcus Holroyd from Just Like Heaven.
Not in every single trait, no.
But in the way that actually matters?
Absolutely.
The one part of Eddie that isn’t Marcus
Let me start with the only real exception.
Eddie has that occasional sharpness — that dry, slightly prickly edge — that actually reminds me more of Anthony Bridgerton.
Not because he’s cruel.
Not because he’s cold.
Just because sometimes he has that same clipped, thorny way of reacting when he feels boxed in.
That part? Anthony.
But the deeper emotional structure?
That’s Marcus all over.
They both build family outside of blood
Marcus grows up without a real family in the emotional sense, and Daniel Smythe-Smith’s family becomes his.
That’s where he belongs.
That’s where he roots.
Eddie does the same thing.
No, he isn’t an orphan. But emotionally? His real home is not his parents.
It’s the 118.
That’s his family.
That’s his emotional center.
That’s where he becomes himself.
So already, both men are built around the same idea:
family is not just where you come from — it’s where you are finally held.
Both men are ruled by duty
Marcus is a caretaker by instinct.
When Daniel leaves, Marcus steps in. He protects Honoria. He takes responsibility. He becomes the steady one because someone has to.
That is so Eddie-coded it hurts.
Because Eddie is exactly the same.
Protector.
Custodian.
The man who will put himself second if it means someone he loves stays safe.
Christopher, obviously, is the clearest example. But it goes beyond Chris. It’s who Eddie is in every room he walks into.
And Marcus is built from that exact same material.
Neither of them is shy. They’re reserved.
This is important.
Eddie is not shy. Marcus isn’t either.
But they are both reserved.
They do not seek out shallow social interaction just because it’s available.
They do not flirt for sport.
They do not perform interest when they feel none.
They do not chase noise to avoid silence.
If they’re not genuinely engaged, they’d rather stay home.
That is both of them.
Marcus is bored by balls and polite conversation.
Eddie is bored by superficiality in any form.
If he doesn’t care, he’s not pretending.
This is the key: barricaded men do not get unlocked by strangers
And this is where the theory really begins.
Marcus is not looking for love.
He has made peace with the life he has. He is not searching. He is not yearning. He is not waiting for some grand emotional revelation.
And after Kim?
Neither is Eddie.
That’s the point.
Kim didn’t just end badly. It reinforced every reason Eddie has to close himself off and say:
I’m fine alone. My son comes first. Stability matters more than desire. I can live like this.
Marcus arrives at that through Regency bachelor detachment.
Eddie arrives at it through trauma.
But once again: different cause, same internal structure.
And characters like that do not get changed by some random new woman entering the narrative and instantly becoming important.
It doesn’t work like that.
That’s why Marcus falls for Honoria
Marcus does not fall for an outsider.
He falls for Honoria.
Someone he has known forever.
Someone he has barely really looked at.
Someone who has always been there — just outside his emotional focus.
And that’s exactly why it works.
Because love doesn’t arrive as lightning. It arrives through proximity, rediscovery, and the horror of realizing that someone familiar suddenly doesn’t feel familiar at all.
That is what changes Marcus.
Not novelty.
Recognition.
And that’s why I keep coming back to May
Because Eddie and May already have the one thing Marcus and Honoria had:
history without intimacy.
They know each other.
They’ve shared space.
They’ve talked.
They’ve had moments that went beyond surface-level interaction.
Not romance.
Not even necessarily friendship in its fullest form.
But definitely more than nothing.
That dispatch year matters.
You cannot write scenes where she opens up to him, cries in front of him, lets him comfort her, lets him advise her, and then act like they should forever function as near-strangers.
That’s not how people work.
And that’s why May makes sense in this theory.
Not because they were secretly romantic all along.
But because the material already exists for a Marcus/Honoria-style reintroduction.
What’s missing is the trigger
Marcus and Honoria need the season to force them together.
That’s the trigger.
That’s what takes them from “I’ve always known you” to “why am I suddenly seeing you like this?”
Eddie and May need the same kind of trigger.
The auction could have been one. It wasn’t.
Fine.
That doesn’t mean another won’t come.
Because once you have two people with preexisting familiarity, emotional potential, and a mutual history that never fully disappeared, all it takes is one sustained reason to be around each other again.
Then the rest writes itself.
Not instantly.
Not dramatically.
Slowly.
Which is exactly how this kind of arc has to work.
Because for men like Marcus and Eddie, emotion comes before desire
This is another reason the comparison works so well.
Marcus does not begin with physical attraction as the main engine.
He begins with rediscovery.
With conversation.
With noticing.
With realizing that being around her feels good in a way he had never stopped to name before.
Only after that does desire become unavoidable.
Eddie is exactly that kind of character.
He would not start with “she’s hot.”
He would start with:
“Why do I keep wanting to talk to her?”
“Why does this feel easy?”
“Why do I care what she thinks?”
“Why does her being here suddenly matter?”
That is an Eddie arc.
And that is a Marcus arc.
The age-gap panic actually proves less than people think
One of the first objections people jump to is age.
But once I actually looked at the canon ages, the gap was nowhere near as dramatic as people act like it is.
So the real obstacle wouldn’t even be scandal in some huge external sense.
It would be internal.
Very Marcus internal.
“I’ve known you too long.”
“I never thought of you that way.”
“What is wrong with me that I am starting to now?”
That’s the kind of emotional panic Marcus goes through.
And honestly? That would fit Eddie much more than some big melodramatic taboo narrative.
Which is why Ravi/May does not worry me at all
Because if the writers were trying to build Ravi and May as some major long-term emotional anchor, they would not have burned through the beats that fast.
Auction.
Dinner.
Sex.
Then near-total irrelevance.
That’s not endgame writing.
That’s placeholder writing.
At best, it’s a temporary connection. At worst, it’s narrative filler.
And if it’s filler, then all it really does is keep the board moving until the actual trigger arrives.
Final take
Eddie Diaz, like Marcus Holroyd, is a man defined by restraint, duty, emotional reserve, and the kind of closure that only looks stable from the outside.
And men like that do not fall because someone brand new walks in and sweeps them off their feet.
They fall because someone they thought they already understood becomes impossible to ignore.
That is what happened to Marcus.
And if Eddie ever gets the right romantic arc?
That is exactly how it will happen to him too.
