In Hebrew, the names mean "From the Ground" (or "man") and "living"/"life," respectively.
Variations such as Andrew/Andreas and Zoe, which are the Greek equivalents of the Hebrew names Adam and Eve, also count. Note that the names "Adam" and "Eve" and all their variations are in common use and just because a character is named so does not mean they necessarily fit the trope.
See also Adam and Eve Plot and Name of Cain. May be the Original Man.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- 18if has its Big Bad named Eve, who apparently is the dreamer of reality itself that must not be woken up at any cost. It turns out that she's actually that Eve, and she dreamed up Haruto's world out of resentment for the treatment she got in her own and grief that she doomed all humans after her to suffer. One of the main characters is named Lily, and she takes pleasure in learning about the people the Dream World took in. She turns out to have a double-whammy in her name: Not only is she the Literal Split Personality of Eve (thus making her name a biblical reference in hindsight), She's also the Anthropomorphic Personification of her youth and innocence before she ate the Fruit (invoking the "purity" angle of lillies).
- The last human on Earth in the Japan Animator Expo short Kanón is named Adam. Fitting his namesake, he eventually makes an Eve and a Lilith, and their story mostly plays out the same. The short ends up not being about them (as the girls exit the plot rather early), but about the feud between him and another male he created named Ego.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion:
- The Seeds of Life, more commonly (and erroneously, including In-Universe) known as the First and Second "Angels", are named "Adam" and "Lilith" respectively. Additionally, the Evangelion mechs are usually referred to with the shortened designation "Eva", a variation of "Eve". As the majority of known Eva were apparently cloned from Adam, this invokes the myth of Eve's creation from Adam's rib.
- In Jewish legend, Lilith was the first woman, created from the same earth as Adam. Lilith refused to be subservient to Adam and chose to depart the Garden to find her own path. The Seeds of Life had a similar existence, apparently created by the same power and sent to create life but refusing or unable to do so together. Whenever a planet is colonized by Adam and Lilith, either one of them will have to voluntarily shut itself down to prevent catastrophic destruction of the planet. However, the history then veers away from myth when it is revealed that Adam was the one who entered dormancy on Earth, and thus, all humans (also known as the "Lilin") originated from Lilith.
- One Piece: The Treasure Tree Adam has the most durable wood in the world and the Sunlight Tree Eve is an enormous mangrove tree that canalizes sunlight to the sea floor. It's speculated in-universe that the two of them are related, but this is not confirmed.
- SK8 the Infinity: The main villain Ainosuke Shindo calls himself ADAM and obsesses over Langa, seeing him as his EVE.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: The Big Bad of the series is a woman named Eve but was actually brainwashed by a mysterious card known as G.O.D. Her long-lost lover is appropriately named Adam.
Comic Books
- Captain Atom (Allen Adam & Nathaniel Adam) and Nightshade (Eve Eden) have names that make it clear they were originally designed as each other's love interests.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): Dr. Robotnik creates E.V.E., a shape-shifting mass of what basically amounted to nanomachines. Her name stands for Exceptionally Versatile Evolvanoid. Several years later, Dr. Eggman comes up with a mostly unrelated artificial intelligence called A.D.A.M.
- One Trolls de Troy story features a mook named Adam Ster, pretty much so the narration can state that "Adam was the first man to join the trollhunter's recruitment drive".
- Wanted has Adam-One, the oldest man on Earth (a Captain Ersatz of Vandal Savage, the ancient, immortal caveman from The DCU). His name is obviously meant to imply that he's the first human being and possibly the Biblical Adam himself.
- Wonder Woman (1942): Steve Trevor's secretary Eve Brown's name acts as an amusing bit of symbolism, as she ends up being the first of many after she becomes the first and only recurring character to be Killed Off for Real during the book's run in The Golden Age of Comic Books.
Fan Works
- Danganronpa, but Everyone Is Okay: Sonia Nevermind and Gundham Tanaka's future daughter is named Eve. Like Adam's Eve, this Eve also has some connection to God (or Atua), as she has a heavenly glow to her, can walk on water, and can bring painted butterflies to life (a parallel of Jesus bringing clay birds to life).
