Okay So I fixed it after 4 hours of hair pulling.
I noticed, if I added 'localhost' to IE's "compatible view" mode, and refreshed the page, it looked exactly like what I was seeing from the remote server. So that made it very clear I was going into compatible mode remotely for some reason but not locally.
adding this tag straight under the html header fixed it up:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge" />