Would you goncharov your oc's? 🥺 I'd be hype to see it personally 👀
well you see the thing about peckie and j is that despite the immediate appearance of them being two different people or as j being irrevocably changed when he was revived (yeah, the immediate inclination is to bring up the "person who died and came back wrong trope" as an model of the situation) i think people who accept that wholeheartedly are actually just swallowing the narrative that people like osiris or even millie use to convince themselves that overruling peckie/j's autonomy is just or correct.
despite some memory gaps, j fully understands herself as peckie. the name change is not about not connecting to who he was before dying, but rather that fully remembering such an extreme trauma and knowing that her adopted parent caused it, she's questioning his wisdom on... everything? especially his choice to try to mold her into a tiny version of his estranged homoerotic best friend and name her after him.
the personality of peckie as a completely carefree overly kind boy-next-door is also very much a mask. we've seen the slow cracking in it with peckie letting herself angry and, most importantly, complicated around millie, and the general confusion she'd allowed herself to feel at the appearance of zeeb. i don't think there's any world where peckie doesn't lose faith in osiris. and i think every time she does, she becomes something like j. theyre the same guy.
j's character struggle is largely about his own identity versus how other people percieve him, force him, or even unintentionally influence him to be (such as, peckie refusing to identify as transmasc because of her experiences with abusive paternal figures and not wanting to turn into them, mainly her biological father who she ended up killing) and it definitely can't be said that there isn't a massive gulf in how peckie and j feel and act, but you have to bring all the context in!