okay question!
thoughts on people in fanfic and fandom having the depictions of Ra's being a bad person & the LoA being a cult? (this is excluding talia being a bad person and ra's being creepy)
(also as someone who also almost purely just visits the damian-centric tag on ao3 for batfam content, I totally agree with you on how every time I venture away from it they do my son so dirty and it makes me so sad TT)
DC fandom on ao3 is the trenches of war and the 'Damian-centric' tag is my only ammunition against the enemies.
I like how you already filter out the Creepy Ra's al-Ghul. Makes this way easier.
Anyways, regarding your question, it ultimately depends on what crimes they're making him commit. I'm Genderfluid enough to admit that both Talia and Ra's are morally grey, the man more so than her, but not enough that they'd be pinned down to just as the villain.
It also brings conflict when it comes to reading Damian as a character, because most (if not all) of his backstory stemmed from Ra's/Talia being inherently morally-ambiguous or a straight up bad person.
Here's an artistic rendition from yours truly:
However, I also believe that both Ra's and Talia can be good people with good intentions gone bad. It's like how a certain parenting style from a certain region won't be favoured in another country, or how at one point neglect was normalized.
I don't want to pin people who think that Ra's is just a bad person as anything through and through— I used to be in a similar boat. It's easy to believe that Ra's is a horrible man considering that he's often narrated to be the bane of Damian's existence, even in comics.
Damian's fans are put in a confusing conundrum of having to nit-pick at Ra's every intentions, as Damian himself could be some sort of an unreliable narrator when it comes to unpacking his trauma (tm), and having to substantiate Damian's own story— not wanting to disregard anything but not wanting to assassinate Ra's character either. It also certainly doesn't help that a huge number of DC executive writers had it out for Arab people/POC (fucking Tom King when I get you).
So, unlike the people who pinned down Talia as a bad mother, I wouldn't be as harsh when it comes to people who make Ra's to be some sort of a villain. BUT, there still needs to be a limit; all of Ra's 'crimes' should be ultimately tied down to him wanting the best for the planet.
He trained Damian so harshly so Damian could one day lead humanity in his absence. He kills because those people are posing as a threat to the environment. He does this and that for the planet, if not for his family.
See my post of my ideal characterisation of the al-Ghuls. You'll understand what I mean.
In retrospect, I do believe that people who are convinced of the depiction of LoA being a cult could have an interesting conversation to be had. This argument was first brought to my interest by @daminette-56 's post where they claim that it's inherently racist/stemmed from racism that the only 'cult' within DC-verse is the LoA and isn't the Court of Owls, who, to be fair tends to act more cult-ish in comparison to the LoA.
However, this topic could be pretty messy and sensitive, so let's go through them one by one:
According to Wikipedia (and this is taken in verbatim) a 'cult' is defined as:
"Cults are social groups which have unusual, and often extreme, religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals. Extreme devotion to a particular person, object, or goal is another characteristic often ascribed to cults. The term has different, and sometimes divergent or pejorative, definitions both in popular culture and academia and has been an ongoing source of contention among scholars across several fields of study."
And this is what the Oxford Dictionary has to offer:
"A system of religious veneration and devotion directed towards a particular figure or object."
I don't necessarily agree that people who enthusiastically agree on something is a cult—because then it'd be stupid, and then presents the idea that there's a lot of marginalized cults around us. Religions would be cults. A political belief could be a cult. Lydia from two blocks down who watches WitchTok religiously might as well be part of a cult.
So, no. Boiling the LoA down as a cult because they have a shared belief of achieving the perfect future utopia is, arguably, narrow-minded. If anything, it'd make them an organisation with shared value of preserving the environment.
Not to mention, it perpetuates an orientalist idea often spread by the Western of any and every radical organisation from the Middle East is immediately a cult. Like how all Arab women are either oppressed, forced to cover head to toe and wear the burqa or scantily clothed with sexualized belly-dancers attire. Or how Arab men are either angry Muslim terrorists/evangelist that's perverted towards young white man or a sheikh.
However, this doesn't deter the fact that Damian was isolated from the world. He didn't go to school nor have friends his age until he was well over 13 years old, and that's horrible news for his social development assuming that he was meant to socialize at all. You'd see me referencing Damian as a refugee seeking shelter as someone who just escaped from a cult— but that's because Damian exhibits signs often associated with victims who just left a cult, even though I don't even see LoA as a cult necessarily. While Damian looks like he just escaped from one, doesn't mean the LoA is one.
However, I often make a follow-up joke that Damian escapes a cult just to enter another one, that being the BatFam.
The LoA is a cult because they believe in the future of utopia? So does BatFam, except it's limited to just Gotham. The LoA dabbles in a pretty violent way to achieve that goal? So does BatFam, where they beat up criminals and play the part of the executioner.
So, it's either I see both as a cult, or neither.
Hence why I insist that it's stupid to chalk what's a cult and what isn't on a few checklists.
Again, I can't punish the people who believe the LoA is a cult too harshly considering that I see where they're coming from. I can, however, ask them to not participate in a trend where people approached Ra's and the LoA with a close-minded view.