I fail to see how this supposed obsession with sub-saharan africa of a couple rulers, that they never got to actually interact with in any appreciable way makes them more relevant to quasi-europe than actual european cultures...
If you read the article (which you can't because universities charge you like £100 to read a single article), it's clear that it wasn't just a couple of rulers, it was a Europe-wide phenomenon, and the fact that the depictions are actually fairly realistic suggests that they also got to meet people from subsaharan Africa, although it's not clear how. Medieval people didn't have any modern concept of ethnicity so any black Africans they may have met would have just been called Muslim or "Moor" in the sources.
Europe was not some interconnected union. Just looking at a Mercator map you get a very poor understanding of how much different states or the people living in them would have interacted. In the early middle ages the King of the Franks would have had almost no formal contact with Finland, the Kievan Rus or even the Byzantines, while at the same time the pope was sending missionaries to China and there were Arab and Persian settlements around the China sea, and literal metric tonnes of mass produced Chinese pottery is found all over the Mediterranean and Africa, which was itself influenced by Persian art. In the early middle ages there was a similar amount of trade between Subsaharan Africa and Europe, mostly in gold and ivory and other precious imperishables.
My point is that the proximity between states in the middle ages doesn't determine how much contact they had. Trade and contact happens where there is safe passage and cordial relations, and for much of europe before 1300 this wasn't the case.
Calradia is based on popculture, sure it is. But it is based on popculture that focuses on Europe and the closer areas like the Levant and northern africa, with which europeans had a lot of contact, both culturally and militarily. Does the Sub-saharan Mali count in that? Not really, I would say.
Bannerlord has literal mongols in it, dressed like they're straight out of the Yuan dynasty in the 1300s, alongside "celts" who have more in common with Tolkienian dwarves than historical celts. It also has "preislamic arabs" who bear literally no resemblance whatsoever to any of the sources we have on preislamic armies. Even the architecture is all wrong. This is what I mean by trying to use history to make sense of what will "fit" in bannerlord, because it already doesn't fit anything close to a historical Europe. Nobody can decide which "year" this game is "set" in because I doubt even Armagan knows, and he's retconned it multiple times (early on in development it was the 400s AD but now it's all over the place).
I feel like the only reason people say factions outside the pop culture norm wouldn't "fit" is because of that very reason: that pop culture depictions of the middle ages never include anything outside europe except generic arabs and generic mongols, and it would feel weird and out of place to have anything else.
