Barbaracle is one of Kalos' best-known pokemon outside of the region, but many foreigners are surprised to learn that these pokemon actually exist. Barbaracle have become famous for their roles in Kalos' monster movies, where they play a role somewhat analogous to Golurk – sometimes heroic, sometimes villainous, and always immense beasts of fearsome, exaggerated power. A common plot device in these films is to assemble the seven Binacle of legend to allow Barbaracle to be born, where they will either save or destroy the world depending on the role this pokemon is cast in.
Yet Barbaracle's appearance strikes many even in Kalos as bizarre or absurd, and outside of Kalos this combination of seven pokemon into one chimerical beast was thought too strange to even exist – and mistranslations of Kalosian texts about the first Barbaracle films have aided this misunderstanding by convincing many in the rest of the world that Barbaracle as a species, and not the specific, influential Barbaracle of that particular movie, is a public domain fictional character that has become a staple of film in Kalos.
In the internet age, both the existence of easily accessible, reliable reference works and the large number of people from Kalos who have seen a live Barbaracle have dispelled for many this century-old misconception. Yet even today, it is not that rare on Kalos' beaches for tourists to treat wild Barbaracle like mascots or movie props, only to be surprised when they react with the surprise and occasional aggression of genuine and wild pokemon; these tourists, in a myriad of languages, typically respond with a shocked yelp of "They're real?"