WARNING: EVA
In Which Shadowjack Gamely Tries (and Probably Fails) To Grok The Metaphysics
(Of Neon Genesis Evangelion)
(found here)
Okay, so, White Moon and Black Moon, opposing poles upon the Earth, so to speak. The White Moon was a vending machine containing eighteen Pokéballs, and the Black Moon is a terraformer/birth chamber. If you take one of the Pokéballs over to the Black Moon and fling it into Lilith, Lilith will uplift that species to sapience and create an entire ecosystem to suit, just like the Genesis Device in Wrath of Khan.
Bones: "What if this thing were used where life already exists?"
Spock: "It would destroy such life in favor of its new matrix."
Bones: "It's 'new matrix'?! Do you have any idea what you're saying?!"
Spock: "I was not attempting to evaluate its moral implications, Doctor. As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create."
After you reboot, the original and the other possibilities are recompiled and saved in God's shoebox for next time, which is where Adam comes from.
Or maybe I've got it backwards, and Adam is his own thing. At some point, someone took Adam and a Lilith-chu to the White Moon, put on some music and let them get it on, then Adam went back to the Black Moon to guard the other eggs, while Mega-Lilith remained behind as cosmic expression of the new race. When it's time to reboot, Adam comes back with the empty Pokéball, captures the old one, and puts a new one up in her place.
In any case, what's important is that if you choose Charizard, we get Lizardon sapiens. Choose Sachiel, and you get Cherubim sapiens. Throw in Adam/Lilith/whichever, and you get Homo sapiens. Unfortunately, we kind of woke up all the Pokémon, so, uh, whoops. Gotta kill 'em all!
Yes, I'm saying that the Dead Sea Scrolls are a pre-human Pokédex. Deal.
Perhaps this is how the vending machine is supposed to work: it spits out an Angel to test the environment. If that Angel makes it to the White Moon intact, then that's the next race. If the Angel gets wiped out, then the next Angel is modified to attempt to adapt to the environment before it's sent out. Eventually, one of your Angels will make it, or you'll run out of Angels. This goes fine when there's nobody living on the planet, but human civilization can be one hell of a hostile environment when we put our minds to it, so now the White Moon is prepped and waiting for an Angel that's never coming-until we stick ours in.
Anyway, we're really messing up the whole deal with all this playing around with Adam and Adam clones and Lilith clones and the Lance and God knows what else, because that's what we humans do, of course. The old plan was to jimmy the lock on the vending machine and extract our prototype Pokéball, hack the source code, fiddle with the Black Moon cycle somehow, then trigger the modded process to unleash awesome.
But, like I said, they accidentally the whole thing, and now SEELE's just given up on humanity entirely. They figure they can hack a way to reverse the Genesis process and return humanity to Eden, i.e. Lilith's womb. (Or Adam's. Whatever.) The old plan was to use the Lance and Lilith alone, but since the Lance is lost and Lilith is creepy, they figure they can swing it somehow with the Evas and their pseudo-Lances.
Yui liked the old plan better, but once she had a kid, she decided it was too risky to do it just for Science! However, Gendo and Fuyutsuki encouraged her to plan for it anyway, as a countermove to SEELE. (Better we become more than human than we stop being human, right?)
Now that she's gone, Gendo figures he can trigger, then interrupt that process, and reincarnate Yui. (Or go to join her. Whatever. What's important is that he doesn't get that she's in Eva on purpose.) He wants the Lance gone because it could be used to stop him, and he needs Adam and Lilith together so that the Genesis effect fluxes at homo sapiens's wavelength or some such technobabble.
Shinji and Rei are gonna fuck up the process even more in a few minutes, because Rei is self-aware and Shinji is confused.
I've probably missed something, but that's where I'm at today. Ask me tomorrow and I may say something else.
Psychopomp
(adds on in reply)
(found here)
Okay, I'm pretty sure that the "ADAM is of Lilith" thing is a mistranslation, because I've always seen/remembered "like Lilith." Given that, my take, based on prior interpretations adjusted with 'new' details I noticed this time around:
As I understand it, the White Egg (with ADAM) came to Earth and settled into Antartica. Then the Black Egg (with Lilith), accidentally slammed into Earth and embedded under what would be Japan. (Supposedly this is what made the moon. I don't remember where that's from.)
For some reason, Earth got two Ancient Terraforming Systems. As you note with references to the Genesis Device, that's bad. Apparently, Lilith activated first, and the Black Egg spewed out an entity that is a species of individuals held distinct by multiple, individual AT-Fields. Us! And the rest of life, I assume.
But the White Egg was ticking, waiting for its activation. And someone knew all of this stuff and wrote about it in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Which SEELE got ahold of, released the Bible parts, but kept the parts that describe the Ancient Terraforming Systems for themselves. (Who the fuck wrote that shit down, and how the hell did they know it? How did the details of alien terraformers buried under Antartica and Japan make it into scrolls found in a cave in the Middle East?)
Fast forward to the year 2000, when the scrolls say the White Egg system is about to activate. It's known that we have to reduce ADAM to an embryo to prevent or soften the results of that activation. While the attempt to reduce ADAM is successful, Second Impact occurs anyway, and the Angels are released/signaled to awaken. So, SEELE (including at this point, Yui) know that the Angels will come soon, so we'd better have that Fighting ADAM Clones project up and ready for them.
Then the various Plans diverge, change, and change some more, and 15 years later we end up with the series starting.