Thread:LucidPigeons/@comment-27818776-20150429114914/@comment-6489422-20150429223409

Hopper's case is actually harder than Ronan's because with Ronan, the people he supposedly "cared about" were dead and never on-screen, nor did Ronan's actions show that he cared for them personally so much as he cared about the Knight Templar cause they'd been fighting for. With Hopper we have his mother dead and off-screen, with no indication that he truly loved her and made that promise to her out of love, but we DO have the on-screen evidence of Molt himself. The fact that he's still alive and Hopper refuses to seriously hurt him despite his incompetence shows that the promise meant enough to Hopper that he's holding himself to it.

Personally I think this makes Hopper a monster with a noble quality but not necessarily a redeeming one, and I'm pretty sure he would have finally snapped and killed Molt during their second scene had Molt not blabbed that it wasn't his idea to ask Hopper to maybe back off from the ant colony, after which Hopper made a demonstration of the grasshoppers who were actually responsible. Had Molt been responsible, it could have been him crushed to death by all that grain.