I used to love stories about how the protagonist would be at some beach or river and randomly stumble upon an old-looking class bottle with a note inside. I (and I’m sure many others) have romanticised this idea of finding a message in a bottle before and becoming friends with a stranger or maybe finding out a juicy secret of someone long dead. But in reality, the thought of myself or anyone doing the whole ‘put a message in a bottle and throw it into the sea’ today makes me cringe. That’s littering! It’s blatant pollution of the sea!
This comic alludes to this idea that people used to (perhaps some still do?) have this same romanticise the idea of putting a message in a bottle for someone to find. But instead of some poetic message, the message that the artist wants to convey in particular is with regards to the massive quantity of plastic bottles polluting the ocean.
The comic is also situated in today’s context, where it is very easy to find bottles in water bodies because of their sheer quantity. Though the man says he misses the old messages in bottles, I don’t think anyone today would pay any attention to some random bottle floating into the ocean. It would almost definitely be regarded as typical litter and ignored. I suspect that this ‘message in a bottle’ idea is definitely going to be a thing of the past (if it ever was a thing at all, outside of fictional stories).
