How do strings work in C

There are multiple ways to create a string in C:

I have a lot of problems with this:

According to my understanding of [[Pointers]], string1 is a pointer and we're passing it to [[printf]] which expects actual values not references.

if we accept the fact that printf expects a pointer, than how does it handle string2 (not a pointer) just fine

I understand that char* is designed to point to the first character of a string which means it effectively points to the entire string, but what if I actually wanted to point to a single character

this doesn't work, because we are assigning a value to a pointer:

so why does this work: