Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2020: Week 41
The Bridge is a controversial Beauty and the Beast (TV) story by Cynthia Hatch. The fanwork was published in Kaleidoscope #1 in 1989 and is now available to read online on the The Classic Alliance of Beauty and the Beast archive.
The story presents the character of Vincent and the Tunnels Below as a hallucination that Catherine Chandler creates in order to cope with the trauma of an assault.
After hearing comments by Ron Koslow, one of the show's TPTB, the author wrote "The Bridge" as her way of dealing with "the necessity of accepting Koslow’s vision of doom." (from the 2005 Winterfest Interview with Cynthia Hatch (2005))
There were a lot of fan comments about "The Bridge" and many of them were quite negative. One fan was so upset about the story that she wrote (with Hatch's permission) responsefic called Once You are Real. In a 2008 Beauty and the Beast Fan Fiction & Art Retrospective, Jo Ann Baca called The Bridge "one of the most controversial stories in fandom".
In a 2005 interview conducted for the convention Winterfest, the author said about her story:
I received more passionate mail about “The Bridge” than anything else I wrote; I could open two letters in a row whose readers were totally convinced I had absolutely opposite motives in writing it. One would hate it for the same reasons the other loved it. Some would read it almost exactly the way I “meant” it, and others saw things that had never entered my head. It taught me a very interesting lesson – that a story belongs as much to the reader as to the writer; what they take from it may not be what you meant to give, but it’s valid all the same.