Austin is not an immediately likeable person. He's a snob, he's condescending, he likes to roll his eyes and lightly scoff at the people who don't know or appreciate his brand of esoterica, or who ask dumb questions with no regard for what others might think of them. Because Austin really cares what other people think about him, and if he shows a mild level of disdain for people who don't know everything and have no shame about not knowing everything, then, logically, everyone should assume he knows a lot of things. He doesn't. Not even close. But he props up this perception by showing off the little scraps of knowledge he does have, or by correcting common misconceptions. He's the kid who clears his throat and says, "Well, actually," before stomping on an unimportant factoid someone decided to share with their friends. Then he adjusts his scarf and goes back to reading his Mojo magazine and acting like he's not paying attention to your conversation.

Austin isn't a bad guy, though. He's just annoying, and terrible at judging what a good personality is. Despite his rolling eyes and how snootily he breathes through his nose when he hears someone share their incredibly pedestrian opinions, he isn't mean. Austin doesn't want people to feel bad that they don't know what he's talking about, he just wants them to be awed by how much awesome stuff he knows. Isn't he special? Doesn't he belong right here at Gooseberry High for Geniuses and Impressively Pedigreed Millionaires? No, he's not starting a fight, please don't try to fight him, he's not much of a lover but he's way more of a lover than a fighter.

When Austin knows something, he really likes to show it off. The more he learns on the guitar, the more he wants to tote that acoustic around with him and start a singalong at the Grotto. Give him a venue, and you will find Austin in the middle of the crowd, strumming the opening bars to "Wonderwall" and declaring that the reason no one wants to sing with him is because he's unappreciated in his own time. He tends to overestimate how much people want to hear from him, especially his friends, and you all have to pay the price for that.

Austin is kind of a sweet kid most of the time, with a brooding undercurrent. He's a hormonal teenager who doesn't even have a particularly difficult or emotionally troubled background, so he finds reasons to brood on minor things. His French press broke, his favorite shirt got a grass stain, this is the worst week of his life. Aside from his many First World Problems, though, Austin's moodiness doesn't tend to spread to other people, he doesn't complain about his roommates and he won't tank your group project because he doesn't want to work with you. His problem is with machine of society, not the cogs in the machine.

Though he seems like he would be cocky and full of himself, Austin is very sensitive and gentle. He has a weak handshake and a quiet voice, and Up! made him cry more times than he knows. He's a shy dude, and it takes a bolder personality to really reach out and try to actively befriend him. And it might not super be worth it; if someone insults him or someone he loves, he's more likely to frown and retreat than put up his dukes. Maybe he'll write a song about it, though it almost definitely won't be very good.

Mother - Coral Ann Gudjonsson (née Carney) - Travel Services Representative for Payless Portkey Ports, a popular chain of budget portkey hubs that look to Muggles like a Payless Shoesource. Sometimes she has to work the cash register, but only when they’re really shorthanded.
Stepfather Mother's Husband - Gudjon Gudjonsson - He's some businessman from Iceland or whatever. Austin doesn't know him that well, the dude's only been married to his mom for two years, which is exactly how long he's been shipped off to school.
Ex-Stepbrother - Tanner Krauss (20) - the only person who really gets Austin. His dad and Austin's mom were only married for about four years, but it was at just the right point in both of their lives and for just long enough that Austin still considers Tanner his big brother.

Father - Austin Jacoby (AJ) McNamara, Sr. - no-maj, electrician. Whenever Austin tries to tell him about what he’s doing in school, AJ usually tries to relate it to some kind of wiring or circuitry issue that he’s actually familiar with so he can pretend he knows what the fuck is going on.
Stepmother - Jamie McNamara - She's been in the family for like twelve years, he guesses she's not so bad.
Half-sisters - Savannah (10) and Georgia (9) - they make Austin's life hell.

Cousin - Cameron Carney - Ebonhide senior. He's all right.

Austin McNamara, Jr., was born during a tornado, in the basement of his Grandma Jacoby’s old house, with his nineteen-year-old mother cursing him and the equally young and dumb Muggle boy she’d run off with. Once upon a time, for one brief, shining moment, Coral Ann Carney had been a star—or, well, close to a star. She’d been in a successful band at least, one of the “and the Carneys” from Casey and the Carneys, the girl group fronted by her little sister. But when little Casey got knocked up at sixteen and blew up the only taste of success Coral Ann would ever have, she refused to go back to Ol’ Hooker’s Holler. God kill her if she ever had to try and pay a grocery bill with second-rate livestock ever again.

So Coral Ann took off, down to Alabama, where she and AJ, a no-maj boy she’d met strumming his guitar in a coffee shop while they recorded a single in Muscle Shoals, hopped on over to Iuka, Mississippi, the nearest place to get married in a hurry. The next time she wrote home, she signed her name Coral Ann McNamara, and she said she was never coming back.

And wow, that felt like a great goddamn idea now that she was giving birth in this damp old basement, during a tornado in the damn winter, with her cranky old mother-in-law telling her this wasn’t nothin’—why, her other daughter-in-law’d given birth to twins during the storm of the century and didn’t complain near half as much. Coral Ann probably decided to file for divorce right there in that basement. She’d much rather haggle over how many chickens to pay the doctor than listen to this.

