#do not even start with me with this damian is irredeemable bullshit i will hit you

[thekidthesuperkid]

Actually I'm not done talking about the Damian grew up in a cult thing. You see, the thing you might not get if you're relying on a pop-culture understanding of cults, is that they are very very good at brainwashing people and they dont let you know theyre doing it. It is their entire purpose in fact. Their entire purpose is to strip you of every bit of personality and individuality you have, take away your will to object, take away your ability to think and reason critically about what they're telling you, and then selectively feed you only what they want you to believe, and all of it without you even noticing its happening, like boiling a crab. They are very good at isolating you so you have nobody to snap you out of it. They are very good at making you distrusting and even afraid of the outside world so that you never willingly leave. They are very good at stripping away your self esteem and your confidence and your ability to trust yourself and your decisions so that you never make decisions contrary to their goals.

Let me make this clear: cults do not let you think. Cults do not let you use your own moral compass. Cults do not let you be opposed to anything they do.

Now imagine someone didn't just end up in a cult later in life, imagine they weren't trusting of the wrong person and that led to their being stuck in a cult, imagine instead that they were born in it. Imagine they didn't just have their personhood and individuality stripped away, imagine they were never allowed to develop it in the first place. Imagine they have never in their lives experienced a world outside that group, they can't even picture what it would be like. Imagine they never learned critical thinking skills, imagine they don't know how to just THINK about what they believe beyond what's been fed to them.

Imagine you are that person and you've just been forced to leave your entire world. Everything you believe is no longer true and you cant tell what IS true. Now that you're forced outside the cult, you're now in a situation you've been conditioned to be more afraid of than any other situation, even death. Now imagine yourself at ten years old and think of the scariest thing you experienced at that age and how lost and confused you felt and how little context and coping skills you had, and then think of the difference between how well you would be able to handle that same thing now versus when you were ten. And then take that difference and apply it to how you imagined it might feel like leaving a cult for you now at your current age.

Do you get it? Do you understand why Damian would've at first fallen back on familiar patterns of behaviour instead of immediately and perfectly molding to his new environment? Do you see why Damian needed a bit of time to adapt, let alone start forming a better moral compass?

Grown adults have fallen into much worse behaviors after leaving even milder cults than Damian did. Grown adults have come out the other side of cults that look like nothing in comparison to the League of Assassins, and never had the strength of will to grow or learn or improve. And Damian was a kid, even more vulnerable and impressionable and with even less maturity and mental and emotional strength. And he's LEARNING. He's growing and changing and improving and becoming a better person and developing his own ideals and standing by them. He's only four years out from leaving the League and he's already done so much. Some people leave cults much tamer than that and take their entire lives to make the progress he did. He's doing fucking incredible. And that's not even getting into the whole "being forced to kill as a child" thing.

Also here's some reading you can do on the mental effects of cults on children whove grown up in them:

EDIT: adding a basic model for understanding how cults function: