Unorthodox Sheathing

Related to Unorthodox Reload and Unorthodox Holstering, you have Cool but Inefficient ways of sheathing and unsheathing your swords.

Can sometimes overlap with Weapon Twirling, particularly Gun Twirling.

Has nothing to do with Sheathe Your Sword, despite the name.

Examples of Unorthodox Sheathing include:

Anime and Manga

• Rurouni Kenshin: Cho performs a Reverse Mid-Air Unsheathing and Sheathing technique. With a baby hanging on the sheath of the sword.
• One Piece: Zoro has been known to resheath his swords by throwing them into the air and then catching them with the sheaths. And, of course, he does it with three at the same time.
• Inuyasha cheats; Tessaiga's sheath can summon the sword to it, up to some distance. He's used this twice.
• Dragon Ball Z: Trunks has sheathed his sword at least once by catching it out of midair with its sheath. At least once, he lets out a good sentence before the thing fall down.
  • Partially justified in that Trunks is strong enough to throw his sword into orbit.
• Mysterious Girlfriend X: Panty scissors.
• Toboso Yana seems to like this trope. In Black Butler's anime season two, Hannah keeps a demon sword in her esophagus. In Rust Blaster, Kai literally is the sheath.

Film

• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has the characters unsheath their swords by launching the sheath across the battlefield like a missile. Every. Single. Time.

Video Games

• Muramasa the Demon Blade: after finishing a battle, Kisuke throws his sheath in the air and catches it with his sword.
• Haohmaru of Samurai Shodown throws his sword in the air and catches it with his sheath.
• Yuri Lowell in Tales of Vesperia will swing his sword's sheath off the blade.
  • One of Lloyd Irving's Victory Poses is to throw his blades spinning up into the air which both land perfectly into their sheaths without him even moving them.
• Link has one of these in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Mostly it just involves lots of random spinning until he gets around to putting it back in. He always does it in cutscenes, but he'll also do it if the player manually resheathes immediately after clearing an area of enemies. It also appears as one of Link's taunts in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
• Vergil and Dante of Devil May Cry sheathe the Yamato in odd ways after performing its aerial attack. After performing his aerial rave move, Vergil moves the sword and its sheath behind him at hip level, sheathing the sword behind his back horizontally, the same form was used by Dante in homage to his brother once acquiring Yamato. Naturally, they're able to do this with flawless precision in less than half a second.
  • Vergil, the weapon's original owner, also has variants of his sheathing technique in holding the sheathe behind him, moves the sword over his head and drops it directly down into the sheath after decimating a Hell Abyss ambush. He also sheathes Yamato in the same way as he does with his aerial rave technique - behind him at hip-level - after confronting Beowulf.
  • Vergil does the same behind-the-back sheathing in his Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 victory animation.
• Jin has a behind-the-back katana-sheathing after his CT Astral Heat which is practically identical to Vergil's, as described above.
• Keiji Maeda from Sengoku Basara, whose BFS sheath descends from the heavens and lands perfectly over the blade after the end of each battle (with the implications that he threw it away at the beginning and can summon it back at will).

Web Original

• Adam Taurus of RWBY sometimes unsheathes his sword by firing it out of its sheath, which is also a gun; it hits its target with the end of its hilt, which makes it just about the only non-lethal attack Adam has.

Western Animation

• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Piandao, Sokka's sword instructor, has his butler throw the sheath to him and he catches it by holding the blade out and letting the sheath slide on—while he was blinded by sand thrown in his eyes, no less.