No matter what she decided in the throes of labor, Coral Ann and AJ made a good show of it. Or, well, they made a show of it. But it was never going to work out. Real life was hard, being an adult was hard, being a parent was really hard. Coral Ann hadn’t split from home so she could work all night at Walmart and argue with her mother-in-law over the right way to calm a colicky baby all day, and AJ worked too many jobs to be much more than a paycheck donor. By the time little Austin was two, those divorce papers were signed, sealed, and fucking delivered. Looking at his parents now, Austin has no idea how they ever managed to stay married for even that long.

Coral Ann begrudgingly stayed in Alabama, after her former mother-in-law threatened to rain down all sorts of hellfire if she dared take her baby out of state and away from his father. For the first several years of Austin’s life, he was shuffled back and forth across the Tennessee River, his parents jumping right on every little opportunity to stick it to each other.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t know he was supposed to be back by 6:00, I told you when dinner is.”

“Is that a new truck you’re driving? How the hell are you paying for a new truck when your last two child support checks bounced?”

Tensions eased some when Austin was four and they both got remarried. Within two months of each other. And Austin, the ringbearer at both weddings, had to put up with more hobbit jokes than he knew even existed. Shut up, so what if he was small and had curly hair and liked to run around barefoot and was tasked with caring for the ring(s), stop calling him Frodo! He doesn’t even know who that is!!

Austin’s new stepmother was a sweet, down home girl, who made sweet tea and cookies any time they had company, and didn’t even need magic. Within a year, she was pregnant with Savannah, and barely a year after that came Georgia.

His new stepfather thought he was the funniest motherfucker on the planet, playfully slapped Austin way too hard on the back, and always called him “kid.” There’s no way Austin ever would have preferred his mom’s house if it wasn’t for Tanner, his new big brother. Tanner was four years older than Austin, and while it was jarring going from being an only child to being the middle kid in what felt like a matter of seconds, Austin couldn’t have asked for a cooler big brother.

Austin followed Tanner around like a little shadow, he copied his posture and wore his hair the same way, he wanted the same clothes and he pretended to like basketball so they could like the same team!! And for all his eye-rolling and desire to protect his super cool nine-year-old rep, Tanner really liked having a little brother who reassured him that he was the best.

It was hard on both the boys when their parents got divorced a few years later. Austin was angry that he was losing his brother, the coolest person ever and keeping Savannah and Georgia, who were so not even remotely as cool to hang around with. All they ever did was make a mess in his room when he was at his mom’s, and take all his dad’s attention away from him. And he wasn’t even allowed to talk about magic in his dad’s house because the girls couldn’t even be trusted to keep a secret? This was the WORST.

This moodiness really set the stage for his tween years, which is when his newly divorced mom decided to move to Kentucky because her psychic or someone had told her she could start to heal from her divorces by healing old wounds. Austin was reluctantly dragged north so his mom could reconnect with her family, so he could be plopped in the middle of the extensive extended Carney family and told to be best friends with this one and that one.

Austin was NOT a fan of Kentucky from the start. Moving is never easy, but Austin was sure this was way worse? They were, like, ten miles from Olympus and yet somehow it was the exact opposite. They didn’t even have a record store. And despite his mom’s promises that he would see his old friends just as much and he would spend almost as much time with his dad (especially if she got that portkey job!!), it didn’t quite work out that way. How was he supposed to be able to keep up with his old friends when it was time to go to middle school and he didn’t follow them, he went to the same school his cousins went to in Georgia? He didn’t want this new family his mom had foisted him into, he wanted his old family, in Alabama.

Lookout Thaumatergical Academy was by all rights a perfectly good school, and Austin did just fine there, but a rigorous academy of magic didn’t exactly make it easy to tell his very Muggle dad, in his very Muggle home, with the Muggle family he wasn’t even allowed to discuss magic with, about his day at school. In an effort to bond over something the two of them shared, AJ bought him an acoustic guitar for his thirteenth birthday. There wasn’t some kind of… magic music instrument he’d rather play, is there?

Thirteen-year-old Austin with a guitar was a menace. He was constantly playing, and he was not very good. He thought it was cool to kind of learn how to play “Wonderwall” and then play it everywhere. The fact that he had cousins who had been playing the guitar since they were kids didn't make him feel like he was behind at all!! At least there weren't very many artists at LTA, and he was usually one of the better guitarists in the school—especially after his cousin went off to some fancy rich kids' art school in Utah, and Coral Ann really got it into her head that Austin should go. Austin thought it was timed suspiciously soon after her upcoming wedding to some Icelandic dude she met through work.

Austin balked at the idea on principle; yeah, sure, drag me away from home, then try to dump me on some dumb third party. But Cameron did seem to really be enjoying his arty school, and they had a music program. He knew his parents couldn't actually afford to send him to Gooseberry, though, so he stuck to rolling his eyes and telling his mom he didn't even want to go and he couldn't even get in if he did. Coral Ann convinced him to submit a recording of some of his guitar playing to an Olympus-area charity that sometimes provided educational scholarships to aspiring recording artists. The fact that he won has nothing to do with the fact that Casey Carney does a lot of work with the organization. Honest.

After the initial adjustment period, after the melodramatic homesickness, Austin settled into Gooseberry. He hung around the music room, he gradually, with very strong and patient guidance from Ms. Thrussell, got better at guitar, he stayed out of the way, he didn't get kidnapped by ghosts at the end of his sophomore year. He hasn't even embarrassed himself too much. God, even his Arty Rich Kid Ghost School experience is depressingly average.