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Unorthodox Reload

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Pffft. Show off.

This is the fun aversion or supplement to the Bottomless Magazines trope. Sometimes the gunslinger has to have a cool (if not practical) way of reloading to show how badass he is.

Usually the Unorthodox Reload involves a lot of unnecessary and complicated choreography. In others, it involves incredible, mostly impossible—and often obscenely-unsafe—feats of physics that if attempted in reality, would either not work, jam the firearm in question or result in grievous bodily harm.

Reloading a firearm is actually a deceptively complex procedure, and must be done carefully. If done improperly the gun may jam or malfunction. At worst, you could seriously injure yourself.

See also One-Handed Shotgun Pump, Unorthodox Sheathing and Unorthodox Holstering.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • During a battle with the Special Assault Team in Ajin, Sato makes use of "quickloader" tubes to rapidly reload his pump-action shotgun.
  • Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto: Kanna, who dual wields revolvers, and reloads using speedloaders.
  • Train Heartnet in Black Cat is probably the epitome of this, in that he throws bullets up into the air, cracks open his revolver, so that the handle flips back (its a custom weapon in this case, so at least that bit is somewhat feasiblenote ) then times a hand flick so it snaps back into position with the bullets grabbed in the revolver chambers.
  • In one episode of Black Lagoon Revy reloads one of her pistols by loading a magazine into it using her teeth. While still firing at her opponents with the other one.
  • Jo's mechanical holsters in Burst Angel also double as magazine dispensers.
  • In City Hunter: Shinjuku Private Eyes, Ryo Saeba reloads his lever action shotgun Terminator 2: Judgment Day style, by flipping it with his fingers (which would normally be impossible without breaking his fingers).
  • Blush from The Western manga Et Cetera can fire his guns so fast that it seems it all came from a single gunshot. In fact, characters claim to hear only one gunshot even though as much as 12 shots can have been fired. Because he uses all of his ammo in an instant, he carries pre-loaded cylinders on his beltnote , and simply pops the empty ones off and "reloads" entire cylinders to use.
  • Rushuna Tendou from Grenadier stores extra bullets in her considerable cleavage - when she needs to reload, she somehow manages to eject the exact number of bullets from there and then scoops them out of the air with her revolver. While spinning, and performing Gun Kata to dodge bullets (as in forty villains, all firing at her with modern rifles). And she isn't the only character able to do that.
  • Rally Vincent in both the Manga and Anime of Gunsmith Cats has at least one scene in either version of the series in which she reloads her CZ-75 pistol by dropping a fresh magazine onto her foot (a necessity in the manga, with one broken arm as the result of an accident) and then kicking it up into the magazine well of the gun before popping the slide release to chamber a round.
    • Worth pointing out that the anime version had her balancing an empty mag on her foot that she'd ejected. She just caught it with her off-hand after flicking it back up and tucked it into her jacket - presumably because it was cheaper than leaving it behind and buying a replacement.
  • Alucard from Hellsing uses his teeth to pull back the slide on his pistol and chamber a round (either one) after setting in a magazine. Don't try this at home, kids, unless you have jaws of steel.
    • In the finale of the TV series, he uses telekinesis to pull a magazine from across the room and catch it in his gun.
  • Guido Mista from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind reloads his revolver by tilting his head down. The bullets come out from under his cap, and his Stand, Sex Pistols, a group of six bullet-sized spirits, load them into the chambers without trouble. He only does this during battle where a quick reload is required, though. Otherwise he reloads by hand.
  • Mana Tatsumiya from Negima! Magister Negi Magi does a magic reload, as in swinging her Desert Eagles handle first towards magazines emerging from Hammerspace.
  • Used in one chapter of Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple, when the titular character's father Genji attempts to "rescue" his son, hauling away his son in one hand while blasting away at the masters of Ryouzanpaku with his rifle Rotowski. When weapons master Shigure gives chase, she notes that Genji won't be able to reload his weapon singlehandedly. A single panel later, he does exactly that.
  • In the first episode of Mazinkaiser SKL, Ryo throws two fresh magazines towards the enemy, where they stick into the ground.note  Then he reloads normally, charges the enemy while firing, and as soon as he's out of ammo he ejects the spent mags and dives to the ground, reloading using the mags he threw there earlier.
  • Signum of Lyrical Nanoha casually flicks a Cartridge - basically something that resembles a bullet but is just storage for an extra burst of magic - into the chamber of her weapon in the second episode of the second season.
  • Yukimi from Nabari no Ou also does this once. It's justified, though, because he only has one arm and can't reload his gun any other way.
  • Rebuild World: Akira uses compressed time (a more grounded equivalent to Bullet Time) to toss his clips in the air and then slam his guns up into them.

