NGINX config for Wordpress in sub-directory, served on root - Ubuntu 18.04

I’ve messed around with these settings for a solid 2 hours now, but just can’t seem to get it right. I want my site to display at gemfruit.com, and the wordpress directory is at /var/www/gemfruit.com/html/wordpress. I was able to install Wordpress correctly, and later the settings under general to tell Wordpress where the directory / site are, but something about my server block is wrong.

gemfruit.com (403) gemfruit.com/wordpress (works, but should be at gemfruit.com) gemfruit.com/wordpress/wp-admin/ (works - though in my attempts, there was a point where this would not work without being followed by index.php) gemfruit.com/?p=1 (403)

I followed quite a few guides to get set up (also have cert bot for SSL), but ultimately these two:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-nginx-mysql-php-lemp-stack-ubuntu-18-04

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-wordpress-with-lemp-on-ubuntu-18-04

The only place I ventured off guide, was to give Wordpress its own directory. I’ve tried to make proper sense of the server block rules, but despite my best attempts, I’m still missing something.

Lastly - what’s the difference between /index.php$is_args$args; and /index.php?$args; ? The 18.04 guide uses the former markup, where as the older 16.04 uses the latter.

server {
        root /var/www/gemfruit.com/html;
        index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
        server_name gemfruit.com www.gemfruit.com;

        location / {
                #try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
                try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
        }

        #location /wordpress {
        #       index index.php index.html index.htm;
        #       try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
        #}

        location ~ \.php$ {
                include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
                fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
        }

        location ~ /\.ht {
                deny all;
        }

        location = /favicon.ico { log_not_found off; access_log off; }
        location = /robots.txt { log_not_found off; access_log off; allow all; }
        location ~* \.(css|gif|ico|jpeg|jpg|js|png)$ {
                expires max;
                log_not_found off;
        }

}