The Dream of Reveily: Chapter 1. Formation
Welcome everyone to The Dream of Reveily. I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, especially considering the fact the first draft of this was created on the 16th of April. Yes. That long ago. But it was so longggg and I didn’t want to proofread it. But I’m finally working on it lol.
The Dream of Reveily is the Reveily version of Behind the CALLA, which is in turn inspired by Creator Thoughts by
@LostInTheDream. For this first chapter, I will focus on how I created Reveily’s concept and who the members are, with future chapters diving into each album concept. I’m excited to explore this group with you, because they’re quite different to CALLA being a lore group, but also because I specifically recorded moments in planning just so when I made them, I would have everything. Anyways, enough chattering, enjoy!
THE BEGINNING OF A DREAM
Reveily has been in the works for a very long time. The earliest records I have of forming a new group were from November 2022, but I believe I’ve been planning a new group even before that. Around this time I was obsessed with CSR’s Pop? Pop! and was having a bit of a cute concept fever. CALLA has a mature and elegant concept and so I couldn’t really do much cute stuff with them without it feeling inauthentic to my vision for them.
SOLSTICE was my first concept for a new group. SOLSTICE was a duo consisting of members Seola and Alice (Sol-Seola, Ice-Alice, it’s so good lol) and their concept would be half cute and half girl crush. During summer months, they would have a bright and fun concept, but during winter it would be dark and girl crush. They were intended to debut in December 2022 but I abandoned the concept and the duo.
The next group plan I had was 8 members, a group named Leciel (‘Le ciel’ is French for ‘the sky’). 3 members were named and 8 stage names had been picked. Out of all of these plans though, nothing bar one of the member names, Huihyeon, survived, either due to losing interest or face claims being… claimed. Funny that.
January 3rd 2023
“Part of me feels like I should debut a second group…”
“If I did it, it would be a cute concept group… it also wouldn’t be under MeHoney Entertainment…”
January 14th 2023
“I’m leaning towards being inspired by aka stealing TXT’s concept is growing up. So they’d start with cute, transition into teen crush and eventually end up as girl crush… depending on how far I got with them……. Yeah I’m way too invested in planning this group that won’t even debut for another 6+ months”
Reveily was finally born in January 2023, with their name begin recorded for the first time on the 7th, alongside 3 member names who made it to the final lineup.
KEEP DREAMING
Reveily’s lore began with the idea of sharing a story about a group of girls’ stories as they grow up. This then became the idea of the story of a group of idols exploring idol life. This is where the name Reveily began, with Rêve meaning ‘dream’ in French, the lore would share the story of the girls’ dreams.
My issue with this concept is I felt finding songs that are directly linked to idol life would be difficult. This is when I came up with the final concept for Reveily. Their concept would show the life of trainees while their music would show the life of the trainees after they achieved their dreams and became idols.
Though in the fik-verse, the trainee stories would be like a web series, sort of like Aespa’s, I decided it would be best for me to write this story directly for the users of Kprofiles. I then later decided this story would be written in the first person of one of the trainees and be in the style of a diary. The trainee team would be ‘The Dream Team’, due to the link between Rêve and dreams, while the trainee’s diary would be the dream diary.
One thing that was also not intentional but I love about the name Reveily is that you can extend the name from the Reve meaning dream to Reveil, with Réveil meaning ‘awakening’. This can be used to describe their trainee timeline, with it being a brutal awakening to the hardships that trainees face before they can achieve their dreams. Though I must also emphasise I know the story told by Reveily is a much more mild portrayal, as sharing a real experience would be a lot more difficult and contain many triggering topics I don’t want to exploit.
Edit: Hi it’s me in May now. I was imagining the girls sharing the story behind their name and I realised if you changed the pronunciation to match a more Korean pronunciation, it might end up a bit more like “lebelly” which in turn kind of sounds like lovely and ISN'T THAT SO CUTE?? MY GIRLS ARE SO LOVELY INDEED.
I decided that because these trainees were characters the members were playing, the real names of the members would be similar but different to their character. This would also be explained in the fik-verse as a way for the members to protect their personal lives from the public.