    Films — Animation 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • In Lucio Fulci's The Beyond, a character can be glimpsed dropping a bullet down the barrel of his weapon. This was, however, a joke by the actor which slipped into the final cut.
  • In The Boondock Saints, Don Yakavetta can be seen loading a revolver before flipping his wrist to cause the cylinder to snap shut. While common in movies, doing so in Real Life will warp the arm holding the cylinder and eventually cause a misfire due to the gun being misaligned.
  • In Bram Stoker's Dracula (the movie with Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing and Gary Oldman as Dracula) Quincy P. Morris the Texican cowboy stereotype flip-cocks his rifle in much the same manner. One handed. While riding a horse. Then again, he IS from Texas!
  • Bulletproof Monk plays with this trope, using the unorthodoxy as a combat technique in and of itself. Chow-Yun Fat empties two pistols, ejects the magazines, and spins to kick the empty magazines at some Mooks.
  • Resident Evil: Retribution spin-kicks empty clips at zombies.
  • The Dark Tower: Roland pulls off some very impressive reloads with his revolvers, including rapidly dropping individual bullets into a spinning cylinder, trailing his open cylinders along his belt as he pushes bullets into the chambers with his thumbs, using speedloader rigs on his belt to reload quickly, and even catching two moon clips in mid air with both of his guns' cylinders before quickly opening fire.
  • Equilibrium: Preston has spring-mounted magazines in his sleeves that automatically reload his weapons. He also has bottom-weighted mags that he tosses into the middle of a group of enemies. After charging into them and emptying his magazines, he ejects the empty ones and slams the guns down into the mags on the floor.
  • Played with in The Expendables - Barney reloads his M1911 normally, he just does it incredibly fast. With enough practice, any experienced shooter can do it, too. Now, doing it while being shot at by fifty men with assault rifles in the open...
  • Ramón Rojo in A Fistful of Dollars casually does the half-cycle spin at the beginning of the final showdown.
  • In The Good, The Bad, The Weird, Don-wo spin-cocks his Marlin lever-action rifle at several points, most notably when he is charging into a fight on horseback or swinging from a rope and so has one hand otherwise engaged.
  • In Hawk the Slayer, the character Ranulf loses a hand, rendering him unable to reload his crossbow in a normal fashion. He compensates by using a self-loading crossbow with an entire magazine of bolts. This isn't your garden variety (i.e. real world) repeating crossbow though, this is your terrible B-movie repeating crossbow - basically a submachinegun that fires arrows.
  • The One-Handed Shotgun Pump is parodied in Hot Shots! Part Deux: Ramada pumps and shoots her shotgun with one hand. When she pumps it for the third time, however, the gun rips off the grip and conks a mook in the head. She then tosses the grip at another mook, knocking him out, too.
  • John Wick: Chapter 2: When in close-quarters combat with an assassin, John realizes his shotgun is empty. So he uses it to physically pin the mook to the wall, reloads while the mook struggles futilely, and then shoots him.
  • In Kick-Ass, Hit Girl, while fighting in a corridor, throws two new magazines out in front of her, then, while running, and slides her pair of guns over the new magazines that are more-or-less hovering in the air and happen to have rotated perfectly to be pointed to lock into place. The move was done for real, the only trick being a disabled magazine-lock in the SIG P232, as this pistol usually has a magazine release on the heel of the grip, making one-handed reloading impossible. According to Miss Moretz she exercised the move for days, and got it right on the fourth take.
  • Check out this over-the-top scene from the Swedish action-comedy Kopps, justified by the fact that it is a day-dream sequence.
  • Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: During her opening training sequence, Lara has spare magazines strapped to her thighs by their bases, allowing her to simply swing her guns down onto them. Later in the Temple of Light, she has a tricked-out backpack that lowers magazines behind her in pairs. All she has to do is jam the guns behind her back and presto, instant reloads.
  • Mad Max: Fury Road. When Max and Furiosa meet they quickly get into a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. Furiosa tries to grab a hidden Glock but Max gets there first, so she ejects the magazine which falls in the sand and is seized by Nux. Nux holds out the magazine, Max shoves the Glock on top of it, then chambers a round by rubbing the slide against the back of his pants.
  • Unusual variation in New Police Story: Jackie is in a Gun Stripping competition with the Big Bad, as a Call-Back to one he failed in the beginning of the film. While his opponent is still faster, Jackie is able to cheat by popping a round into the chamber directly while assembling his gun, allowing him to skip loading the magazine. His opponent sees this happen, but since he's just a bit faster, it's too late for him to try the same trick, forcing him to finish assembling his gun before he can load it.
  • Once Upon a Texas Train has a scene where Cotton and his gang of Young Guns are standing in a line, waiting for the combined force of retired outlaws and Rangers to make an appearance. As the camera pans across them, each one flip cocks his Winchester in turn.
  • Two characters do this in Pom Pom And Hot Hot, an unusually titled 1992 Hong Kong film. Shooter Yin, the boss of the two leads, does near magical reloads on two separate occasions. On the first, he empties a revolver of spent shells, than grabs six loose bullets and throws them all at once perfectly into the chambers. Later on, he has a gun magazine knocked out of his hand, so he flips his leg sideways and kicks it back up - straight into his pistol. A villain in the film manages to SPIT a bullet into the chamber of his revolver at another point in the film.
  • In The Quick and the Dead, Herod's guards have a habit of spin-cocking their Winchesters.
  • In The Raid 2: Berandal, Eka reloads a gun by holding the gun in his mouth and inserting the magazine. He does while driving a car, so he only had one hand available.
  • In The Rundown, the character played by Dwayne Johnson flips two shotguns up-side down and backwards and then snaps them between his arms and torso to pump them in an instant. Earlier in the movie, he inverts this by ejecting a magazine to make his target slip on the floor.
  • During the hospital shootout in Rush Hour 3 Zhang Jingchu picks up a magazine and somersaults over a mook to give the magazine to Jackie Chan who then jumps on and rides on a cart in order to load the magazine into Chris Tucker's gun.
  • John Wayne flip-cocks his Winchester lever-action rifle in several of his Westerns, notably in his very first scene in Stagecoach (1939); in the climax of True Grit he combines this with Guns Akimbo on horseback. Truth in Television: several of Winchester's lever-action rifles had "saddle ring carbine" versions with a shorter barrel and a larger, more round loop on the cocking lever, so that they could be flip-cocked this way. However, it put unusual stresses on the rifle mechanism, so it was not recommended.
  • Terminator
    • The Terminator: During the police station shootout scene, the Terminator reloads its assault rifle by flipping the used magazine upside down, where it had taped a fresh one to the other side.note 
    • Terminator 2: Judgment Day:
      • The T-800 would cock a lever-action shotgun by flipping it over his fingers while using the other hand to handle a motorcycle. You can tell they used two different props for that scene: one with a larger loop to flip and another with a regular sized loop to fire with. In real life, flip-cocking would snag the wielder's fingers and probably break them (this almost happened during filming, when Arnold Schwarzenegger grabbed the standard-lever prop for a flip-cocking shot), though it's obviously not a problem for a robot with a titanium steel endoskeleton.
      • In the climax, Sarah Connor does a One-Handed Shotgun Pump because her shoulder is injured. Because Linda Hamilton really was in good enough shape to pull that off.
  • Played for Laughs and taken to the extreme in Top Secret! when Chocolate Mousse front-loads an assault rifle. Yes, he pours gunpowder down the barrel.
  • Ultraviolet (2006) takes this even further, instead of mechanical devices the main character has little wrist-mounted portals to pocket dimensions that feed bullets into her guns.
  • Towards the end of Valkyrie, Von Stauffenberg, knowing that he is about to be arrested, loads up his Walther PPK. Because he is missing a hand, he pushes the slide against a nearby desk to assist him in chambering a round. The real Von Stauffenberg was known to use a prosthetic to perform this function.
  • Expert marksman and Gun Fu practitioner Agent Zero from X-Men Origins: Wolverine solved the dilemma of reloading while dual wielding by tossing up his two pistols into the air from behind, then pulling out two magazines and simultaneously catching both pistols onto them... IN SLOW MOTION.
  • In Zombieland, Tallahassee prepares an unorthodox technique when luring zombies to a kiosk for his last stand. He stands all his pistol magazines up on a counter, then reloads when necessary by slamming his pistols onto the counter.

