“You’re a protector, Bill. You’re so stupidly loyal to your friends that you do so many stupid things. You’re not a ‘monstrous beast’, you’re a big, dumb cat that wants to defend his loved ones.”
—Pina
Protector is a Beastars fanfic by BiconNigini15
and sirmeraki.
"In the midst of suffering from the segregation, his slowly decreasing good reputation, and the feelings brought on after nearly being killed by Riz, Pina finds himself more lost than he has ever been.
Bill's need for meat and his devotion to being a good club leader are at constant odds to each other, to the point that the Bengal tiger can no longer function without feeling like the entire world is weighing down on his shoulders.
Two animals, intertwined by a single, seemingly inconsequential event with a baby chick that spirals into a descent into madness, driven by remnants of each other's pasts coming back to haunt them.
No one ever said that interspecies love was easy."
Spoiler Warning: The story is set during the Revenge of the Love Failure Arc, the spoilers before this won't be marked.
Tropes
- Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Across the board. Multiple characters get Dark and Troubled Past backstories when there were none.
- In canon, there's no sign Pina has a particularly hard life, and even after being kidnapped by Riz, he's still pretty much fine. In this fic, aside from having a troubled home life due to a strained relationship with his father and finding the body of his mentally unstable mother after she killed herself when he was a child, he seems to have gotten PTSD from being kidnapped by Riz to a degree where he has a panic attack when kissing a female bear and running through the campus in shock until he could find Bill.
- Bill in the manga is generally a guy whose biggest worry is the desire to be taken seriously and to perform his duties as club leader when Louis leaves that position to him, in this story, he has a lot of emotional baggage. His home life is a mess as he has a religious fundamentalist father that is physically and emotionally abusive towards him, a brother who ran away from home when Bill let it escape to their father that he was in love with his male, herbivore roommate, a promise to said brother on the night that he ran away that he'd never fall for a man, leading to internalized homophobia when he realized he was attracted to a man. Furthermore, a lot of actions he got over in canon are now deeply haunting to him, specifically the fact he almost ate a baby chick if Pina hadn't stopped him and that he ate an old man's finger at the start of the story.
- Agata's backstory is relatively simple, he had too much pressure in his life from being a lion and ended up having a rebellious face that led him to become a member of the Shishigumi. In this story, we learn that through his interactions with his younger brother Hikaru that his mother was extremely abusive and that he ran away to get away from her.
- Els, who didn't have any dark secret revealed in the manga, is revealed to have serious anger management issues to the point of having medication for it. When they visit Pina, she admits to Bill that she was transferred to Cherryton after she attacked a bully of hers with a baseball bat. The increased stress when Bill leaves her to take care of the Drama Club pushes her further over the edge.
- Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In the manga, Gouhin and Bill have no idea the other exists, here, Bill got porn magazines from Gouhin, and even gets some help from him when he starts getting feelings for a herbivore. Bill also becomes Gouhin's patient when he goes on a meat bender and drinks the bloodbone drug.
- Amateur Sleuth: Pina decides to try to investigate the drug dealers at the school by himself, with Bill as his bodyguard, when they realize that calling the police on them might make the school even more segregated and end the drama club.
- An Arm and a Leg: Pina's horn gets cut out by Keiko when he teases him with the fact that he knows what his gang is up to, and gets kidnapped and thrown in the Back-Alley Market for it. When he is rescued, he spends the next time as a Broken Bird in a hospital bed.
- Anti-Villain: Kariya, the bear member of the gang. He did not want to torture Pina, and calls out Bill's Disproportionate Retribution on his gang. He also points out that unlike Bill, they're poor carnivores and don't have much in the way of choice in what to do to survive.
- Big Bad: Keiko, a black panther that goes also by Daisuke, is the most active and vindictive member of the ring distributing the bloodbone drug. While he doesn't start as the leader, he becomes one after Bill kills the previous leader.
- Broken Bird: Pina, post chapter 23. Being kidnapped and having one horn removed left him in a terrible state where the only thing keeping him away from suicide (which he did try to commit in the Back-Alley Market), is Bill being there for him. His nurse describes looking at him as looking at someone letting himself sink in a tarpit, and only trying not to drown when the tiger is there for him.
- Call-Back: While breaking and entering in Gon's office, Bill throws himself and grabs Pina to hide him from an incoming security guard. This, the pose they end up with, and Bill feeling a sudden urge to try to eat Pina makes it a Meaningful Echo scene to Legosi capturing Haru in the source material
- The Confidant: Aoba becomes this to Bill more and more over the course of the story. When Bill becomes one of Gouhin's patients, the first person he calls is Aoba to inform him that he's in a relationship with Pina and that he used bloodbone.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Kariya calls Bill's Roaring Rampage of Revenge this. Most of the people he hurt aren't involved in cutting Pina's horn, and while they were doing bad things, Bill's violent outburst on all of them killing six of them is not an equal retribution.Kariya: Don't you dare talk about justice. What you did was revenge.
- Driven to Suicide: After Pina has his horn cut off and is thrown in the market, he walks a little before finally giving up completely and letting a fox eat him, thankfully, he is saved by Bill just in time.
- Gayngster:
- In this story, Agata and Dolph are a couple and still members of the Yakuza group of the Shishigumi.
- Keiko and Yuri, two members of the bloodbone distribution ring, are also in a relationship.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Melon is mentioned a few times, and that he's behind the absolute chaos going on in the Back-Alley Market.
- Lower-Deck Episode: The entire fic is one to the main series. Legosi, Haru, and Louis, the central characters of the story are only mentioned and are not at all related to the events of the fic, and it ostensibly gives focus to secondary characters, especially Bill, Pina, and San.
- Official Couple: Bill and Pina. Multiple secondary couples are mentioned later in the story, including Juno/Louis, Dom/Kai, and Tao/Kibi.
- Parental Neglect: The reason why Pina has an estranged relationship with his father. Following his mother's suicide, his father dove headfirst into work and spent less and less time with Pina, who was still grieving, and by the time he hit high school, he resented his father. While he is now trying to make amends, Pina rebukes him.
- Pride: A big component of Pina's character is his pride. He outright states that without his pride, he has nothing, and losing his horn does a number on his self-esteem that he is still recovering from. He recognizes his tendency to annoy people comes from a necessity to feel like a bigger guy than
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Bill goes into one after Pina gets his horn cut off. He proceeds to fight and kill his way through the hideout where they did it together with San, destroying most of the operation and even killing the leader of the group, however, he ends up not finding the man who took Pina's horn.
- Self-Harm: Pina has taken up this as part of his PTSD symptoms. He has developed a tendency to pick on and re-open the wounds Riz gave him when he was kidnapped by him when he is in a really bad place.
- What the Hell, Hero?: One of the members of the bloodbone ring, a bear named Kariya, calls Bill out after his Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Keiko alone hurt his boyfriend, and the other members of the ring had nothing to do with it, despite this, Bill's revenge killed six people only tangentially involved in that and severely hurt more than that. Bill acknowledges that, to some degree, that was messed up, but that they are still criminals who hurt other herbivores.
