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.
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