A Goodreads user
asked
Jason Pargin:
Salutations! I'd like to ask where you got your idea for Will Blackwater? (He's my favorite out of all your books!) Ps, I'm glad your books exist, thank you for creating them for people to enjoy!
Jason Pargin
Well the idea for Zoey came first, and the character of Will needed to be the perfect foil for Zoey. Not someone who is her exact opposite or her perfect enemy, but someone who is aligned with her but different in ways that create the most volatile mix. She would love to categorize him in some simple way (evil, privileged, whatever) but he tends to defy categorization at every turn, which drives her crazy. He is everything she is not and yet somehow she keeps seeing shades of herself in Will and shades of Will in her. And in that sense he represents the system as a whole, she would love to hate it and dismiss it and root for its downfall but she is frustrated by every effort to truly separate herself from it.
More Answered Questions
Erich w/ an h
asked
Jason Pargin:
Hey Jason! You've mentioned that your upcoming novel ("I'm Starting To Worry About This Black Box Of Doom") is a standalone. When coming into this novel, did you decide first that it was going to be a standalone, or did you have a plot that wasn't working within the JDatE or Zoey universes?
Ryan Dunne
asked
Jason Pargin:
Hi, I just started reading Zoey is Too Drunk for This Dystopia and so far I'm loving it, I just have to ask: At the very beginning, Zoey is eating Doritos from a heated bag. Is this based on real technology? How can I eat heated Doritos? If I put Doritos in the oven would they "taste like they'd been pulled fresh from a deep fryer"?
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