Understanding Characters, Social Accounts, and Relationships

Three tabs for three different jobs

Open Characters & Relationships in your project workspace. The manager separates your cast, their online identities, and their connections into three tabs.

Tab	What it manages	When to use it
Character Roster	A character's name, display name, avatar, and story details	Create or update a person in your AU
Character Social Accounts	Platform accounts belonging to each character	Prepare an Instagram identity, an X account, or another supported social identity
Relationship Dynamics	Connections between two characters	Record friendships, rivalries, family connections, or other story relationships

For example, Maya is one character. Her Instagram account maya.pages is an online identity belonging to her. Her friendship with Nina is a relationship between two characters.

You do not need to complete all three tabs before writing a scene.

Character Roster: build your cast

Start with Character Roster. Enter the required Character Name, then add a display name, avatar, and any useful story details.

The existing character form remains available, including its optional primary account shortcut. You can leave the account fields empty and manage accounts later in Character Social Accounts.

Character-based chats use the character's identity and avatar. Creating a separate social account is unnecessary for those chats.

Character Social Accounts: manage online identities

This tab groups accounts under their characters. Use the Character filter to focus on one person, or keep All characters selected to review the cast.

Choose Add Social Account under the appropriate character to create an account. Open an existing account card to edit it.

Account settings include the platform, username, display name, account visibility, status, verification, follower counts, bio, and an optional avatar override. Leave the display name or avatar override empty to use the character's identity for those fields.

One character can have multiple accounts on the same platform, including public and private identities. There is no need to duplicate the character to represent another account.

Visibility and status have different purposes:

• Public / Private describes the fictional account's visibility. It does not change access to your AU Studio project.
• Active / Inactive / Suspended describes the account's status. Account resolution uses active accounts.
• Show verified badge controls fictional verification. Private identities display a lock instead of a verification badge.

These accounts are story assets. You do not need real platform passwords or authentication.

Which scenes need social accounts?

Scene or platform use	Identity to prepare
iMessage, WhatsApp, LINE, or Messenger chat	Character name and avatar
TikTok Chat	Character name and avatar
Instagram DM	An active Instagram account for each participating character
Instagram posts and stories	Instagram account
X Post	X account
Inbox using X Chat	X account
TikTok Video Post or a TikTok account profile	TikTok account

X Chat is available as an Inbox option; an X one-to-one conversation is not currently offered in the chat platform choices.

Facebook is hidden from new-account creation. Existing Facebook accounts remain available for management; this does not add a Facebook scene option.

For scenes that require accounts, AU Studio resolves the compatible identity from the character. A single active matching account can resolve automatically, and an existing saved scene identity remains significant. Multiple matching accounts are not randomly selected: the existing resolution rules still apply. Adding an account does not guarantee that an unresolved multi-account scene will resolve automatically.

If a scene reports a missing account, follow its account-creation action, create the required platform account for that character, and return to the scene. Check the scene after returning before continuing.

Relationship Dynamics: describe your story connections

Create at least two characters before adding a relationship. In Relationship Dynamics, choose Character A, a Relationship Type, and Character B. You can add a Custom Label and Description / Notes.

For example, connect Maya and Nina as Friend, with the custom label Childhood friends. Your notes can explain that they reconnect after several years apart.

Use Edit to update a link or the delete control to remove it. Removing a relationship leaves both characters in the project. View Map opens the relationship map in a separate tab.

A relationship does not create social accounts or write a conversation for you. It records how characters are connected and is optional for scene creation.

Choose the shortest path to your scene

For a WhatsApp conversation, create your characters and move to Add Scene. For Instagram DM, create the characters, add their Instagram accounts, then create the scene. Add relationship details whenever they help you plan the story.

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