    Literature 
  • The Dark Tower: Roland Deschain can (or at least could) reload one of his revolvers with one hand while firing with the other.
  • Subverted in Nation when Mau takes note that Cox must reload with two hands.
  • Prince Roger in David Weber and John Ringo's We Few does a quick reload in a hyper-real MMFPS that fools his potential allies into thinking he used a cheat. Actually he palmed the replacement magazine.
  • Averted in Patriot Games by Tom Clancy: in the shootout at the beginning, one of the terrorists has taped two magazines for his AK-74 rifle end-to-end, but he somehow damaged the lip of the second magazine, so when he switches magazines, his rifle jams.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In "The Big Bang Job" episode of Leverage, Eliot secures the magazines of his twin pistols by pressing them against his hips and pulls back the slides by holding one pistol upside down over the other so he can hook the rear sights together and pulls the pistols in opposite directions. This example is made even more interesting by the fact that Eliot Doesn't Like Guns.
  • Chuck Connors used the flip-cock method for his rifle in The Rifleman. The rifle had a custom, circular loop to facilitate the flip-cock and was drilled and tapped for a set screw. The lever design allowed him to cock the rifle by spinning it around his hand. In addition, the screw could be positioned to depress the trigger every time he worked the lever, allowing for rapid fire, emptying the magazine in under five seconds during the opening credits on North Fork's main street.
  • Sharpe definitely has an example that falls under the heading of "do not try this at home." Specifically, "spit loading", which involves putting the muzzle of the musket into the mouth and spitting the ball home instead of ramming it home. There are no records of this ever been historically tried and given the nature of flintlock muskets the technique is so incredibly dangerous even when loading blanks that it's surprising whoever was supervising safety on set even allowed this as it adds nothing to the plot.
  • Steve McQueen (actor) would frequently flip-cock his "Mare's Leg" (a shortened 1892 Winchester rifle with a loop lever) in the Western TV show Wanted: Dead or Alive.
    • This was the same gun (literally the same prop) Zoe used in Firefly, and she cocked it this way at least once.

    Music 
  • Sabaton: In the video for "The Unkillable Soldier", the one-armed Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart is shown recocking a revolver by slamming the hammer against the shoulder of his missing arm.

    Tabletop Games 
  • In Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, the "Two-fisted shooter" feat allows you to, among other things, reload a hand crossbow with one hand, solving the Guns Akimbo problem. Exactly how you do this is never explained, and left up to the player's imagination (perhaps using the rest of this page for inspiration).
    • It is technically possible to do this in 3rd edition as well, with two feats (rapid reload and quickdraw). According to a literal interpretation of the feats, you put one crossbow away, reload the other, put that away, take the first one out, reload it, and pull out the second crossbow. All in the time it takes to discuss combat tactics.
      • Doesn't actually work, due to a subtle facet of the Quick Draw feat— it makes *drawing* weapons a free action, but doesn't affect the action needed to put them away. Many, many players overlook this detail.
      • This is one of many reasons the number of free actions you can take is largely DM's discretion.
  • Pathfinder, the spiritual successor of Dungeons and Dragon's 3.5 edition, lampshades the above while taking it one step further. A gunslinger archetype, the Bolt Ace, of sufficient level gains an ability called Inexplicable Reload - as long as they have at least one point of Grit, their crossbow is always considered loaded and ready to fire at the beginning of his or her turn thanks to unconscious muscle memory making the action essentially automatic. Additionally, this grants further benefit to the Rapid Reload feat, reducing the reload time for a crossbow, normally a free action, to even less than that.

