step and a step mv theory + observations: a thread

everything in this thread is just my opinion, a lot of it may be wrong and you do not have to agree with me at all, i just wanted to share my perspective

let's start with figuring out the main goal of the video: finding miihi.

i do truly believe that all of the members were looking for miihi, maya just happened to be the one who found her. my reasoning for this is that nobody found or

opened their doors until after maya arrived on miihi's island.

none of the member's doors are shown until after miihi and maya's eyes meet at 1:15 (timestamp), and most of the members start smiling when they finally see/approach their doors.

i think this is because they somehow know that miihi has been found/saved and now it's okay for them to stop searching and return to their shared space the pink flowery area, which has a slightly different color palette than the flowery

area we see the members in without miihi. i don't know if miihi made the colors change or if they're in a different place altogether or if it was just done to match the outfits but it's something interesting that i noticed.

now let's start talking about doors. and colors. if this gets confusing i'm sorry...

niziu have official colors assigned to the members that were revealed in make you happy- i don't think the mvs are related but the colors may be important.

niziu's official colors are as follows:

mako- red
rio- indigo
maya- orange
riku- green
ayaka- purple
mayuka- yellow
miihi- blue
rima- teal/turqouise
nina- magenta

when i first watched the music video and noticed the multicolored doors, i thought that they were the member's official colors (because that would make the most sense) but that was not the case.

here are the door colors:

mako- indigo
rio- yellow
maya- light purple
riku- red
ayaka- teal/mint
mayuka- multicolored/green
miihi- light purple
rima- red
nina- blue

a couple of things to point out before i dig deeper here

1. miihi and maya go through the purple door together, meaning we only see 8 of 9 doors (assuming that there's 9 to match the members)
2. mayuka's door is pulsing rainbow until the

very last shot of it, where it is shown to be green.

3. rima does not find her door, she makes it herself. this may be why it is the same color as riku's (YES
riku's is red, before you ask, it does look orange at first but it's

not, which you can see on the side of the shot where maya brings miihi through the door (the pattern of the door matches riku's perfectly so it must be her door)

now we get to the point where i really don't know exactly what's going on so i'm just giving it my best guess. again, i feel like it makes the most sense for each member's door to be their official color, so i think for some reason

they all had to check someone else's room for miihi instead of their own, which is why they all look so confused.

so why didnt they just check their own rooms, wouldn't
it have been easier?? that's a good question, and i wasn't really

sure until something clicked in my brain: maybe theyre suspicious of each other? i know this is a big reach for such a sweet concept but it kind of makes sense when you consider rima again.

not only does she actively make a door herself,

she's also the only member who sings to the camera in her solo shots.

i'm still a bit unsure about this theory bc you'd think the girls would look more upset about each other in the group scenes if this were the case, but at the end

of the day the group scenes were probably just filmed for choreo purposes and i think it's okay to kind of discount those scenes bc there's no acting/storyline in them from what i can see.

rima is also the only member in a small,

cramped space. there is legitimately nowhere to go for her (which is probably why she creates her own door) as opposed to mako and ayaka who run through the halls or maya who sets out on the ocean or mayuka in the forest or riku in

the clouds or rio in the large stadium. everything about rima's room/area is very odd, leading me to believe that she's not to be trusted or she has some kind of specific abilities.

the only other members who seem to have "help" getting

to their doors are maya and nina- both of them hold props. maya a telescope/looking glass and nina a lantern. both of them use their tools to get to the doors that they use to return "home."

rima instead uses her room itself to create a path back- which makes me wonder, is rima's room even considered one of the colored doors? she made the door herself and ti is the same color as riku's, meaning that there is not just one

door missing from the vdieo (whichever one maya bypassed to go to miihi) but two. these doors would supposedly be orange and magenta if they existed.

this isn't really a complete theory because i still have a lot of unanswered questions

like

why are mayuka and nina searching in places that are used for the ot8 dance scenes?

why does ayaka smile as id she's found something before miihi and maya meet? (i would have mentioned it earlier but i simply didn't notice)

can ayaka somehow tell the future?

why do nina and rio leave footprints?

why is mako's room black and white until she finds her door?

why does rio look like she's given up at first? (she's sitting down as if she feels defeated)