YMMV / One Life to Live

• Awesome Music: The 1984-1991 theme, named after the title of the show and performed by Peabo Bryson.
• Better On DVD YouTube: Follow only the storylines you're interested in, just the teens, everyone except the teens...all that's missing is an Abridged Series.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Todd Manning. One fan even held up a sign once saying "Rape me Todd".
  • Tess gets this as well. It doesn't matter that she's tried to kill the people that her split personality Jessica is close to, including Jessica's boyfriend and her mother, Vicki, and tries to make Jessica's life miserable. She's the real victim.
• Ensemble Dark Horse & Misaimed Fandom: Roger Howarth. Originally supposed to play a short term character designed solely for Marty's Gang Rape storyline (for context, his previous role was as preppy Kent Winslow on fellow ABC soap Loving), his acting skills were quickly praised by fans, to the point that, to the writers and actor's dismay, the character of Todd received a lot of popularity from (girl)fans who liked him in spite of (or because of) of his crimes. One fan even held up a sign that said "Rape Me Todd!". The writers gave in and Todd was softened and given a Freudian Excuse.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Max and Luna are starting to make love when she tells him to wait. His response? "If you stop me now, I will murder you and no jury will ever convict me." (he's frustrated because it's the umpteenth time she's done this) This is meant to be funny, but when you consider that women have in fact been killed for refusing a man's advances, it really isn't. It gets even worse just a few months later when Luna tells Max she's a rape survivor and he realizes that this is the reason she told him to stop. It's a miracle his comment didn't result in her having flashbacks.
• Ho Yay: Jack's obsession with Shane
• Moe: Starr Manning, at the very least as a child.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • That's Castle as one of the many—but arguably best and best-known—actors to play Joey Buchanan.
  • Rainn Wilson's very first screen credit was a small 1997 role as a psychopathic criminal/standup comedian.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: The Todd/Blair vs Todd/Tea shipping wars were legendary during the late 90s, with Todd/Rebecca fans occasionally checking in.
  • In the mid-2000s, there was the John/Natalie vs John/Evangeline shipping wars.
• Squick: the "rapemance" of 2008, in which amnesiac Marty fell in love with her rapist, Victor.
  • Incidentally, this storyline was proposed years earlier, and led to Roger Howarth leaving the show, because he had a SERIOUS problem with it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Matthew's paralysis. Even throughout the ever-escalating Ass Pulls that the storyline took starting in the summer of '09, there was the sense that the actors were capable of, and there was support in the writers' room for, telling a sensitive, realistic story of a teen and his family coming to grips with a permanent disability; but that Executive Meddling was forcing it in the direction of wringing out as much Wangst as possible as the storyline shambled towards the inevitable miracle cure.
  • Revisited in the home stretch of the ABC run, in a classic cliffhanger, Matthew flatlined on a Friday, was okay on Monday.
• Wangst: John McBain.