- A History of Magic: The first Puella Magi was named Eve, who wished for humanity to rule forever. Yes, she's that Eve. She also becomes the first witch, Lilith, after Adam casts her out for humiliating him.
- Rocketship Voyager: In Captain Janeway's backstory, a Spacefleet captain goes mad and tries to establish a human colony on Mercury using his female crew members as a Baby Factory. This causes a mutiny which is kicked off by a crewmember called Eve throwing a red globe of firefighting powder
at an officer called Adams.
Films — Animation
- Igor: Igor tells the monster he created to be "evil", which she mistakes as "Eva", which thus becomes her name.
- The Son of Bigfoot: The main character who's the son of a human woman and bigfoot is named Adam and the girl who has a crush on him is named Eva.
- WALL•E: After centuries of solitude, WALL•E meets a fellow robot; she is named EVE. The symbolism is doubled when we realize that she represents a new start on Earth for the human race. Also, she looks vaguely like a dove and returns to an "ark" of survivors carrying a plant. Word of God even notes the ironic symbolism: she brings the plant that will redeem mankind instead of ruining it.
Films — Live-Action
- The 6th Day: The title alludes to the day God created man and the protagonist is Adam Gibson, He gets cloned along the way, so life is created out of a piece of him.
- All About Eve: On the one hand, her name makes Eve Harrington sound like a wholesome, generic every-girl. More significantly, it gives the movie a Double Entendre title: all about the character/all about women.
- Avatar: Eywa, the deity of Pandora, sounds and is written very similar to Eva.
- Blast from the Past: The lead character goes out into the world after living his entire life in a bomb shelter. He is named Adam, and his love interest is named Eve. The Mother even notes, "I hope that's not sacrilegious." The Father reassures her, "No, it's perfect."
- The Dragnet TV movie made just before the 1967 revival involves a dating service where everyone starts out anonymously. All the men are 'Adam' and all the women are 'Eve' at the gatherings.
- EX_MACHINA: The gynoid that the main character is hired to give the Turing Test to is named Eva. She is the first truly functional AI made by a scientist.
- The Lady Eve plays (For Laughs) on the idea of Eve as a seductress, even including the image of an apple with a bite taken out of it on the movie poster.
- The protagonist of The Last Spark Of Hope (aka W nich cala nadzieja) is called Eva, and she believes she may be the last person on Earth after a nuclear war. She has a robot companion, but it's called Arthur not Adam, as it can't exactly repopulate the human race with her.
- My Favorite Wife: Ellen Arden and Stephen Burkett return to civilization after spending seven years together on a Deserted Island after a shipwreck. They both insist that nothing happened between them...but the fact that they have nicknamed each other "Adam" and "Eve" may raise some suspicions.
- Only Lovers Left Alive: There's longtime vampire couple Adam and Eve (plus Eve's sister Ava). These names may be aliases.
- Please Turn Over: Dr. Manners' Naked Revolt counterpart is Dr. Adam Gay, who at one point treats a patient called "Eve".
Literature
- "And Not Quite Human": The apparent leader of the forty-four vampires that are the sole survivors of the Arcturians' assault on Earth carries the name Adam Manning. With Earth no longer offering them sustenance, the vampires travel to the Arcturians' planet for a fresh start with the added perk that unlike humans the Arcturians do not know how to deal with vampires.
- Adam Chase, the handsome military historian Lori meets in Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil, could be said to be "from the ground" a la the Hebrew meaning of his first name: he's the grandson of Claire Byrd, the ghost of Wyrdhurst Hall.
- East of Eden: Cal and Aron are expies of Cain and Abel. Their father's name is Adam. Adam's brother was named Charles. Adam's wife was named Cathy. Notice a pattern?
- Emergence: After a bioweapon attack wipes out most of humanity, the first person Candy finds alive is a boy roughly her age (eleven) who tells her, "Think of me as 'Adam.'" She thinks that's old, but relents a bit after discovering the Embarrassing First Name his parents hung on him — "Melville Winchester Higginbotham Grosvenor Penobscot-Jones IV.
