When a player holds a loaded crossbow in their offhand while holding and using an item that has a guaranteed right click function in the mainhand, such as a bow, shield, or trident, the crossbow will still display as active in third person despite the player being physically incapable of shooting it. Instead, holding right click will trigger the mainhand item instead and its animation will overlap with the mainhand, leading to unexpected conditions that don't make sense when rendered. This bug relates to MC-137783 that was marked fixed and was addressed by adjusting the arm positioning to avoid crossed arms while still combining the animations of each hand, but did not address the inconsistency described in this report. This current behavior is visually confusing to other players and does not convey the action being performed.

The correct behavior can actually be observed when holding a throwable item such as a snowball or fishing rod and right clicking, which will correctly lower the crossbow hand and run the throwing animation instead. This correct behavior can also be seen when using a tool with right click function such as a shovel and right clicking grass.

Also related to MC-100000 regarding issues with arm animations and crossbows.

Expected behavior:

When holding and using an item with guaranteed right click function in the main hand, the crossbow in the offhand should be lowered to indicate that it is not in use to other players while the actual animation from the used item plays out.

An alternate potential fix to this is to never do the offhand crossbow animation when an item with guaranteed right click is held in mainhand, for example, if a bow is held in the mainhand, the offhand should be lowered automatically.

To Reproduce:

1. Load a crossbow and put it in offhand
2. Go in third person. Hold a trident in mainhand and pull it, notice that it points straight down due to the angled arms that are also holding the crossbow despite the crossbow being unable to be shot. This also is illogical as the trident flips in the hand then shoots forward instead of straight down as it seems visually.
3. This can be seen as well when using a shield, in which case the shield animation plays on top of the crossbow arm position, resulting in an awkward positioning.
4. Compare this to when using a throwable, like a snowball or egg to see that the crossbow is lowered as expected during the animation.

Notes on alternate fix:

1. In regards to the alternate potential fix, this can be seen when using a bow in which case it will appear as if the crossbow will also be used when holding right click reveals the bow is the one in use. The alternate potential fix would lower the offhand whenever the right hand is holding a bow.
2. In regards to the alternate potential fix, when wielding an unloaded crossbow in the mainhand, again the offhand crossbow is the one that is active despite right click revealing otherwise. The alternate potential fix would lower the offhand whenever the right hand is holding an unloaded crossbow.