On one hand it makes sense that medieval european social relations imply, well, medieval european social relations and it makes sense to use your novel (or your show) to examine those.
On the other I can relate to many people wanting to see women in medieval fantasy to be represented in some other way than constant misery porn.
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I was interested in the "world" of GoT, so I did some digging into the maps and places that didn't come up in the show. The broader world is really just a lazy version of our own world. Like, there's a land with an Asian-sounding name that has Asian-looking people in it. Some cold forested land in the north that is named some word that's very close to "Moscow". There are black folks but they live in the warm, tropical south. And some more examples like that.
It gets extremely lazy sometimes. There's the city Qarth that's the seat of a renowned trading empire and it's a rival to the surrounding areas. It's depicted as controlled by rulers only interested in gold and jewels who maintain their decadence through control of the sea lanes. Oh and it's on a separate continent.
It's just Carthage, it's how Romans talked about Carthage.
Carthage is Qart Hadasht in it's original Phoenician too
Is that lazy though? What's wrong with putting Carthage in a story
Nothing, they just want to be Mad At Something Popular
yeah I have problems
Why wouldn’t melanin levels correspond to distance from the equator?
It’s not like GRRM makes a secret out of doing this, he’s talked about it a ton in interviews how the plot of GoT is loosely based off the War of the Roses and that Westeros is England but bigger.
Not saying he's like, racist about it per se. Just that he's uncreative.
Mossovy (what you though was Moscow) is more like Siberia than Moscow. Its a general area not even a city or nation state.
The closest equivalent to Medieval Russian would be Norvos or Qohor and even then its a really distant analog
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That's also the woman who set a woman who poisoned her rapist husband on fire...
Geez, people weren't kidding with the Hillary comparison.
it's so weird because the show (haven't read the books) seemed to look at her actions positively throughout the first seasons and then in the couple of last ones she starts acting more and more unhinged until become a war criminal and a despot. so fucking bizarre that all the show lead up to was a cringe cautionary tale of "populism". i'm not sure if it was supposed to be more about her being a relative of the mad king or what but it was so awful either way.
As another user said, if your worldbuilding is based on materialist conception of history then it’s going to necessarily involve class struggle and reaction. If your feudal world doesn’t have these then it’s very disconnected from how reality works and it endorses an idealist view of history if you can just edit out the parts of reality you don’t like when they should be there based on the conditions. This is the primary way that monarchists and reactionaries push their ideology, they make up a clean fantasy world and say that’s what happened instead of the reality.
Writing a bunch of feudal fantasy fiction where there’s no reaction is Disneyfied monarchist propaganda