- Empire from the Ashes: The Achuultani appear to be a One-Gender Race that reproduces via cloning. The evil A.I. running their society wants it that way. Later in the series, Imperial geneticists crack the Achuultani version of DNA and clone a female Achuultani. She doesn't get an Achuultani name; instead, she's named Eve.
- Eva: The protagonist's full name is Eva Adamson; the plot was originally about a girl who time-travels to meet various "first women", and was familiar with apes. While the final plot of the book is very different, remnants of this symbolism remain. Early on, Eva watches a cartoon called Adam and Eve, which is very loosely based on the book of Genesis. Just like how Eve was the first woman and lived in a natural paradise, Eva is the first human-in-chimpanzee, and her ultimate purpose is to guide a troop of chimpanzees in one of the last wild places on Earth.
- Eve and Adam: Eve designs Adam, the first artificial human.
- Eve of Man: Eve is the first girl born in 50 years. The title also uses the word "eve" in the sense of "the start of".
- Frankenstein: The monster, a new kind of lifeform created by Dr. Frankenstein, tells his maker "I ought to be thy Adam."
- The Future Eve: Hadaly is a highly advanced robot given a human identity. She is the titular Future Eve.
- Good Omens: The Antichrist is named Adam by his human father. The idea is that the boy is neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically evil, just intrinsically human. Note that this was the last suggestion of the Satanic nun who was advising him on names; she went through Damian, Wormwood, Cain, and who knows how many other Names to Run Away from Really Fast that he rejected. The child a more competent nun thought was the Antichrist ends up being named Warlock.
- His Dark Materials: It turns out that the name of Lyra's true destiny is Eve, which is symbolic of her purpose to bring the second Fall of Man. Naturally, the Church find this intolerable, which is why she's number one on their hit list.
Live-Action TV
- The main characters of Dutch TV series A'dam - E.V.A are named Adam and Eva (the Dutch equivalent of Eve). The title's seemingly odd punctuation is because of the words' double meaning: A'dam is short for Amsterdam where the story is set, while E.V.A. is an acronym for "en vele anderen", meaning "and many others".
- Angel: Eve is Angel's liaison to the demonic Senior Partners. Since her admitted job is to tempt the cast into evil, she lampshades her own name while mockingly offering Angel an apple.
- Being Human (UK): At the end of the first episode of Series 4, we find out that George and Nina's baby — the first child born of two werewolves — is named Eve.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Big Bad of the fourth season is named Adam. Aside from his connection to Frankenstein (being an undead mixture of human and demon parts), he ultimately plans to make more beings like himself.
- Dark (2017) has Adam, Jonas' older self, and Eva, the alternate Martha's older self. Neither bears much resemblance to the biblical characters, but a painting in Erit Lux's headquarters shows the original couple. Both names were assumed, perhaps inspired by the painting. Those two characters' plot function as the source of so much evil ties into the series' use of Gnostic imagery. Furthermore, similarly to how the biblical characters were the ancestors of all of humanity, Adam and Eva's child is the ancestor of much of the family tree in both worlds (as well as Adam and Eva's own ancestor). Their influence on the loop also means that even the characters who aren't their direct descendants exist because to them.
- Eve (2015): The title character is named Eve. The finale of the first season shows her polar opposite Adam being activated.
- In Heroes, Adam Monroe is (at least) 400 years old, and his superpower is immortality with a Healing Factor. In the comics, it's implied that he's the ancestor of all the people in the show with powers.
- Highlander: The oldest known Immortal (Methos) was disguised as a Watcher named Adam.
- Kyle XY has Adam Baylin, the member of the first generation created by a breeding program to create super-smart people. His female counterpart's name, however, is Sarah. The organization was trying with everyone they had the chance to name, though. Their do-over after Adam was called Noah (this was Kyle's original name); when that got screwed up, they sent in Jessie to turn things back in their favor.
- Used In-Universe once in NCIS when an autopsy is performed on an assortment of bones and decaying material found in a crypt. After Palmer identifies the pelvic bones of a male and a female, Ducky tells him to put "Adam" on one table and "Eve" on the other.
- Northern Exposure: When Dr. Fleischman discovers that Adam's wife is called Eve, he cannot resist taunting them about this. When their first baby gets born, he asks them whether they called him Cain or Abel.