    Video Games 
  • The protagonist in Advent Rising apparently reloads all guns by twirling them around Western-style... including rocket launchers.
  • Battlefield:
  • Bioshock Infinite doesn't show it onscreen, but Booker's method of reloading any weapon one-handed, flying through the sky, without looking at anything he's doing must be pretty interesting.
  • Similarly, Subject Delta in BioShock 2, who reloads not only all of his weapons but his plasmids (which for Jack entailed injecting a syringe full of EVE with his other hand) singlehandedly, so that he can still use whatever he has equipped in his other hand if necessary. All we get to see is some variation on his arm going Behind the Black briefly and returning.
  • Although the Gun Porn first-person shooter Black doesn't exactly have unorthodox reloads, if its most detailed aspect is its guns, the second most detailed aspect are said guns' reloads. Every single reload completely blurs the focus of anything past your gun and the hand that is hold it, essentially forcing you to pay attention to your normal, albeit slightly exaggerated, reloads. It's averted if you're under fire, though, in which a quick, no-nonsense reload occurs.
    • With the speed-loading revolver, Jack spends a full second staring at the new clip before inserting it.
    • Jack tips the M16 magazine's top towards him to see whether there is ammo inside.
    • The MP5 has him smacking the new mag against the side of the gun to line up the cartridges right before inserting it.
  • In BloodRayne 2, the twin magic handguns used by the eponymous half-vampire, called the Carpathian Dragons, are powered by blood. They have spikes on the front, and are reloaded by stabbing someone. If they run dry, they feed on the firer's Life Meter.
  • The Borderlands series:
    • The first game, Borderlands, revolvers have detachable cylinders.
    • Borderlands 2 definitely has some unusual reload methods:
      • Jakobs sniper rifles have detachable cylinders.
      • Tediore takes the cake on weird reloads, as reloading involves flinging your gun at an enemy while a new, full one is digistructed into your hands. The gun you threw then acts like a grenade and explodes. Tediore rocket launchers effectively become an additional rocket when reloaded.
      • Maliwan is a close second, though. Their snipers have top-break receivers with the mag nestled inside, pistols and rocket launchers have triad-shaped battery packs for magazines that stay exposed and are inserted from the side (in the case of launchers, the reload is not done until it does a spinning motion), and SMG's have either a constantly rotating wheel magazine that has to be cranked upon insertion, or in the case of cheaper models, a battery-like mag that fits imperceptibly into the side of the gun and can only be ejected by running a finger over a specific portion of the receiver, like one would a mobile device's touchscreen.
      • Hyperion also deserves a mention for how their weapons load. The magazines to all of the weapons they make (pistols, SMG's, shotguns, and sniper rifles) load in through the top, parallel to the body of the gun. Each of them are reloaded by the magazine's back end being ejected so the shooter can pull it out and insert a new one. The scopes on the sniper rifles even slide forward to expose the clip before ejecting it through the top.
    • Borderlands 3 has its own fair share of unusual reloads:
      • COV guns (which replace the Bandit/Scav guns of the previous games) don't have magazines and instead draw directly from the ammo pool. However, they can overheat if the player keeps firing for too long, causing the gun to either break (in which case the character replaces the gun's barrel) or catch fire (which the player extinguishes by either pouring a bottle of beer over the gun or squirting it with a little toy water pistol).
      • Some Hyperion weapons have some sort of insert for magazines, which then mechanically retract into the weapon.
      • Tediore weapons are still thrown when reloaded, but now come with extra functions when done so, such as shooting while in the air, becoming a turret, and more.
      • Atlas returns as a weapon manufacturer to the series for the first time since the first Borderlands, albeit with some drastic changes to their gun designs. Atlas pistols are wrist-mounted contraptions which come with strange, disc-shaped magazines. For some variants, the player uses a dedicated reloading tool to swap it out.
      • For some Jakobs rifle variants, the player uses a speedloading tube to quickly refill the internal magazine.
      • The Magnificent, a legendary Vladof pistol, has three separate magazines, all of which get swapped out during its (lengthy) reload animation.
  • Call of Duty:
    • In Call of Duty: Finest Hour, rather than inserting stripper clips, the character will reload the Lee-Enfield via swapping out the magazine. Yes, the Lee-Enfield's magazine is detachable, but British soldiers were only trained to remove it when cleaning the rifle, and of course they were never issued more than one magazine.
    • When reloading (empty) dual M1911 pistols in Black Ops, the character will reload both guns by dropping the magazines, loading in new magazines (off-screen), and flipping the guns over to pull the slide back.
    • The FAL in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the FAL OSW and AN-94 in Black Ops II, and the KN-44 in Black Ops III all get a reload in which the character removes the old magazine by smacking the release lever with a new one before inserting that (with the new mag clipping through the trigger guard on the way in the MW2 FAL's case).
    • The ASP in Black Ops, the P99 and G36C in Modern Warfare 3, the Five-Seven and SWAT-556 in Black Ops 2, and the AK-12 in Ghosts all get another similar reload, where the character grabs the new magazine first, brings it up next to the old one, then in one quick motion removes the old one and tosses it away while inserting the new one. This later became more or less standard in some later games, particularly the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot, where the only time most guns aren't reloaded like this is when you've fully emptied the mag.
    • The Call of Duty games from the fourth on all include the "Sleight of Hand" perk in multiplayer, which allows players to reload their weapons in half the time it normally takes. In the case of Black Ops 2, this is replaced with the "Fast Mags" attachment, in which the player uses physically-possible methods of reloading their weapons faster rather than just speeding up the regular animation, such as taping magazines together (like with the dual mags attachment in the first Black Ops), letting them drop free instead of taking the time to put them away, and hitting bolt catch levers rather than pulling charging handles.
    • At one point in Modern Warfare 3, Captain Price reloads his M4 during a quiet moment. Since he's currently holding his left hand to a headset to talk to Nikolai, he hits the mag release, then drops the rifle to let it hang freely as he grabs and inserts a new magazine one-handed.
    • The IMR assault rifle in Advanced Warfare is a speculative future weapon that uses an attached 3D printer to create new ammunition on the spot — the "reload" animation has the player pulling back the charging handle, causing the printer to whir to life and print a whole mag's worth of rounds that are automatically loaded from there. They can be seen cycling into place through a small window on the side of the gun. The raw material itself comes from a canister of liquid matter attached to the stock.
  • The Squad in Clive Barker's Jericho uses a Timey-Wimey Ball to turn back time on their weapons to a point when they were already loaded. Somehow this doesn’t also have the logical effect of un-shooting who or whatever they previously shot with those time-shifted rounds.
  • In Western Outlaw and Darkest of Days, you get equipped with a muzzle-loading revolver. Since muzzle-loading each individual round would take way too long for gameplay purposes, your character simply pulls out the cylinder and pops in a new one every time they reload (even though the model of revolver in Darkest of Days, at least, doesn't actually have a hinge at the point where the game-model is shown to have one).
  • In The Darkness, the Darkness Guns are reloaded by standing in shadow. Also, you reload your dual pistols by simply tossing them away and drawing another pair. Unusually for a videogame, this does waste any ammo left in them. In a late-game shootout, a retired mobster, who is missing his legs and one arm and thus can't fight, is still helping by loading guns for you. He chambers the first round using his teeth. It's impressive to see, honestly.
  • Devil May Cry:
    • Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening: While fighting some demons in close quarters, a nearby explosion from her rocket launcher sends approximately three of Lady's guns flying, all of which spent some time in the air during their reloading process; she puts a magazine clip in her mouth, throws two more clips in the air, catches a pair of guns first, then lets the guns catch their respective clips. Immediately after, she repeats the latter trick with another pair of handguns from her holster. The last handgun falls near her, then she reloads it too while catching it.
    • Nero in Devil May Cry 4 has a similar revolver-reloading technique to Rushuna (above), substituting his gun hand for the cleavage because the other arm is immobile in a sling.
    • Dante reloads his twin pistols by magically creating more bullets inside them.
  • Doom:
  • DownWell allows you to reload by jumping on an enemy. Landing on the ground also does this.
  • Reloads in Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon range from orthodox to just plain weird. The Battle Armor reloads most weapons by making a weird sort of arm-pumping motion, for instance - though with the other hand taken up by the shield projector this is somewhat understandable. But no matter which Armor you use, they all make quite a racket when reloading.
