"First things first, cotton candy!" 

He looks at it with deep suspicion, tries to take a bite, gets a facefull of cotton. 

"This is so sweet it is actively painful," he says, still incredibly dubious. "It's like if you took sugar and wove it into fiberglass. I didn't know you could do that." 

Asher and Chen keep getting double-takes from people who aren't sure if that's actually someone they recognize or not. 

Asher, his face covered in cotton candy, waves at the people double-taking!

"Theme parks specialize in doing horrifying things to sugar."

"That's.....an interesting specialty." In addition to the whole thing tasting sharp, it turns out that when it melts in your mouth part of the way but not all the way the resulting sugar crystals are actually sharp. "This is going to make my mouth bleed if I keep eating it, does anyone want the rest?" 

Chen takes it from him and studiously ignores the double-takes unless they come from someone younger than ten. 

"Maybe it's better when you start having it when you're three and pure sugar that your parents will let you eat is the best thing in the world?"

Much to his great sadness, Asher realizes that they should probably try rides instead of getting Sasha's reaction to funnel cake. 

"I can't believe someone decided to design a theme park, wondered what their theme should be, decided it should be 'the life stories of real actual celebrities that live in our country,' and managed to get that past a marketing team," he says, in the line for Snow White's Scary Adventure. 

"There are fictional stories too! About spaceships and Indiana Jones and presidents!"

"That doesn't make this place less confusing but okay I guess!" 

"I'm just glad we haven't seen anyone in costume yet."

(They have, in passing, but from too far away to be able to tell much other than "Oh, the person playing Cinderella is doing photos," not close enough for it to be an actual interaction and not someone any of them know personally.) 

"It's so awful! My mom doesn't wear a giant floofy dress that you can't cook in and she's not a princess! She runs a restaurant! Why is she even here?"

"And my mom only sometimes wears dresses at all and doesn't wear pink and doesn't wear makeup unless it's a super formal occasion and even then she gets my sister to put it on for her, and she's a general in an army, not a princess. They're not playing my mom and they're not playing your mom, they're playing a completely fictional woman who happens to be named Mulan who comes from a completely fictional country that happens to be named China and a completely fictional princess of Maldonia who just so happens to be named Tiana, what a coincidence." 

"My mom's not a princess of Maldonia! Neither of us is anywhere in the line of succession! It's a courtesy title but my dad got disowned for being slutty."

"Then the completely fictional princess of Maldonia is even more fictional, and even less your mom!" 

A six-year-old girl who is dressed in a poofy green tulle dress and has five flower barettes in her hair stares at them. Chen waves and tries to act like he hadn't just said her idol doesn't exist. 

Asher is really unsure how to act with regards to hero-worshipping six-year-olds so he chooses not to engage!

"My mom is extremely cool," he says in a lower tone of voice, "but it's really irritating that instead of being like 'if you work hard and keep developing your skills you can overcome racism and run your own business' they're like 'if you marry someone with a courtesy title you too can have a courtesy title and a giant floofy useless dress that you can't run in.' Like, what kind of message is that for girls?"

"And they dress the completely fictional woman who happens to be named Mulan in a dress that my actual mom only wore when she was forced into it and found the experience uncomfortable and humiliating. I'm not saying it's good, I'm saying it's not personal." 

"I really hope they don't have anyone I'd know, can you imagine anything more awkward?" 

"They don't do villains because it would be disrespectful to the victims."

"....and it's respectful to have people dressed up as your public persona pretending to be you and doing meet and greets? Like, don't get me wrong, for a variety of reasons I am very glad I don't have to interact with someone doing a terrible Prince Hans impression, but I'm not sure they're thinking their logic all the way through." 

"I guess it's better than my mother having to do meet-and-greets!"

"Last time I was here I went to see the Queen Elsa impersonator and they took 'ice queen' waaaaaay too literally. She's not cold and standoffish! She used to help me sneak out of boring court events and build a snow fort in the middle of July."

"She sounds great." 

Into Snow White's Scary Adventure they go, but Sasha's not expecting much from a ride with a name like that. 

Unfortunately for Sasha, Snow White's Scary Adventure is legitimately terrifying. The Queen looks beautiful and then turns and she's suddenly a horrifying witch. Trees jump out at you. Creepy voices say things like "One taste of the poisoned apple and the victim's eyes will close forever in the Sleeping Death" and then cackle. The queen screams when she plunges to her death. 

The book says "and they all lived happily ever after!" at the end but it's pretty unconvincing.

The creepy voices are a little much — once you've heard a real serial murderer cackle loudly, a recorded animated version is just less of a big deal — but the jumpscares do get to him. 

"I am now even less convinced that they had any thought at all of what would or wouldn't be respectful to the victims," he says as they're walking out. He sounds casual, and carefully does not call attention to the fact that he held onto Chen's hand so hard it probably hurt for most of the ride.