This is part of Nimbus Llewelyn's Signature Style — which is unsurprising, given how he's repeatedly indicated that he's very heavily influenced by Terry Pratchett. Child of the Storm uses variations on bold, italics, and bolded italics to indicate psychic speech (italics), or something truly inhuman speaking, such as Chthon or Surtur.
Examples by Series
Crossovers and Fusion Fics
In Project Bluefield, the Zeros' journal entries are digital text documents that feature redactions and glitches.
KNOCKLES' DIALOGUE IS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS, TO SHOW HIS STUPIDITY.
shadoo's dialogue is in all lowercase, to show his stoic personality.
R0ter.exe inserts numb3rs @nd @ symbols into s0m3 of his w0rd5, to @dd to his gl1tchy c0mput3r m0t1f.
Tails Doll spaces out all of his words and speaks in all lowercase. However, he only says a few short sentences, because otherwise it would be... h a r d t o r e a d .
With This Ring uses text effects for a variety of purposes.
Colored text indicates strong emotion, particularly when Lanterns are using emotion-based powers. Green text, for example, indicates an exertion of willpower; violet text shows that they are speaking out of love.
If the punctuation is colored too, then the speaker is entirely suffused with the emotion, indicating that either they're a power ring (or communicating via a power ring hologram), or they have Enlightenment Superpowers, or they're overwhelmed and crazy.
Invisible text (revealed by highlighting the chapter) is communication using God Speech, an interaction between souls rather than simple words. Note that since souls are made of magic, this kind of communication can have significant effects.
Changes in the font typically indicate that something is altering the protagonist's perception, such as the alternate "Sybarite" timeline where he recharges his power ring by consuming demons, and has absorbed a more demonic outlook on the world as a result.
Santa Claus states that Goku's Blood Knight makes him a threat to the entire universe. When Goku questions how he could ever endanger the universe, a fake YouTube advertisement for Dragon Ball Super appears at the bottom of the screen.
Santa Claus tells Trunks that his time-traveling has endangered the Space-Time Continuum. When Trunks insists that the Space-Time Continuum is fine, the footage briefly switches to the 1993 version of the Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans OVA, while the rest of the special uses footage from the 2010 remake.
In The Ghost of Ochs, whenever Sothis speaks to Byleth, her dialogue is always rendered with centered italics to differentiate it from standard italics for characters' thoughts. Characters with a Secret Identity Vocal Shift, such as the Death Knight and Flame Emperor, have their speech written in bold italics.
In Forward (Peptuck), scenes from River's perspective portray her chaotic and jumbled thoughts. Text is centered instead of left-aligned, and a seemingly random mixture of italics, bolds, capitalizations, and underlinings are used. Coupled with a stream-of-consciousness narration that is liberally sprinkled with non sequiturs, random thoughts, and the sheer jumbled confusion that is River's brain, it makes for a very surreal and effective read.
When Adrien is affected by mind-altering akumas in Spellbound (Lilafly), his human side is suppressed and his fae side comes to the fore. This makes his speech become unnerving and unnatural, represented by alternating regular and italic letters.
Faedrien: What’s the matter? It’s just me, my lady.
Background Pony: The titular character's name is always written in green.
Black Queen, Red King: When Rex telepathically thinks to Chrysalis, it's written in orange. When she replies, it's written in green. Also, certain words that describe Rex's and Chrysalis' souls have Zalgo text, like this: t҉̻̙ḛ͈̩̫͚n̠̭͍̗̫d̤̬͍͇̲͝ͅr̘̯͠i͝ļs̞̤̜͓.
Mendacity: The narration describes the realm of Faerie in long paragraphs of run-on sentences, distinct from the rest of the story.
Paper Mario: The Land of Harmony provides an interesting example: the story is written as if it were a Wii U gamenote Pinkie Pie flat-out says that it is a Wii U game in the first interlude, so characters in-story refer to things such as a gamepad and DLC, after the intro scene (reminiscent of Past Sins) a save file is created, after each chapter a save screen shows up, every now and again a multiple-choice screen appears, etc.
Pink Personal Hell And Altering Fate takes a few cues from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, separating all the "Pink Personal Hell" and "Altering Fate" sections from one another with the narratives bolded (and the shift in perspective), but when the two become one, instead of jumping to the other, they are simply "Pink Personal Hell and Altering Fate".
Sunsplit Saga: In Sunsplit, the sections of text from the magical linked journal, have their sections marked with a black bar on the left, are indented further in, and the speakers' words are colored for their coat color. Purple for Twilight, Yellow for Sunset, Orange for Sunburst.
Percy Jackson: Spirits: Vaatu's manipulations of other beings take the form of sections of their inner monologues colored red to represent thoughts that he's planting in their head. Raava's counter-influence likewise takes the form of sections of blue text in smaller print.
Whenever there's a "Freaky Friday" Flip, players tend to switch their avatars to that of the normal player of that character.
The use of music IRP to affect the mood of posts.
The Terrifying Presence Auric power is signified by the use of eviltext IRP.
Heart of Gold super empathy is signified by the use of gold text.
Thoughts, whether telepathic or otherwise, are often signified by the use of italics.
Brackets are used to signify Monese, except in the PMD universes where everyone speaks it, save for PMD-B when the brackets come back for interaction with humans.
Glitchmons tend to use an intentionally glitchy font when speaking.
Later, Traitor: When Frazie accidentally uses a Confusion Grenade on herself, the story's formatting messes itself up. Part of a sentence is printed vertically and then backwards.
With Strings Attached has a lot of this, including italics for the Fans and for telepathy, the use of brackets and other symbols instead of quotes to indicate that a different Fan is speaking (as their sections are all dialogue), gradually darkening text to indicate that Paul is slowly coming to grips with their situation, run-on sentences when John's life flashes before his eyes, and text floating around the page for a variety of reasons.
The Keys Stand Alone continues the tradition of Painting the Medium started in With Strings Attached. One notable new “painting” is the way the crazy, demigod-like Trelayna speaks telepathically, with all caps when she refers to herself and much smaller text for people she dislikes.
In Everqueen, the scene of Isha healing broken Machine Spirits uses Zalgo for a Chaos corrupted one. A broken device has text mixed with binary code and All Caps.
has the story divided into two-to-three columns, representing the two narrators and, occasionally, the Scrabble board they were playing with.