  • Enter the Gungeon shows the reload animation on many of the guns, from twirling revolvers to reload them, to the Fightsabre, which parodies the lightsaber from Star Wars: as you would expect, when you reload it, it swings around and deflects any projectiles back at the enemy.
  • Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon has some pretty silly reload animations. When reloading the Fazertron, Rex twirls the magazines between his fingers for some reasons and when reloading the Galleria 1991, he flips the shells into the slot as if they were quarters. The closest to an orthodox reload is for the Kobracon, in which he bonks the new magazine against the gun before setting it in properly, and even then he still pulls that mag up by flipping it in the air.
  • The Finals has an unlockable alternate reload animation for the AKM which has the user toss a fresh magazine upwards, then eject the old magazine and catch the new one with a single sweeping motion before inserting it.
  • Gears of War has the Active Reload function, in which the player can reload their gun more quickly if the reload button is pressed at just the right moment during the reload, as well as gain a temporary increase in damage. If they miss, however, the gun jams and reloading takes longer than usual. Note that the standard (long) reload is actually an orthodox reload, as the character goes through the motions of carefully inserting more ammunition. The active reload is the Unorthodoxy, where the character circumvents procedure for speed.
    • The flip-cock is also used when the action reload fails on the shotgun, and after unjamming the shell, thew character will flip the weapon around (for no reason) and ready it.
  • In GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, every single-handed weapon in the game can be dual-wielded, and the player character can reload any combination at will. With specific timing on pressing the reload button, he reloads dual-wielded Jackal .357's by tossing the magazines into the air, and slamming them together between the pistols. Reloading other combinations simultaneously has him dropping the magazines, lowering the guns off-screen for a second, and then spinning the pistols by their trigger guards as if he has two extra hands located off-screen doing the actual loading and unloading.
  • Grand Theft Auto V: The reload animation for the pump, sawn-off, and bullpup shotguns shows the player inserting only one shell, regardless of how many the player fired.
    • This actually isn't very new to the series. The shotguns in IV had similar reloads, except the player inserted two shells instead of one.
    • At least V has the most realistic animations in the series. Another one of IV's reloads was for both assault rifles, which were reloaded via racking the charging handle without even touching the magazine.
  • Half-Life:
    • The Half-Life mod, The Specialists, made with an action movie flavor, features several different kinds of guns that can be taken akimbo. The more unusual reload animations include putting both guns into one hand to load new magazines simultaneously, or simply dropping the guns and pulling new ones out from off-screen.
    • The Opposing Force expansion has Adrian reloading the M249 SAW by taking out the belt box, opening the feed tray cover and removing the old belt like usual, but instead of placing the first bullet in, he throws part of the new belt onto the open chamber, which is a waste of ammo as some of the bullets would obviously not be fired (even though you still have 100 new rounds anyways since it also plays in One Bullet Clips). This is more jarring as you're playing as a trained marine who really should know better.
    • The mod Wasteland, based off of post-apocalypse games (particularly Fallout), allowed mix-and-match pistols. The most memorable reload animation was that of the Colts akimbo: ejecting both magazines, and then sequentially tossing the guns up in the air to have a free hand for the new magazines.
      • The sequel mod The Wastes toned the akimbo combinations down a bit, but empty dual wielded pistols would reload by tossing two fresh magazines into the air, flipping the guns over and catching the fresh mags in each gun's empty magazine well.
      • Similarly, the mod SMOD for Half-Life 2 brings in a Matrix feel. Including dual pistols and SMGs. They reload the same way, in which the character will spin the guns around their fingers and use centrifugal force to pull the spent mags out, and then ramming in new ones. Breaks every rule of firearms safety all at once, but it certainly look badass.
    • Hunt Down the Freeman has the empty reload for the AK-47, where Mitchell pulls back the charging handle, then replaces the magazine while still holding the charging handle back, only releasing it when the magazine is locked in. This reload technique is in fact a real-life one dubbed the Iraqi reload, which was devised by Iraqi fighters to circumvent problems with reloading AK rifles caused by manufacturing differences between magazines and the rifles themselves.
  • As a by-product of Halo star Master Chief's ability to go Guns Akimbo in Halo 2 and Halo 3, he can reload either gun at any time with one hand, even while firing his other gun! What's more impressive is that he can do that while climbing a ladder. Lampshaded in the Halo Legends short The Package, where it is shown that Spartans store extra magazines in compartments in the armor on their thighs, and they just slam the guns down on them to reload. Which does not explain the "climbing a ladder in half-ton armor while using your hands to reload and/or shoot" bit.
  • Depending on where she stops in her attack combo, Linkle from Hyrule Warriors resets the bows on her dual crossbows at the same time with either the holsters for her crossbows on her boots, or with bows of the opposite crossbow.
  • Everybody in Killer7 uses some trick to reload absurdly fast: Con Smith (1:40) uses his feet to help him reload.
    • Except KAEDE. In fact, this is one of her two balancing measures (alongside Glass Cannon): she deals good damage and has a scope, letting her nail the enemy's weak spots from long range with consistency, but she reloads at a realistic pace - which in this game means it takes forever. It takes forever and a day if you reload while still aiming, as she fumbles the reload. This ends up being her downfall when you duel against the Handsome Men - Handsome Light Brown finishes reloading before KAEDE and shoots while she's still swapping mags.
    • Dan and MASK both get upgrades during the course of the game that let them reload faster than they could before. This is accomplished by speeding up the part of the reload where they dump the fired rounds, then skipping the part where they load in new ones before closing up.
  • The MP5 in Killing Floor has a similar reload to the FAL from Modern Warfare 2 above, with the bonus of an added HK Slap. This isn't possible in reality with the MP5, because the magazine rides too high in the magwell.
    • The Flare Revolver, rather than using speedloaders like the .44 Magnum, has its entire cylinder removed and replaced with a new, fully-loaded one when players reload. When dual-wielding them, the player slams the barrel of the first revolver down on the second to break it open, before breaking open the first via grabbing the barrel with their other hand.
    • Killing Floor 2 has a lesser version where several perks get a "Tactical Reload" skill that speeds up reloading animations for that perk's respective weapons; rather than just arbitrarily speeding up the existing animations, they get new faster animations, including letting mags drop free or knocking them away with the new one and using bolt-release levers rather than pulling the charging handle.
  • In the Killzone games, virtually all of the Helghast weapons have an interesting or unusual reload animation (especially evident in Killzone 2) because the Helghast seem to prefer large-capacity drum/helical magazines over plain single- or double-stack magazines. For just one example, the helical magazine of the StA18 Pistol is identical to that of the Russian-made PP-19 Bizon submachine gun, as is that of their SMG.
    • To their credit, the Helghan weapons hold more ammunition than the equivalent ISA weapons. While the ISA standard M82 assault rifle (essentially a bullpupped M4 that moves the mag well into the telescoping stock while leaving the receiver largely unchanged otherwise) holds 32 rounds, the Helghast assault rifle holds 40. However, this is offset by the fact that the muzzle jump for the Helghan weapons is cylindrical instead of straight up (that is, when you shoot, the bullets will eventually go around the target instead of above it, which makes no sense whatsoever but doesn't need to); Helghan automatic weaponry is also less accurate at longer ranges compared to their ISA counterparts.
  • The Security Officer in Marathon can not only equip and use two double-barreled shotguns at the same time, which is badass enough by itself, but he flip-cocks them like in the examples above. The implausibility of this is lampshaded in the manual.
    Durandal: I won't waste my time trying to explain the loading mechanism to you - your primitive mind could never grasp its complex nature.
    • There are several popular theories among Marathon fans as to what this mechanism is. The best is that spinning the shotgun around its lever generates electricity, which is used to teleport shells into the chamber.
  • In Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, both Max and Mona can reload their weapons when they're in Bullet Time by spreading their arms out and doing a quick 360-degree spin to eject the used magazine. This is the only way to quickly reload many slow-loading guns, such as the sawed-off shotgun (which normally takes a long time when you're slinging lead with bad guys).
  • Metal Gear:
