History YMMV / EclipsePhase

* FridgeHorror: Lots of this.
* FutureSocietyPresentValues: The game offers a rather unusual case of this trope. There's an in-universe "faction" (if they may be called so) collectively known as Anons. Yes, the ImageBoards kind -- or, more accurately, a future incarnation of [=4chan=]'s anons. The game depicts them in a mildly favourable light, as whistleblowers and vigilante social gadflies striking against stuffy establishment figures. Had this depiction been developed in the era of "memeing for Trump", one figures we'd see them presented as wannabe {{Black Shirt}}s for the Jovians or even worse.

* MarySueTopia: Anarchist habitats, thought thankfully the authors caught on by Rimward and tried add some depth.
** The entire setting is something of an exploration of this trope: this is a world where being professional-level good at something is a matter of a few minutes on Google and a software download, and in many places you can get a body that verges on physical godhood just by finding someone with a spare and asking nicely. Mostly this ends in a bit of deconstruction, but sometimes the post-scarcity angle gets played straight and everyone is brilliant at everything all the time.

** The Ultimates have gotten this, a debate which has gotten [[InternetBackdraft particularly heated]] ever since 2e decided to remove them from the list of playable factions. Are they outright fascists who want to wipe out or enslave all other transhumans, or are these "overhumanists" just extremists while "real ultimates" are warrior-philosophers dedicated to endless self-improvement?

* AlternativeCharacterInterpretation: The Jovian Republic is commonly given this treatment. Tyrannical assholes who [[PuttingOnTheReich Put On The Reich]] to keep their people down and kill anyone who doesn't agree to their creed, or the defenders of humanity and the only voice of reason in a world of nanotechnology and genetic engineering gone mad?
** Consider this: Your house has just burned down. While standing in front of the ruins, the ideas of various members of your family mostly range from "Everyone should have access to as much fire as they want - they'll surely not do anything immoral and/or stupid with it" over "Hey, we could build a new house by selling fire to those who can afford it!" to "I think the problem was that we didn't have ''enough'' fire!".
** The Jovian rank-and-file is entirely sincere. The Jovian leadership, on the other hand, are a bunch of hypocrites who are all 'Fire for me but not for thee!', while pretending to be 'Only we can protect you from fire!'. Which means [=DMs=] have to do more than a bit of rewriting to make the Jovians a genuine 'Hey, they do some disturbing stuff but they still have a point!' faction. Which is annoying, because they're supposed to be useable as that faction right out of the box, but the secretly transhuman leadership in canon gets in the way of that.
** Improved as of ''Firewall'', which goes into detail about the Jovian standards for taking transhuman tech out of the box. They have just about everything the other factions do, but only employ them when a sufficient threat appears. In addition, the Jovian mindset regarding using them is very much one of sacrificing one's own humanity for the greater good and survival of the only human society to have weathered the Fall. One Jovian Firewall agent explains how they see transhumanity as essentially being an unstoppable alien race who won't stop playing with fire.
** Amusingly, the "fire" argument is [[spoiler: mostly a RedHerring. While the [=TITANs=] did massive damage during the Fall, the Fall itself was mostly a result of humans finally destroying themselves due to human nature, pushing each other to the brink of war and armed with technology that could cause tremendous destruction. In this case, everyone's arguing over fire when in fact everyone who lives in the house is a raging pyromaniac.]]
** There are hints and implications that the Jovian Republican isn't a third-world luddite hellhole - it's still hi-tech, but are fairly clunky and unwieldy without the use of nano-fabricators or nanotech. As a result, Jovian tech is implied to be underestimated and/or ''very'' rugged, durable, and practical, which makes them stand out in a world filled with tech that might not last outside of a well-defended hab.

** The entire setting is something of an exploration of this trope: this is a world where being professional-level good at something is a matter of a few minutes on google and a software download, and in many places you can get a body that verges on physical godhood just by finding someone with a spare and asking nicely. Mostly this ends in a bit of deconstruction, but sometimes the post-scarcity angle gets played straight and everyone is brilliant at everything all the time.

* StrawmanHasAPoint: Even with their fanatical opposition to modernization, the pre-generated characters from the Jovian faction are portrayed sympathetically - they're not going to rely on the tech that destroyed Earth unless it's the last resort, they're not going to be like everyone else in the 'verse and pretend what comes back after resleeving is still them, they're not going to take what they feel is the easy route in anything by loading up on programs that screw with your mind instead of hard training, and they're ''certainly'' not luddites scared of fire - not using someone's tech isn't the same as not ''knowing''.

* ParanoiaFuel: When dealing with [=TITAN=] tech, there's no way of knowing that they aren't ten steps ahead and you aren't already doomed. One particularly enlightening story is of a Firewall investigation into a morph company that was blasted out of existence with unusual ferocity during the Fall. It is quickly discovered that the company's morphs just happened to use an abnormal standard which rendered TITAN nanoplagues ineffective, explaining why they were targeted. However, it is then discovered that only the earliest nanoplagues were subject to this flaw, and that for most of the Fall the morphs would have provided no help. This leaves only the explanation that the [=TITANs=] specifically destroyed almost all traces of the very existence of a specific morph standard that they easily subverted anyway in order to deny transhumanity any possible insight into their already exponentially superior technology just in case anything could ever have come from it. This all happened at a rapid pace during the Fall. Firewall, with all of their resources, took a ''decade'' to figure out that this even happened, and that resistant morph is still lost to the ashes. That's what fighting a super-intelligence is like.