I have seen many people theorize about how Evokers work in Persona 3 and find that almost everyone is wrong. A lot if not most people will tell you that simply putting an Evoker to your head is enough to summon a Persona, this is entirely false. We already know that one way to involuntarily summon a Persona in Persona 3 is the sense of danger and death which is where the theory of simply pointing a gun shaped object at your head comes from. If this theory was true, what would happen is Persona users would know that the Evoker won't harm them after using it therefore all attempts to use it after the first couple times would fail to summon a Persona. Also, if this theory was true, the times when real guns were pointed at S.E.E.S. and they knew they were real guns, by this theory's logic, that should put them into a state of fear that summons their Personas although, by the time they reached these points in the story, it's possible that they have been hardened to the point that a gun pointed at them by someone else wouldn't put them in a state of fear.
My theory, which I'm surprised isn't that common is that the Evokers fire a form of matter that when making contact with your body, forces you into a state of dread that summons your Persona. We can clearly see in the game that when characters use their Evokers, there is a force that hits their head hard enough to cause them to physically react. We can also see a mist or glass-like shards coming from where the exit wound would be if it were a real gun making me think that the matter that is shot through you passes through human tissue as if it were air. The Evokers also carry this matter as ammo as you can see a blue substance in the Evoker's grip. In the first Persona 3 movie, Junpei even runs out of this substance in his Evoker and is unable to summon his Persona despite pointing the Evoker to his head and pulling the trigger. This fact also makes me think that unlike other Persona games where SP is essentially how much energy you have left and characters talk about how tired they are when low on SP, Persona 3 SP is actually how much of this substance is left in a character's Evoker. This has further evidence as characters being physically tired is a separate mechanic from SP. What makes me think that this substance forces you into a state of dread is that in the movies, it's common for a character's expression to change to that of dread or glazed eyes when using an Evoker. One thing that is canon in Persona 3 is the plume of dusk which is what allows things to operate during the Dark Hour. We know that Evokers use this plume of dusk to operate but whether they just use it to make Evokers function or it's the actual shot substance, I do not know.
Written 2021-7-28 Published 2021-8-1