    • Metal Gear Solid's Revolver Ocelot doesn't reload in that strange a way... except he talks about it in such a way that implies that he really loves to reload in the middle of a gunfight. In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, when he first tries a revolver, he rambles on and on about how great it feels to slide the cartridge into the chamber and how he's "never felt a tension like this before". Creepy.
    • Early in Snake Eater, Ocelot's attempt to look awesome backfires utterly - he tried cycling the slide after exchanging magazines with a round still in the chamber. However, he "short-strokes" it, releasing the slide too early and catching the previous round halfway, jamming the gun (and thus getting him soundly and embarrassingly thrashed by Naked Snake). He switched to revolvers instead afterward on Snake's advice (since he also had a tendency to let his arm ride with the recoil rather than resist it, something which could also cause a jam with an automatic), which had the added benefit of ensuring something like that would never happen again.
    • From Snake's side of things, rather than reloading the M37 a shell at a time, he pulls a shotgun speedloader from his hip, places one end into the loading port, slides his hand up the length of it to load the shells into the mag tube, and then works the pump on the gun to remove the speedloader and chamber the first shell. This is an actual method of reloading shotguns, but it's rare outside of shotgun competitions, as the speedloaders are too bulky to be carried and drawn practically with combat gear. This method appears again in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.
    • A glitch in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots lets Old Snake pull off the weirdest reload in the series, where he mimes reloading the long barrel/scope Desert Eagle while holding an entire second Desert Eagle in his other hand instead of just a magazine.
  • In the Metro 2033 franchise, Artyom reloading the revolver is an interesting inversion in that it's an extremely quick no-nonsense action composed of exactly four movements. When most games have lengthy, Gun Porn-y reloads for their revolvers, seeing a Player Character that reloads his faster than many can reload a magazine-fed pistol is quite unusual.
    • On the other hand, some of the Scavenger World-made firearms have such bizarre designs that they require an unorthodox reload by design, such as the Shambler/Uboinik shotgun, whose externally loaded, exposed revolving buckshot cylinder which in which two of the six cylinders are blocked (by the Luger-like toggle lock firing mechanism, and by the gun's frame), meaning the gun must be cycled or tossed from hand-to-hand to load each of the cylinders - the gun has about a dozen unique animations solely for different combinations of firing state, shell position, and ammo count.
  • In Monday Night Combat, the Sniper reloads both his sniper rifle and his SMG behind his back.
  • Monster Hunter: World:
    • Bowguns are reloaded by pulling a bolt with varying speed and force (fast and medium speed are identical, slow has you stop to pull the bolt more forcefully, very slow has you slap the top, slap the bottom, then pull the bolt) but ammo type is swapped with no animation. Aside from the "very slow" animations, you aren't seen actually loading anything into the bowgun.
    • Gunlances apparently have an infinite internal storage, but only a specific amount of shells and one wyrmstake can be chambered. A quick reload (performing a reload mid-combo) has you flick the the lance around, reloading all shells but not the wyrmstake. A normal reload has you slam the hilt down, with the top flipping out akin to a PEZ dispenser and revealing stakes, before closing back up with full shells and a wyrmstake ready.
    • While not exactly a ranged weapon, the charge blade does have phials that must be periodically reloaded. The phials are charged by attacking a monster in sword-and-shield mode. Reloading is done by shoving the blade into the shield (which also works as a sheath). From here, the shield can be powered up, the sword can be powered up (only if the shield is already powered), or the phials can be used in combos, or all at once in a massive shockwave attack.
  • In Not a Hero, Bunnylord uses teleportation to dispose of used weapons and produce new fully-loaded ones.
  • With the various amounts of characters with different firearms, Overwatch has plenty of weird (but cool-looking) reload animations.
    • Several heroes with energy-based weapons (such as Tracer and her Pulse Pistols, Winston and his Tesla Cannon, or Zarya and her Particle Cannon) reload by lifting their weapons up and allowing them to recharge, usually without needing to exchange or replace any parts of the device itself. Some get unique flourishes like how Tracer spins her pistols on her fingers, or Orisa absorbs some kind of green, gaseous substance through it.
    • Genji loads up Shuriken fed through his robotic hand and forearm, with additional shurikens apparently loaded from somewhere else in his body.
    • Bastion in its recon mode similarly loads the SMG built into its arm internally, with the gun segmenting apart as mechanisms pop in a fresh new magazine to fire.
    • Torbjörn's ammo for his Rivet Gun is actually extremely hot slag generated by the claw-like device in his other hand. When he needs to reload, he generates a cup's worth of it and pours it directly into his gun.
    • Cassidy spins his Peacemaker revolver on his finger to eject the spent bullet casings, jams in a fresh set, then gives a quick twist of the hand to knock the chamber back into place.
    • Mei points her Endothermic Blaster upwards and twists a small chamber on the side (adorably with pinkie finger extended), loading more water into the gun from her backpack.
    • Roadhog's Scrap Gun doesn't really have any bullet chambers; he just crams a fistful of scrap metal into his gun and that seems to work just fine.
    • Lucio ejects what looks like a vacuum tube out of his Sonic Amplifier, then pulls out a new one while spinning it in his hand before slamming it inside.
    • Symmetra summons a Hard Light sphere, then feeds it into the side of the Photon Projector. No adding in a magazine or even opening any parts of her gun, she just floats a Hard Light sphere into it.
    • Zenyatta simply recharges his Orbs (which float around his neck like Buddhist beads) by briefly meditating, which from first person perspective resembles a few dramatic hand gestures and his Orbs whizzing under the screen.
    • Moira's "reloads" actually serve as her primary weapon, as in order to fuel her all-important healing spray, she needs to drain the energy out of enemies.
    • Reaper completely forgoes the mere concept of reloading and just pulls out an endless supply of shotguns from his trenchcoat.
  • Paladins has quite a few reloads that just make no sense, even in it's High Fantasy setting.They still look cool though:
    • Barik has two odd reloads. His own reload for his blunderbuss is by spinning the crystal inside. His "Team Fortress 2 Engineer" skin reloads his blunderbuss by him getting his Wrench, and tightening a stray bolt on the side of the gun, which somehow reloads the gun.
    • Buck's Ultimate reloads his Shotgun by simply spinning his shotgun once.
    • Bomb Kings' Bombs come out of his arms. Did we mention his bombs are sentient?
    • Dredge' gun reload has the squid attached to it swallow the empty magazine and fires it as a projectile. With the "Scuttle" talent, said magazine explodes on contact.
    • Furia tracks her hand on the side of her sword to reload its shotgun component.
    • Jenos puts what appears to be cosmic energy into his gun.
    • Lian Reloads by forcing the main crystal body (hinged to the handle of the gun) downwards, lets some gas come out of the end of the hollow crystal tubing, and then put it back to it's original state.
    • Lex points his Magnums upwards, and they reload a second later.
    • Reloading with Mal'damba makes his primary weapon, a snake, hiss for a second, then spit out venom.
    • Talus reloads by pushing a rune back into the body of the gun, which slowly creeps out the more you shoot.
    • When Ying breaks her mirror, she seemingly summons another mirror from nowhere to replace it.
    • Zhin pours flammable oil onto the groove on his Flaming Sword to reload it.
  • Perfect Dark:
    • The Maian weapons all reload by putting an orb of goo into them. The gun's side just sucks it into itself. Even more amazingly, the Phoenix and Callisto NTG are reloaded with standard handgun and submachine gun bullets, respectively. Apparently Joanna crammed a magazine into the orb off-screen before sticking it in the gun.
    • Also, the Cyclone seems to be reloaded by running an extremely long stripper clip through an electronic hopper mechanism.
    • Many of the animations for reloading show Joanna to have inhuman abilites - for instance, while reloading a single Falcon 2 (a standard semi-auto pistol) in less than one second would be possible (though not likely at the consistency with which an FPS protagonist burns through ammo), when she's using two of them, she still manages to reload both of them in the same amount of time.
    • Continues in Perfect Dark Zero, which included wonderful bits like the one-hand shotgun pump, propping up the bolt-action sniper to reload it one-handed, and locking back the bolt of an MP5 with the end of the old magazine.
  • PlanetSide:
    • Ancient-Tech weaponry, which both plays straight and averts this trope. While the Maelstrom reloads by swapping out a small module near the front, the Spiker pistol reloads by swiveling the top of the gun once the side orbs are tapped, and the Radiator is reloaded by what looks like tickling the bottom.