I still wanted Reveily to have some sort of connection to CALLA though, so this is where the FortyForty Labels project began. Forty refers to the Four companies that would come together and exchange trainees that made up Reveily. Two of these trainees would be from MeHoney Entertainment: Kayeon and Jiwon.
MEMBERS
This is the most exciting part, let's be real. Some members were more thought out than others, but I’m still excited to share them.
KAHYUN:
Kahyun by far is such a deep and complex member of Reveily.
To start with her personality, I see her as quite introverted and serious. She is highly ambitious and independent. She is the daughter of the CEO of MeHoney Entertainment, her real name being Lee Kayeon. More about her backstory will be revealed as time progresses as sharing it all here would be no fun.
When creating Kahyun though, her existence pre-dates the announcement of CALLA. The was first mentioned in the CALLA thread before CALLA were even announced. She was intended to just be a name for world building, but I was never able to move on from her. I later used her to apply for another creator’s fake group, with the stage name K.Yeon and she had a different face claim and surname, with none of the nepotism stuff existing yet lol. However this group never ended up debuting and so she was left floating in the void once more.
When I finally got around to forming Reveily, I chose Chaeryeong for Kahyun’s new face claim because she was the only ITZY member not being used and I was gonna snatch her up while I had the chance. Chaery is mine! However, another fun story… or not so fun but more backstory. Trigger warning for brief mentions of bullying. Kahyun’s name was originally not Kahyun but Karam. I liked the name Garam because of the ex-Le Sserafim member, but replaced the G with a K for the name theme (I believe this is a thing, some idols spell their names multiple ways?). However, there was an issue with this. Another member goes by Eunseo, and Garam’s accuser was also called Eunseo. Having a Karam and Eunseo in the same group felt wrong to me so I ultimately chose to change Karam to Kahyun.
IYAH:
Iyah is the leader of Reveily, and I feel she is basically a more extroverted version of Hyunjoo. She’s a bit louder and more commanding but still fun and silly with her members and cares about them a lot.
Similarly to Kahyun, Iyah’s story begins back with CALLA’s debut. Although I guess the Iyah we have now is quite different from the Jiwon she started as and tbh they don’t really have to be the same person. But it felt lonely having only Kahyun come from MeHoney lol. So I decided to recycle her too.
Her stage name was stolen from a WJSN song, and that’s also why her solo fandom name is Bebe, because Reveily is my group to be silly with and Bebe is also a WJSN song. I gave her the fake name Huihyeon from Leciel.
Yeonhee is a claim I’ve wanted to use for a while, however before Iyah was using Yeonhee, she actually had Maizy’s face claim, Seeun.
MOONSEO:
Eunseo is Reveily’s maknae and is quite shy and lacks confidence, although she is also bright and happy at the same time. I’m slightly scared I make her sound really whiny, but my intention for her is she does a lot of aegyo.
Moonseo’s real name, which won’t be revealed because what’s the point of the real/fake name concept if I just leak all the real names, was one of the first I came up with aside from Kayeon and Jiwon. Originally, Moonseo consisted of two potential trainees, her real name and another trainee called Moon Seola, Seola being taken from Seola from SOLSTICE. However, I eventually decided to drop the name Moon Seola because it sounds too similar to Moon Solar and I have a dark past which if you know you know!
However, there’s a certain group I like called WJSN, maybe Reveily is just WJSN at this point, and while they have a Seola they also have an Eunseo. Moon Eunseo was also the name of an idol I had a long time ago when I ran groups by myself back in like 2020-2021, and her stage name was also Moonseo. Even though I felt a bit off about using one of my past idols as a new one, I just felt the name was so lovely and I didn’t want to waste it.
At first, Moonseo had many different candidates for her face claim, including Eunjo who she has now. Moonseo to me felt like maknae, so I tried to give her a face claim that would match that. Dahyun from Rocket Punch was a strong contender, and Siyoon from Billlie was actually her face claim originally. I didn’t feel like Siyoon fit her so eventually it was between Eunjo and Dahyun, and since Yeonhee was being used for Iyah I decided to use Eunjo for Moonseo.