While not everyone reading this is necessarily familiar with Final Fantasy, many of you are, I would presume, familiar with other franchises, be they video games, TV shows, films, books, anime, whatever floats your boat. And we're in the same boat. While pathFinal Fantasy is, as the name would imply, primarily focused on translating Final Fantasy into a tabletop system, we'd be lying if we said that Final Fantasy was all we thought of in regards to what we could translate.
To that end, there are several aspects of pathFinal Fantasy that have what is known as the "Pop Culture" designation, be they feats, archetypes or even entire base classes. What's important to note is that we've given these separate designations for a reason. While many of you may enjoy them and get a bit of a chuckle at the idea of, say, a Moogle doing an impression of Jonathan Joestar, we understand that such things may not match the flavour or tone of what your GM has in mind; so separating them out allows GMs to bar their use entirely without needing to worry about not understanding any particular reference.
It should be noted, however, that the pop culture designation is just a convinence thing for GMs. From a "design perspective", so to speak, pathFinal Fantasy makes no distinction between its pop culture content and its final fantasy content. What this means is that non pop culture content is free to reference pop culture content in situations where it would be advantageous.
We want to make it clear that in those situations, the reference would not inherently be intended as a pop culture reference. It would simply because the non pop culture content needs to make use of the mechanics and, even in situations where pop culture content is banned wholesale, such non pop culture content should still be allowed to function even though it uses something that is "technically" banned.
While, at the time of writing, no such cross-polination has actually ocurred, and thus we cannot actualy give an example of it functioning, we just wanted to make people aware that it is a possibility going forwards.
Note: The things that have been given the pop-culture designation are because they're references to those works in function, heavily attempting to mimic aspects of that work within the content itself. It should be noted, however, that there are many abilities (Mainly talents, spells, class options) that are in-name-only references (Or close enough to) to non-final fantasy works, rather than being designed from the ground up as an attempt to interpret the original work within pathfinder mechanics.
For example, the Boldwyr Intimidation Technique talent of warrior is a reference to a Magic The Gathering card, Boldwyr Intimidator, the Force spell being a conversion of a spell from Lost Odyssey (The effect being a spell that deals physical damage), most of the Monk's blitz techniques are named after pokemon moves, and a few of Bard's Verses and Choruses are named after Darkest Dungeon quotes and chants in Pillars Of Eternity. Even if you do not wish to include pop-culture content in your game, we cannot stress enough how you should not ban the in-name-only references, as almost all of them are going to be core aspects of those classes which in some cases, like the monk, they literally cannot function without.
Generally speaking, anything that is going to be worth banning as pop-culture content will be an alternative character option, such as an archetype or alternative base class, or something that is class-independent, such as a feat or item.