- Defied in Penny Dreadful, where Frankenstein briefly considers naming his creation "Adam", then discards the idea in favor of letting the creature choose its own name randomly from a book. This is a reference to the fact that Mary Shelley would call the creature from Frankenstein "Adam".
- The first broadcast episode of QI was titled "Adam". This is retroactive, however — the first series episodes had no titles until the second series established the Idiosyncratic Episode Naming.
- Robin Hood (BBC): One of the Sheriff's spies is called Eve, who tries to seduce one of the outlaws. In a subversion of expectations, she ends up performing a High-Heel–Face Turn out of love for him.
- Rose Red: Ellen Rimbauer gives birth to her first child, a boy, and writes in her diary: "I shall name him Adam, for he is the first." He actually ends up being her only son; her only other child is a girl named April, after her birth month.
- Supernatural has both an Adam and an Eve, though the two have nothing to do with each other. Sam and Dean have a half-brother named Adam Milligan, who is introduced in season 4 and later becomes a makeshift vessel for the Archangel Michael in season 5. Season 6 gives us the Mother of All Monsters, who calls herself Eve. Given that she claims to be even older than angels, it's more than likely just an ironic alias rather than the actual Eve.
Music
- A woman named Eve Moonlit kick-starts the events of the Evillious Chronicles series in Moonlit Bear by stealing two apples (actually babies) from a bear (their mother). Then in Tale of Moonlit Abandonment, she and her husband, Adam Moonlit, are murdered by her now 14-year-old adoptive children when she attempts to get rid of them by leaving them in the forest, and her death releases the Seven Sins to the world.
- "Fire Meet Gasoline" by Sia:
I'm Eve, I wanna try
Take a bite - "Next Level" by aespa mentions a character on their lore called Naevis, which sounds a lot like Eve. Aespa is known for it futuristic and cybernetic themes.
- From the debut Self-Titled Album by Scandroid (a side project of Klayton of Celldweller fame), Atom 7k the "sentient robotic firstborn" and E.E.V. (who is "next to [Atom's] side" when he's "calculating [robots'] survival") are both mentioned in "Pro-bots & Robophobes". Other song is named "Atom & E.E.V.", which sounds just like "Adam and Eve".
- The Vocaloid song "Test Tube Princess" by Machigherita is about a destructive creature created in a laboratory named Eve.
Radio
- Dimension X: In "Beyond Infinity", a couple named Eva and Allen are shrunk down to atomic size in order to escape some fascist thugs. They wind up colonizing an election "planet", and their descendants live for billions of years before dying off.
Tabletop Games
- In older editions of Gamma World (and the first d20 adaption, Omega World), pure-strain (unmutated) humans were often known as Adams and Eves for reasons that supposedly no one remembers.
- In the Ravenloft campaign setting, the Frankenstein's Monster Captain Ersatz is named "Adam", and the girl Mordenheim's wife adopts is named "Eva".
Theater
- In Fiddler on the Roof and its source books, Tevye's third daughter is named Chava, the Hebrew equivalent of "Eve". Like her Biblical namesake, she chooses a Forbidden Fruit (in this case a Christian husband) and is cast out from the family like Adam and Eve from Eden.
- In The Shape of Things, the lead male is called "Adam", and the lead female "creates" him into being just the kind of man that she wants. Her name is "Evelyn".
Video Games
- The BIONICLE Web Game Mata Nui Online Game II has two Onu-Matoran villagers named Akamu and Damek. The first name is a Czech diminutive for the name Adam, while the second is a vernacular form of Adamu, the Hawaiian transliteration of the name Adam. However, in this case the symbolic meaning is the literal translation "from the earth" rather than any progenitor figure, as Onu-Matoran are tunnel dwellers and represent the element of earth.
- Although not a character, BioShock features a substance which can grant you new physical and mental abilities, and another substance which acts as a sort of fuel for those abilities, named ADAM and EVE respectively. Keeping with the theme, the machines that let you purchase and upgrade ADAM abilities is called Gatherer's Garden (you know, as in Eden).
