History YMMV / OrangeIsTheNewBlack

** Pennsatucky's teeth. Taken UpToEleven in season 2 when we [[spoiler: see the results of what Piper beating the crap out of her did. Most of her teeth are knocked out and it is not a pretty sight]].

** Piper showed these tendencies at times, helped by her CryCute moments. It comes to a head in season 4 where [[spoiler:Maria, Flores and the Hispanic inmates crudely brand a Swastika onto Piper's forearm while she screams in agony. Despite her jerkass tendencies, that scene, complete with her being ignored by the prison population while everyone is socializing together and dancing, is quite sad. And then Hapakuka turns on her for treating her horribly and sells her out to the Hispanic inmates]].

* {{Anvilicious}}: The show hits its main messages pretty hard over the course of six seasons, so there's no chance that you won't miss the point.

** Stella. Some viewers like her because she's portrayed by Ruby Rose, is extremely attractive, and helped to shake up the Piper and Alex dynamic. However other viewers find her character boring and pointless. It doesn't help that Stella is the only inmate who always has a full face of perfect makeup and neat hair, everyone else looks more 'realistically' tired and unkempt.

*** Take a closer look when Soso first wakes up; her haircut is horrendously uneven with jagged ends. Presumably Soso gets it fixed into it's eventual sleeker style off-screen by Sophia or Danita.

* FoeYay:

* FunnyAneurysmMoment: In one episode in season 2, Taystee tickles Poussey until she's out of breath saying "I can't breathe." Then comes season 4, where Poussey [[spoiler: struggles to choke out those same words as she's being suffocated by Bayley.]]

** Morello. For all her violent and obsessive behavior, she's obviously seriously mentally ill and is even aware of that. [[spoiler: It's also hard not to feel sympathy after her newborn son dies, shattering her psyche completely and rendering her near catatonic afterwards.]]

* SomeAnvilsNeedToBeDropped:
** Even though Litchfield is a playground compared to maximum-security prison (and this is without even including men's prisons, which are a nightmare), the show is clear that the prison system in general needs to be reformed. However, it's also clear that there's no easy answers to the problem; bureaucracy can put a damper on any attempted reforms, well-meaning staff can't fix the problems they see, the public essentially doesn't care about prisoners, and even if reforms were put in place, it's hard to balance rights with the punishment that prisoners are there for.
** Noted in Kerman's book and a running theme throughout the show: DrugsAreBad. No one in the series does drugs or is involved with the drug trade without some kind of consequence, to varying degrees of awfulness. It's the ones like Nicky who keep going back that you want to slap, but there is a lot of TruthInTelevision there, in that most addicts have a ''life long'' relationship with drugs.
** The biggest anvil that the show drops repeatedly in the last couple of seasons is that our society often sets up ex-cons for failure by hindering their ability to obtain lawful employment and housing and generally treating them like pariahs even though they've paid their debt to society. As the show demonstrates, ex-cons who don't have supportive family or friends can end up homeless or trapped in unsafe living situations, and many return to crime because they can't get a job that pays a living wage.
%%** Some of the show's message on the validity of different gender and sexual identities, and of different viewpoints in general, can be rather heavy-handed at times, but the fact that these are still issues after so many years means you can only be so subtle.
%%** Another fairly clear one comes out with quite a few of these: prison is no substitute for mental healthcare. Besides the obvious (see: Suzanne), Morello and Nicky are ''clearly'' more in need of psychiatric care than punishment, and quite a few others (particularly Lolly, whose story arc is ''brutal'') have more or less obvious psychological problems that simply go unaddressed.
%%** One of the main themes of season 4 is racism, and how pervasive and harmful it continues to be in society, with prison being no exception. The minority inmates (the Latin-American prisoners in particular) are singled out by the guards for frisking after Piper tips off Piscatella, and the white inmates are completely above suspicion despite the fact that Piper herself had been running a criminal enterprise for a while before the guards got there. In the midst of worrying about the prisoners forming gangs, they completely ignore the creation of a white supremacist gang which frequently agitates and provokes the other prisoners.
%%** The aftermath of Poussey's death show two sides of the controversy of Black Lives Matter as it shows on one hand the business execs who own the prison don't allow Caputo to call the police and leave the body there for hours all so they can come up with a good cover story to protect the prison's reputation. They also attempt to find a photo of her that make her look like a thug or threatening to make her death look justifiable. Then also the guards try to lie and say that she had a weapon and attacked first to protect the killer who is a fellow guard. On the other hand her death was an accident at the hands of Bayley who never got proper training and was just trying to restrain her while having to deal with Suzanne who is having a violent freak out. Then because of no one giving the inmates any information when their trying to cover it up the black inmates and most of the others assume it was cold blood murder and Taystee over hears that he is not getting punished for what he did she starts a riot with the other inmates which ends up in a hostage situation and one of the guards in the situation is one of the good ones. Basically the plot ends up showing how sometimes those highly publicized deaths of African-americans/black people were really accidents and how easy it is to paint everyone in a position of power as the villain and let your emotion get the best of you.
%%** Additionally in Season 3: Prisons cannot be run effectively and humanely on a for-profit basis.
%%** Along with a bit of StrawmanHasAPoint, Boo's speech to Pennsatucky in "Mother's Day."
%%--> You were a meth-head, white trash piece of shit. Your children, had they been born, would have been meth-head, white trash pieces of shit. By terminating your pregnancies, you spared society the scourge of your offspring. When you think about it, it's a blessing... What does a good mother do? A good mother does what's best for her children. And maybe what's best for your children was wipin' 'em out before they had to lead miserable fucking lives.

