All my life, I've hated televised sports. I know… but hear me out. If you don't like something, that's just how it is, and pretending to like it just to fit in has never been my path. I feel the same way about alcohol, but let's stay on point.
When I was a kid, my older brothers lived and breathed football. We had one TV in the house, and every game lasted ten hours. And for this, I'm missing the Six Million Dollar Man? I thought. But each season brought a new hero — their favorite player. During games they'd recite details: which team he came from, where he grew up, and statistics that meant absolutely nothing to me.
But along the way, something happened.
As my brothers built the story around their favorite player, the game changed. It was still a sea of uniforms, huddles, and annoying commentary — but there was player X, my brother's guy — and suddenly the score by that athlete had meaning, because the backstory made the moment matter.
That's how I approached the characters in Airovale.
Each one needed a backstory, a raison d'être. And ideally, some complexity that made where they are now feel earned — because it wasn't always this way for them. They overcame obstacles, had failures, survived things.
But characters don't enter a scene with their past exposed. Some of them I've kept deliberately opaque. Why? Do they only exist to support the other characters? Maybe. Or perhaps I'm setting up a revelation that changes everything about them — and if that were told too soon, it would overshadow the storyline currently in motion. But don't you love it when you notice a detail that everyone else missed, and then later… you alone caught it?
Have you ever known someone for years, only to learn one thing that completely changed how you saw them? Suddenly, old conversations take on new meaning. Their quiet moments weren't empty after all — you just didn't have the context yet.
Stories work the same way. And you can see where this is going.
I'm not about to give away any of Airovale's Easter eggs. But it's fair to wonder: in Chapter One, why are we introduced to a character who has lived for hundreds of years — and then their presence goes quiet? Or another, who spent a lifetime in aeronautics, now reduced to watching zeppelin traffic from a window?
Are these background faces, just moving the story along?
Or are they hiding — waiting in plain sight — until their stories step into view?
Time will tell. Time tells all. And time… is the only treasure.