#valentine is very much a counterpart to anna fang in the first book

[fandomsandhappiness]

not to add a whole essay to your otherwise excellent post or anything but this was a bit much for the tags. i reread predator's gold recently and although i never liked the love triangle thing it was actually a lot better than i remembered. once you look at it thematically it all starts clicking into place

predator's gold begins with tom (despite all he's seen in the last book) still defending the ideology of municipal darwinism, even when it gets him into trouble. he can't go back to london, and wouldn't if he could, but that's not to say he doesn't miss the city and his time in the museum (which is a major factor behind his decision to seek out its ruins in book four)

in the previous book hester was paralleled with katherine. tom fixated on katherine because she was his ideal adventure heroine, being beautiful and valentine's daughter, and then he got stuck with hester instead, who was very much not beautiful but was—as it turned out—valentine's daughter also. tom was constantly comparing hester to katherine, and hester constantly came up short in his estimation. but in predator's gold, tom's love interests are hester and freya—who, like katherine, starts to take on all these additional qualities in his mind

for tom, freya symbolises a return to city life, and in a way to his own comfortable life before he left london (which i think he idealises slightly, but that's tom for you). tom isn't just interested in her but also in what a relationship with her would offer him. whereas hester represents moving forward into the unknown, a life on the bird roads. (ironically, freya's big goal is to set her whole city chasing an even bigger unknown, but i suspect tom sees that as a suitably historian-y adventure that could be enjoyed with a set of sturdy deckplates under him)

but where it gets REALLY interesting is that sathya and caul are in the same position. do they move on? or do they refuse to let go of the past?

with sathya, obviously, this plays out with anna fang. she works very hard to resurrect her, pins all her hopes on her, and refuses to listen to the stalker when she insists that she's not anna. so she loses a hand

caul's situation is easily the harshest of the three. the abusive nature of his upbringing was calculated to instil him with both a fear and a love of uncle. letting go is much harder for him than it is for the other two. but in the end, he turns his back on uncle and the lost boys. of the three, he gets the happiest ending (in predator's gold. later books have their ups and downs)

tom, of course, kisses freya, and sets in motion a chain of events that end in him getting shot. idiot (affectionate)

so on the whole, i'm a lot more tolerant of the love triangle than i once was

I never re-read predator's gold because I don't like the teenage drama but I'm doing it now and it's worth it for hester being the character of all time