    • Vanu Sovereignty and Terran Republic rocket launchers; each one is about the size of your body, and you somehow manage to reload it when the magazines are on the back of the shoulder mounted launcher. The Terran one is a bit more forgivable as it is top-loaded, meaning you could just tip the launcher down and pop a new magazine into the receiver at head-level, but the Vanu laser cannon is a bullpup with the magazine mounted on the underside behind the user's shoulder. It would be physically impossible to reload the gun without twisting it upside down around your shoulder. Apparently, Vanu soldiers have rubber arms, else the rocket launcher would go through their head when reloading.
    • The Commissioner and Underboss revolvers in Planetside 2 split their ammo chambers in half along each side of the gun, which are then both reloaded by separate speed-loaders. Interestingly, it doesn't matter how the chamber is orientated from firing, it will always split in half along the gun's centerline. However, if 3 or less shots have been fired, only the left side of the chamber is reloaded.
    • The Vanu Sovereignty's "bolt-action" sniper rifles in PS2 will blast out their side-mounted battery packs every time they are fired, which are then smacked back into place when the user cycles the "bolt". Reloading all Vanu weapons replaces the side-mounted battery in a ridiculously complicated screwing motion. Players using the VS pump-action plasma shotguns individually slide in what appear to be Energizer AA-batteries into the bottom of the gun.
  • The "Beta Shotgun" in the Steam version of Postal 2 is one of the few weapons in the game to not do the classic Bottomless Magazines thing and actually require reloads. However, the reload consists of the Dude grabbing all six shells at once and smashing them into the open ejection port of the shotgun, only one of which actually goes in and the other five scattering away from the gun.
  • There was a button in The Punisher video game for the Xbox that let you kill practically any normal Mook with a melee/point blank attack with whatever weapon you're currently holding. For one of the shotgun melee kills The Punisher hits the barrel of the shotgun to the guy's gut and uses the victim's own terrified grip on the forearm to help him load another shell with another jab forward, to eventually blast the poor guy in the stomach.
  • Raw Data plays with the trope. If you're playing as Bishop, at first you need to manually pull a magazine from your belt and slot it into your pistol - but you don't eject the old magazine first. Later, you unlock Proximity Reloads, which let you reload just by bringing your pistol down to your waist.
  • The MP7 in Red Steel has the same basic reload animation as the Mini-Uzi (replace the magazine, pull back the charging handle), except for this gun Scott decides to use his mind to pull the handle back (likely because the MP7's handle is in a different location than the Mini-Uzi's and they didn't want to put much effort in a different animation for it).
  • Resident Evil:
    • Resident Evil 4 features the Broken Butterfly revolver which Leon reloads in a pretty badass way. Since it's a break-open revolver, he flips down the barrel to break it open, unloads the spent bullets over his shoulder, throws three bullets into it (regardless of how many he actually has to reload) and flip-snaps it shut. What makes it awesome is that, even without a reload speed upgrade, that procedure takes about two seconds.
    • It returns in Resident Evil 5, and you can see that Chris is actually loading the bullets two at a time.
    • If the player attempts to reload the Chicago Typewriter (one of the three special weapons with infinite ammunition) while wearing the Mafia suit, Leon instead fiddles with his hat and sighs annoyedly. Unless you do it four times in a row, in which case he tosses his hat in the air, catches it, and poses dramatically.
  • Robo Recall gives you Throw-Away Guns, with replacements teleported straight into your holsters after a short delay. If that wasn't unorthodox enough, you can actually reload an empty gun by throwing it at an enemy robot, watching it bounce off of them with an ammo icon popping up, snatch that gun right out of the air and shoot them with it. Does it make sense? No. Is it cool? Hell yeah!
  • S4 League is full of this. Just about every weapon is reloaded by doing something that looks cool, regardless of whether any new magazines or ammo is even involved.
  • Any time the Boss reloads dual-wielded pistols or SMGs in the first two Saints Row games, s/he just spins them around without actually touching the mags or even any ammo. It's that kind of game. Reload animations in The Third and IV all actually look like reload animations, but upgrades allow you to speed up how fast the animations play out and get back to the shooting quicker.
  • Serious Sam's revolvers are loaded by shaking the cylinder loose, and then shaking it right back into place without actually putting in new ammo. Justified in that the revolvers have techno-magical ammunition replenishers and refill empty chambers with fresh bullets.
  • In the Splatoon series, all weapon use ink as ammo. Since your player character is a humanoid squid/octopus creature, your ammunition will naturally regenerate over time, but transforming into your cephalopod form and jumping into the nearest ink puddle of your own colour is the fastest way to get it back.
  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R., bizarrely enough for a First-Person Shooter so far into the realistic end of the Facklers scale, has one in the PK machine gun. When reloading, no player character ever flips up the lid to swap the belts; all they do is replace the underside box, connect the new belt to the side of the gun and rack the bolt. The previous belt just vanishes into thin air.
  • In the game Stranglehold the only time Inspector Tequila ever reloads is when he is about to unleash his barrage attack.
  • The now-defunct MMORPG Tabula Rasa generally used fairly realistic reloading animations, but a few months before it was canceled they added dual pistols based on popular demand. They were reloaded by simply spinning them, Western style.
  • Everybody in Team Fortress 2 can be seen loading physical ammunition pulled from their Hyperspace Arsenal into their weapons and for the most part look like it can be pulled off in real life, at least from the player's perspective. However, there are many exceptions, and every class has at least one unorthodox reload animation, though some in the list are presumably bugs and oversights. The community goes to great lengths to create reload animation mods to correct these.
    • The Scout reloads his pistol by dropping the magazine out, flipping it on his finger by the trigger, inserting a new mag in, and completing the spin. Due to an oversight, he doesn't insert or eject anything from the Lugermorph when he reloads it, only pats the grip of the gun. Also, his scattergun technically seems like it has a bottomless magazine, as the "reload" animation simply has him working the lever action; he never actually inserts anything into it.
    • The Soldier jams four rockets at once into the front of his tube-shaped launcher's barrel. Prior to the Love & War Update, all of his unlockable launchers has a similar oversight to the Lugermorph, where he didn't actually insert any rockets into them at all.
    • Again due to the same oversight, the Pyro doesn't insert any shells when reloading the shotgun and Reserve Shooter, appearing to flick the air underneath the gun.
    • The Demoman's pipe grenade launcher has a four round magazine, but the in-game model quite clearly has six chambers (this is for game balance reasons; letting him shoot six grenades between reloads was deemed overpowered). On top of that, the barrels never rotate in the loading animation—he's stuffing all those grenades into the same chamber, Soldier-style (although they do rotate when firing). The Loch-n-Load, Loose Cannon and Iron Bomber all use the same reload animation as the Grenade Launcher, so the Demoman doesn't actually slide the grenades into the barrel. Also, his stickybomb launcher, much like the Scout's scattergun, technically has a bottomless magazine; the "reload" animation simply has him working the bolt, which somehow magically forms new bombs.
    • When the Engineer reloads the Pistol (same pistol as the Scout's), he jams a new magazine in backwards. As with the Scout, he merely pats the grip when reloading the Lugermorph.
    • Much like the Scattergun and Stickybomb launcher, the Medic's line of syringe guns have Bottomless Magazines... of syringes. He still has to replace the air canisters in the back (which function identically to box magazines as far as the player needs to be concerned).
    • The Sniper's bolt-action rifle in-game just seems like it has a bottomless magazine, but "Meet the Sniper" shows it's a single-shot. He just reloads every single bullet by hand in the time it takes to normally operate a magazine-fed bolt-action.
    • The Spy uses both hands to reload his revolver, which is fine... unless he has also activated the Invis Watch on his left wrist (which also appears on-screen), making him appear to have three hands. Additionally, when he reloads some of his unlockable revolvers, it has the same oversight as the Lugermorph; he doesn't put any bullets in the barrel, nor do any bullets eject. And on one revolver, the Enforcer, the Spy's left hand disappears instead of the bullets, which levitate into and out of the chambers of their own accord.
  • The Terminator in Terminator 3: The Redemption flip-cocks his shotgun after every shot as in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Even more unorthodox, the shotgun in question this time isn't lever-action.
  • Time Commando: In the Wild West level, the Twin Revolvers weapon reloads by having the protagonist spin them around his fingers. This gives it the fastest reload of any weapon in the game.
  • Unreal II: The Awakening. The Drakk Laser Cannon. The ammo pods look like tiny mechanical octopi that load themselves into the weapon, inserting their tentacles into a number of holes on the surface of the gun.

