Basic Trope: A work set in the distant future doesn't have any of transhumanism or genetic engineering.
- Straight: Bob lives in the year 2546, and genetic engineering is never mentioned throughout.
- Exaggerated: Bob lives in 944007, and humans are exactly the same as they are today.
- Downplayed:
- Alice tells Bob about her recent Anti-Wrinkling Implants in her forehead, and Bob comes across Sally, who has a bionic arm, but that's about all the transhumans mentioned.
- Creating new transhumans has been outlawed but society refuses to murder innocent existing ones, thus they were grandfathered in. They depend upon high tech to reproduce so they live forever but are unable to replenish population without major changes to the political status quo to relegalize transhuman creation.
- Genetic therapy is permitted as treatment for life-threatening conditions. Genetic enhancements, however, are forbidden.
- Justified:
- Transhumanism was outlawed before genetic engineering could really take off (for cultural or ethical reasons), and it's strictly enforced.
- Genetic engineering of humans has already been tried, but since that genetically-engineered "super-race" tried to genocide unmodified "normals" back in the 2090s, it's been outlawed ever since.
- Inverted:
- Ugg live in 3916 BC. Ugg go to Mod Shop. Ugg get new skull gun. Ugg get new leopard clothes for wife.
- Not modifying humans is outright banned as horrific child abuse. Anyone undoing theirs is considered mentally unwell and engaging in Self-Harm.
- Subverted:
- For the first half of the game, no character has any body modifications of any kind. In the second half, however, a new mechanic regarding genetic engineering shows it's face.
- Everyone appears externally normal humans until the messily murdered group of civilians regenerate from a dried bloody smear after feeding them by pouring high calorie drinks on the messy remains.
- Double Subverted: For the first half of the game, it looks like transhumanism is never mentioned. Then you get a mission regarding a scientist trying to create a neural implant that'll connect all humans at once. It doesn't work.
- Parodied: Zack travels 1000 years into the future to see how transhumanism has affected us. When he notices that humans are still the same and asks them why, everyone scratches their heads and asks him what "transhumanism" is.
- Zig Zagged: At first this trope is at play, but then it's revealed that all the humans in the work used to be aliens, but then they modified themselves to the point they were human. The work takes place over multiple centuries, and the appearance of the aliens reverts from human to original and stays like that for a bit, then back to humans over time, and over and over again.
- Averted: The work contains transhumanist themes.
- Enforced: People can better identify with characters when they're not able to sprout wings from their buttocks and aren't measuring morality in terms of how much bacon it produces.
- Lampshaded: "It's 2617, why can't I have wings yet!?!?"
- Invoked: God makes genetic engineering impossible for the lulz.
- Exploited: Nate has a dire phobia of transhumanism, and knows that there's never any transhumanism in the distant future, so he builds a time machine and goes there.
- Defied: Humans work hard towards transhumanist technologies and succeed.
- Discussed: "In my opinion the augmentation ban was a mistake born from taking hack sci-fi writers too seriously and literally."
- Conversed: "Why does futuristic sci-fi never have The Singularity or stuff like that?"
- Deconstructed:
- As the human population keeps growing, and so do the needs of them, technology is not allowed to keep up with it and civilization collapses in on itself.
- Humanity finds themselves doomed to a relative Modern Stasis - either other factions who defy the ban or aliens who never had one.
- Humanity's lack of enhancements limits their ability to adapt to new and changing environments.
- Reconstructed: Humans don't ever become transhumans, and it's for the better.
- Played For Laughs: For Black Comedy: Humans refuse transhumanism citing worries about inequality, enslaving people to specializing, and commoditizing human life, and besides it is unethical. When their society has a caste system, and they are at a Slave Market because they beat their previous Sex Slave to death for their amusement. Buying a new one using embezzled funds.
- Played For Drama:
- Humanity is at risk of dying out due to fundamentalism in opposing modification after The Plague leaves all survivors with severe genetic diseases.
- Bob is genetically enhanced, but because it's forbidden, he struggles to keep it a secret.
- Implied: A time traveler comes to the future and notes there aren't any cyborgs around. This earns him a very dirty look from a local.
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