>>11309698>>11309629To continue, if you look at the pic I just posted in
>>11309698, you can see the tiny clarification that even on the right side, A and J DO make make fantasy or fictionalized visual romanticization. The deviations they make from Tenochtitlan's actual architecture/layout or actual Ehuatl wargear (in general or for the 1497 Tehuantepec campaign Ahuizotl led that the Codex Black art is based on specifically) are relatively minor, but it's still an example of not-litterally-accurate art that's well done
Something even more fantasy-ified would be Charles Rickett's designs he made in the 1920s for the never-finished Montezuma play, some of which you can see in pic related. These are VERY much not accurate, and mix ornaments and garments from different Mesoamerican cultures and time periods, invents fictional visual elements, and uses the actual ones in a way that they wouldn't have been worn in: The bottom left and right in particular stray pretty close to some of the sterotypical Concheros style outfits seen in modern pop culture
But it still manages to evoke actual Mesoamerican aeshetics despite being very much it's own original thing overall. It's difficult to nail down exactly what makes this okay but the Concheros Photo or Moctezuma II in Civ Rev in
>>11309698 bad, but the simplest way to explain it is that you can tell that Ricketts did his research (which must have been hard as shit in the 1920s, most manuscripts and a lot of museum specimens weren't even rediscovered by then) and started with authentic imagery and then changed shit around, instead of somebody not knowing what they were doing to begin with
I'm not sure I can imagine Axolotl people in padded gambeson and feather mosaic suits/tunics like
>>11306659 suggests, but I could imagine Axolotl mages in some of rickett's outits, and I'd buy the shit out of those
