Character Manifesto
While the fandom manifesto is a pitch, the ship manifesto is the impassioned rambles; the character manifesto tends to come in a slightly more professional form. These are the kind of pieces that may get mixed in with meta as a whole as they’ll usually be analysing the character through a particular lens.
This is when you sit down, hold out your blorbo, and just explain why you love them so much. You can take a more casual approach and just give the full rundown, but some people might want to break the character down scene by scene and explain how each scene affected their view of them and what they read into each action.
Who Are They
As always, we start by introducing who the character is and what role they play in the story. We’ve done several of these in the other segments, but you might want to go more in depth here about certain perceptions of the character. You might then want to highlight how your opinion differs from the masses (if it does) and set the reader up to know what you’re going to be saying about them. If your opinion is the same as the fandom consensus, you can still present it so that the readers know what you’re going to be saying, but you’ll just phrase it differently.
Example:
Cain is one of the main characters in Beyond the End. He joins the party after being sent by Lucifer to recover Hal, but he ends up defecting when offered a possibility of going to Heaven. Being a fallen angel, he has lingering feelings for Gabriel and desperately wants a chance to get their relationship back. Despite this, we see from his interactions with End that his philosophies have drifted far from those of Heaven.
Cain can be taken as the representative of Heaven, or rather, what Heaven should be. While he is now fallen, he fell with the true values that would be lost by the angels in Heaven under Michael’s rule.
What’s Their Story
Now that everyone knows where this is going, you can start breaking down their story. If you’re not sure where to start, it’s always a good idea to go chronologically and just break down each scene you find important (or gets misrepresented by fans) and analyse why you believe a certain thing about a character and what actions or mannerisms showed this.
You can also talk in the more abstract if that’s more fitting for what you want to discuss about the character. You can highlight meta stuff, what symbolism is associated with the character, what the creator has said in bonus material. Anything that has affected your opinion, you can bring up!