    Web Original 
  • The Master Chief in Haloid kills a group of Elites with a shotgun, mixing fancy pumps of the shotgun with martial arts.
  • In between making orthodox reload animations for school and work, YouTuber hyper sneaks in the occasional treat, such as coughing up a spare magazine, and eyedropping revolver rounds from a full-moon clip.
  • This particularly unorthodox reload has to be seen to be believed.
  • And twelve years later, the same guy that made the video above collaborated with Corridor Digital to make this!
  • Kommander Karl makes videos of himself "reloading" objects as if they were video game weapons. Here is a compilation of some of his most popular reloads.

    Western Animation 
  • The Legend of Vox Machina: As seen in this video, Percy has an unusual model of speedloader for his weapon, apparently a device that he pushes into the front of the barrels, twisting a handle to deposit the rounds. The eccentricity is justified—the gun is not a revolver as it is normally understood, but a pepperbox, a primitive firearm design consisting single-shot barrels arranged in a cylinder sequence.
  • Samurai Jack: X9 and the other assassin robots from his era had small little claws under their sleeves. After they'd empty a cartridge, they eject, and the claws come from under the sleeves and put in new ones.
  • Slugterra: Diablos Nacho reloads his blaster by slamming it against the bandolier of canisters on his chest.

    Real Life 
  • As demonstrated in this video, lots of competitive shooters are focused on speedy and efficient reloads of their weapons. A lot of range exercises and competitions score on both speed and accuracy, and feature more targets than can be accounted for in a single magazine. An extra .05 on the clock could mean the difference between first and second place.
  • There may come a time when a one-handed pistol reload becomes necessary, whether due to being in combat and holding something important (such as a child, or a cell phone while calling the police), or getting injured in the other arm. It doesn't have to be limited to combat either: a more mundane example would be breaking your arm in an accident but still wanting to spend time at the shooting range with one good arm. In these circumstances, it's possible to chamber a semi-automatic pistol with only one hand, as demonstrated here. Another (much less reliable) method is here: this one is not exactly practical for most people, though, since it requires a great deal of upper body strength to pull off.
  • To a more realistic degree, some actual guns have a slightly unorthodox reload action that is actually part of their standard operation procedure, and these unusual yet realistic actions make them screenwriter favorites. Some examples include:
    • The "HK slap": a slap on the charging handle after loading a fresh magazine found on several HK guns. This is also an action recommended by the manufacturer themselves and not from field experience.
    • The Ithaca shotgun's "slamfire": on models without a trigger disconnector, it is possible to rapid fire the gun by jackhammering the slide while keeping the trigger pushed
    • The M16's "tap and slap": tapping the magazine against your helmet to align the rounds and prevent a misfeed, inserting the magazine and slapping the bolt release paddle
    • The M1 Garand's distinctive "ping" when firing the last shot is a favorite.

 
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Shooting the frag grenade

Jigen puts a stop to a masked paramilitary soldier throwing frags by shooting one before he can hurl it. It sets off a chain reaction that detonates the other grenadeson his bandolier, killing the others.

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