Ankh-Morpork. I think it really nails (in hyperbolic Pratchett fashion) what it’s like to live in a city (or a society) with tons of other people all crammed together having to negotiate what life will be like.
“It was the usual Ankh-Morpork mob in times of crisis; half of them were here to complain, a quarter of them were here to watch the other half, and the remainder were here to rob, importune or sell hot dogs to the rest.”
I’m aaalmost finished with TSH - I have another 100 pages or so. I like them both but I think as similar as they are they’re about different things.
IWWV was about the obsession with art and the seductive draw of the aesthetic you mention, and as someone who did theatre a lot in school I thought it picked up on something real about actors and artists. You have to find yourself in the character, or the character in yourself, in order to portray them, and sometimes the lines blur. It’s an intense experience. I’d never seen that articulated before so I enjoyed that aspect.
I don’t think that’s the point TSH is trying to make. I actually think it’s a condemnation of elitism and ivory towers. The characters set up a bacchanal to experience life as the ancient Greeks did - but once it’s over, no consequences, no revelations, back to translation as usual. The characters are self-absorbed, disgusted by emotion, and disturbingly unbothered that they’ve managed to kill two people in six months, because the dead weren’t one of them. The characters of IWWV are closely tied, and a spark from one of them sets a fire in another. But in TSH, no one seems to care about each other all that much (except for maybe Richard, and the twins care about each other). Their problem isn’t an obsession with the aesthetic, but their isolation.