King Krávoka
An infection of Your universe.
As far as any living creature goes, barnacles definitely ask the most for you to torture them. Their mere life illegally crosses the border between animal, vegetable, and mineral. Objects covered in barnacles will resemble an enormous piece of feces, a pile of vomit, or maybe the world's ugliest rock. Together they make anything appear to have dozens of superfluous beaks. Many more beautiful and intelligent species end up as the growing beds for barnacles, and tend to appreciate having those pieces of trash pried off of their bodies. Barnacles are the planet's worst venereal disease. A barnacle can not be described as a sitting duck, anything that sits is far beyond the intellectual capacity of these ugly lumps. Their capacity to resist the rightful cruelty of all Adam's subjects is completely dependent on their concrete exterior. Other species cover themselves in shell, or wood, even chitin, but barnacles are a contagious form of brutalist architecture. Even coral has the common sense to color itself like a children's cereal. It would not be meaningfully unethical to forcefully disassemble that hideous meat geode for the longest time period possible, a creature's capacity for suffering is proportionate to the complexity of its life, and how can you believe that a barnacle has any more complexity to the span of its existence than the millions of lobsters that are boiled every year, or even the insects which we casually incinerate?
