Find me a contemporary depiction for more than half of the battanian and aserai armiurs and I'll shut up forever. Prove to me that they only too a tiny amount of artistic license from real historical sources like you're saying.
You're the one here making the claim that "Bannerlord armour is full of fantasy stuff," burden of proof is on you.
I find this image explains the issue succinctly
I think tbf... people might be turned off from playing Battania if they ran around with funny smurf hats and naked calves.
As I've already said in the last page:
"Overall though yes, Battania is one of the biggest mishmashes in the game. Their high tier armour is the worst offender, straight out of fantasy."
So essentially that's posting the single worst exception.
One singular piece is not representative of
all the armour in the game, which like I said, is overall reasonably realistic. You could just as easily find armour pieces in Bannerlord for your left hand image which closely match your right hand image.
Fairer to say it's more 'fictional' than it is 'fantastical'.
This sums it up nicely in my opinion.
"Fantasy" is for stuff like dragons, elves, mithril, massively elaborate designs that would have been almost impossible to create on a wide scale at a certain technology level and would have been impractical even if they did (eg WoW pauldrons or dualwielded ultragreatswords). Things which couldn't have existed in the real world.
"Fictional" is for things which probably didn't exist but probably could've. Like someone wearing two belts. Or having leather strips on their armour, or random patches of fur. None of these seem out of the realm of possibility.
This is why we use the term "historical fiction" to describe historical settings with made up events which we know didn't happen but could've, rather than "historical fantasy".
There are only 3 or so armour sets in Bannerlord which I think stray into "fantasy" territory over "fictional", and the Battanian set above is one of them, and even then it's not THAT implausible.