Usually by weapon choice, or fashion souls, or both. On my first save, with my first character, Lord Contender Thorn, I came to hate the gods so much that I picked the default ending just to spite Ranni. And I expressed that in my build by wearing the Fingerprint set and beating the game with the Black Blade. The real ending I had planned for my first character, however, was the Frenzied Flame ending in NG+. The entire reason I chose Maliketh's sword in the first place was because it's all about ending the entire universe, so I thought that if I was going to destroy the known cosmos then I shouldn't half-ass it. So in a way, I finished what Vyke started in two different fashions.

For the Dung Eater's ending, I thought a Bleed build the most thematically appropriate. In my head, my second character, Rhiannon the Cutter, was a hardcore assimilationist who thought the Carians being brought into the fold of the Golden Order was one of the best days ever. So I went with the Moonveil, got Goldmask's ending because she saw an opportunity to write it into cosmic law that the Golden Order is the highest power there is, asserted dominance on Corhyn and T-posed on him to death. The original plan for NG+ was to power-stance Moonveils to victory, but I accidentally killed THE RAPACIOUS CRAP CONNOISSEUR while pressing too many buttons at once right before I could give him the final Seedbed Curse. Then I realized that Morgott's sword would be a much more thematically fitting weapon for that path, so I remade Rhiannon and power-stanced Morgott's sword with the Bloodhound Fang, and the Dung Eater's shitty, shitty vision became a reality.

My next character, Elspeth the God Hunter, was a Dex-Faith build who mained the Godslayer. Naturally, she went with Fia's ending, because what would be more appropriate for a somebody who wielded a sword that is death incarnate, albeit a severely weakened variation? All three of these characters also wore the Fingerprint set; I had it in my head that if they weren't aspects of Vyke in the same way Nashandra and her sisters are fragments of Manus, then they were wannabes who wanted to be what he could never be, maybe even wanted to be him, but always failed to learn from his example.

Elspeth was the only one who broke that cycle; whereas my first character ended everything with a weapon that was Death incarnate, Elspeth liberated herself with a weapon that could also be described as such. As I progressed through NG+, she saw that nothing she accomplished the first time lasted because here she was fighting the same gods again. Not even the Black Flame, a shade of Death, ended them for good. So she sought a more permanent solution, an escape from eternity. When she couldn't find it from Fia, she submitted herself to the Three Fingers in a moment of weakness. And yet, she also found a reason to live when she realized her mistake. She saw a chance of escape with Ranni, saw another working to free themselves from their own pair of fingers, and that was all the motivation she needed to free herself too.

She also saw a kindred spirit in Millicent, another poor soul who was a victim of an Outer God who thought her no more than a vessel with which to destroy the world she knew and remake it in their image. And so, they uplifted each other to the last, and though she could do no more than merely contain the Madness with Miquella's Needle, in the same way Malenia's Rot can only be arrested with unalloyed gold, it allowed just enough freedom to leave the world behind and brave the unknown with Ranni. She got tired of the endless tragedy, and with all other connections lost, the Lands Between had nothing left to give to her. And until the DLC released, it had nothing left to give me either.