The person everyone overlooked turns out to be the most extraordinary person in the room — they simply stopped performing for audiences who never deserved it. The quiet woman who does not need to be loud because she sees everything.
Performing love with someone you might actually love carries a particular danger. You can play at tenderness for an audience — manufacture the looks, the small touches, the way you lean slightly toward each other in conversation.
A nostalgia specific to a certain kind of historical romance — big, dramatic, emotionally excessive in the best possible way. The hero who is genuinely terrible at first and has a genuine arc.
Believing in someone the rest of the world has already written off — not naively, not without full knowledge of the evidence against them, but with the specific conviction that the verdict does not account for everything — is a kind of love that costs something from the start.