* CrazyAwesome: Season 4 will probably leave you with some newfound respect for Flores. Punished by a guard to stand on a cafeteria table, she withstands ''days'', pissing and shitting herself in the process, and only gets down when the whole prison gets a lockdown. And at the end of the season [[spoiler:she is the first one to protest against Piscatella's treatment of Red, by getting on that table again and inspiring every inmate in the room to follow her]].

* After Trump replaced Obama, a lot of people commented that orange was now quite literally the new black.

** In a flashback, Alex's ex-girlfriend Sylvia sends a "message" to Piper: [[spoiler: a burning bag, revealed to be a turd when Piper stomps on it to put it out]]. Piper later enlists new sister-in-law Neri to [[spoiler: send the same "message" to Polly after Piper finds out about [[YourCheatingHeart Polly's affair with Larry]]]].

** The "The prison system is broken and needs fixing, and convicts and ex-cons alike aren't treated fairly" message was obvious the first dozen times. By the time Alex gets a close-up when stating that "nobody cares about an ex-con," it's almost a redundant message. And then when the prison gets privatised, they ramp up the exact same message just with "privatised for-profit prisons are broken" though they add "and they're worse".

** [[spoiler: Poussey's death. Some commend the show for raising awareness of the brutality often faced by black women in prison, and thought it was done in a poignant and respectful manner used to expose this kind of injustice to millions of viewers. A similarly sized portion of the fandom hated it for what they felt was a cheap, unnecessary BuryYourGays plot twist that they thought the show was above using, and that if they were trying to appeal to the Black Lives Matter movement then they shouldn't have portrayed the guard as a guiltless victim when those groups insist that in real life police/guard brutality often stems from malicious, intentionally violent racism.]]

** In the penultimate episode of Season 4, [[spoiler:Poussey]] is fatally asphyxiated after a guard restrains her by kneeling on her torso for an excessive amount of time, which eventually leads to a prison riot. The whole sequence of events ends up uncomfortably foreshadowing the riots that would take place in several major American cities in 2020, following the death of George Floyd, an African-American resident of Minneapolis, after a police officer restrained him by kneeling on his neck for an excessive amount of time.

** Is Alex angry with Piper because Piper waffles and refuses to commit, or does she not approve of Piper's bisexuality and uses it against her? Both? On a larger scale, is Alex's relationship with Piper sincerely romantic and healthy, or are there some seriously abusive and toxic undertones? As of the second season, more fans are leaning towards the latter, though [[BrokenBase the fandom is mostly split on the issue]]. Averted in the next 2 seasons, as the relationship becomes more stable and human.

* WordOfGay: On the show's wiki, Brook Soso identified as pansexual.
* WordOfGod: In season 7, after Aleida snaps and begins strangling her daughter Daya to death and Daya's fate left uncertain, the show's writers confirmed that Daya does survive being strangled by her mother.

** In Kate Mulgrew's [[Series/StarTrekVoyager last big show]], the guy in charge of the kitchen was notoriously TheScrappy.

* HetIsEw:
** There are some DieForOurShip Piper/Alex fans who hate Larry, not for Larry's genuine flaws, but because they believe having the main pairing on the show be heterosexual is somehow homophobic.
** It also says something when there's a portion of the fanbase who believes that Piper is a "bad bisexual" because she chose Larry, a man, rather than an unhealthy relationship with Alex, who's an attractive woman.

** There are still some scuffles between Piper/Alex and Piper/Larry camps, the former believing the other side to be any variation of boring/disgusting/HetIsEw, the latter believing the other side to be a toxic and unhealthy relationship. And then [[TakeAThirdOption there's the final group who doesn't care about Piper's love life at all]].