The phrase “character:” started out on 4/30/2015 on the /b/ (Random) board of 4chan. One user would post “character:” in a seemingly random, popular thread, and then another user would right after post “This should be a meme. character:”. This leads to several posts of variations of the word character followed by a colon being posted as replies to this thread, and then being spammed until the thread died.
Someone then proceeded to say “>character: its the way of lafe” which ended up as a motto among the shitposters.
The source was from two samefags on the board who would bump the post with replies such as ‘charactor:’ instead of ‘character:’ because of it being a duplicate reply. This would then gain momentum and derail the thread, much like the spiderman meme.
Almost always would the original poster reply saying in some manor that they found the meme in some other thread and then name a random thread that is already dead. This quickly escalated overnight, being dropped in several different threads, making the owners to make this knowyourmeme, to ensure the story gets told correctly.
character: in action:
http://imgur.com/vPhy0eP