- Black & White (2001): In the Creature Isle Expansion Pack, the basic goal is to win enough minigames that your Creature can earn the right to have sex with the world's apparently only female Creature, aptly named Eve. Seriously.
- The protagonist of Deus Ex: Human Revolution is named Adam Jensen. He's the first augmented human that doesn't suffer from rejection syndrome, essentially the first more-than-human human. This is due to him being the Sole Survivor of a series of human experiments performed at White Helix Labs, a Versalife subsidiary.
- In the Devil May Cry series, Dante and Vergil are sons of "Eva."
- In Elsword, the king of Nasods is Adam, the final boss of the Altera region, and the queen of Nasods is Eve, a playable character.
- Ensemble Stars! has idol duos named Adam and Eve. Together, they form a group called Eden.
- Eve, the signature necromancer of Guild Wars, has a pet skull named Adam.
- Lost Eden features the male protagonist Adam. A female character that joins his group (and serves as a potential love interest) at one point is named Eve.
- In Mass Effect 3, one mission has you rescuing a fertile krogan female in order to help cure the genophage. Since she's a shaman, she refuses to reveal her real name, so Mordin dubs her "Eve," precisely because of the symbolism: because her DNA will be used in the cure, she will be the "mother" of all post-genophage krogan. He says he chose a figure from human mythology because they happened to be on a human ship at the time.
- Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has EVA and Revolver Ocelot as ADAM. There's a Snake, too. It gets much better in the epilogue of the game, when it is revealed that EVA was in fact a Chinese spy who ran into him in the forest. When Snake asks if she is the ADAM he's looking for and tells her that his code name is Snake, she goes with it and says her codename is EVA. This is precisely the code name of ADAMs partner, so Snake no longer questions her about not knowing the password.
- NieR: Automata: The Machine lifeforms' attempt to recreate the human form takes up the name Adam after reading the Bible to try to better understand humanity. His brother, who emerges from a wound in Adam's side after a battle, ends up named Eve, and yes, he complains about the Gender-Blender Name.
- Parasite Eve (1998): The antagonist takes her name from Mitochondrial Eve.
- Trauma Center (Atlus): In Under the Knife/Second Opinion, the leader of Delphi is named Adam, in reference to GUILT having been incubated inside him.
Webcomics
- Applegeeks: The female robot built by Hawk is named Eve.
- Girl Genius: The promethean constructs Punch and Judy live as regular people under the names Adam and Lilith Clay. In this case, every part of both names are significant. Lilith was traditionally (in Apocrypha) the first woman, and made from clay like Adam, instead of from Adam himself. This makes the two constructs equal to each other.
- Earthsong (Crystal Yates): An Eve is the progenitor of a planet's sentient species.
- In Fallout Adventures of Anderson, Adam was the only man in vault 69 when he came in.
Western Animation
- My Gym Partner's a Monkey: Adam Lyon is the only human in a group of animals.
- The Owl House: Evelyn is the wife of the first human to live in the Demon Realm, and was indirectly responsible for the Boiling Isles becoming the cesspool of suffering and sin it is in the present day.
Real Life
- Real-life example: Scientists have named the human race's matrilineal and patrilineal most recent common ancestors, respectively, Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam. Of course these are titles, so the person who holds them can and has changed over time. It's a bit of a misnomer, though, since it is probably not the case that they were the first humans, knew each other or even lived at the same time. Mitochondrial Eve is simply the latest woman who is a common matrilinealnote ancestor to everyone now living, but when she lived and earlier there were lots of other human women; it's just that their children (or their children's children, or...) were male or died without reproducing. Same for Y-chromosomal Adam on the patrilinealnote and female descendants. (So, to reiterate: "Eve" is a common ancestor for all of her women descendants, and "Adam" is the ancestor for men. If an "Adam" had a daughter, she would be counted toward "Eve", and sons born to an "Eve" count for "Adam" instead. And the ones that get labeled "Adam" and "Eve" are the most recently known common ancestors to everybody.)
- On most Tarot Card Decks which are common around the world the Major Arcana Card The Lovers depicts both Adam and Eve and the two trees.
- First sons of families that believe in the Pentateuch often get the first name "Adam."
- During the Middle Ages, it was common to name opposite-sex twins Adam and Eve.
