I lean towards leaving this c2 cloze italicized just because it’s preceded by an italicized word. What do you think @Brian_BH? Also, tangential but I’m just curious: what are the display issues that can be caused by bold/italic cloze brackets?
Hey hey. 
Basically, because of the way Anki handles markdown for certain formatting, bolding or other formatting in brackets can occasionally have a few wayward effects
For example, bolding, or italicization, or underlining, involves HTML/CSS formatting which can interfere with certain add-ons, rendering of things like Mathjax (which also use brackets to append), and can bleed over to other parts of the card in unintended ways.
This is a cheap exaggerated example, but it illustrates an easy visualization of the basic idea, albeit in an intentionally simplified way:
This is an overly simple example, and it’s worth pointing out that as long as all formatting is pristine it shouldn’t be a problem. But, in cases where the brackets themselves have formatting once you start adding additional brackets and/or formatting to notes (which is common, in a lot of circumstances, either in personal editing or various formatting tweaks, add-ons, etc.), the formatting on the brackets themselves can carry over or conflict with other elements in the note in unintended ways.
This example is simplistic, but depending on the permutation it can happen when additional formatting is interspersed from add-ons and/or interrupt the brackets that things like Mathjax use (the one I see the most from users who reach out is the BionicReading add-on, though others can cause the same hiccup/s).
For this reason I’ve tried to clean up the formatting on the brackets themselves, and this card is a good example. As long as the targeted word is italicized, it still shows up just fine (but without the added potential complication of additional formatting on the brackets themselves).
Hopefully that makes sense though happy for any thoughts or feedback
Edit:
I’ll add that I sort of stumbled onto this realization many months ago when troubleshooting for a user who reached out having some issue with cards in the MCAT deck, and realized that it also fixed some other problems I had seen other users have (and that I had seen myself on occasion).
It’s one of those things that gets overlooked, I think, and I figured surely no one is crazy enough to want to go through and clean up the bracket formatting in the Step deck (given its size) so I thought I’d make myself useful as I work my way through. Seemed a harmless, and potentially helpful, sprucing up that sidesteps a handful of potential pitfalls at the very least.
Wow, thanks for that in-depth explanation! Keep up the awesome work and suggestions!!
What do you think about italicizing the brackets as an exception in scenarios where the clozed word is part of a broader phrase which is italicized? I feel like it looks kinda weird to have (before revealing the answer):
“italicized word [non-italicized brackets]”
as opposed to:
“italicized word [italicized brackets]”
I imagine you’d say it’s better to not italicize the brackets in this scenario, just so we don’t potentially run into problems in the future? There’s no policy on this…I’m just musing over here as to what the best approach is!
Gosh, It’s a great point
It does look kinda goofy and out of place in that example, for sure, to have one half of the phrase italicized and the other ramrod vertical?
I confess I do think it looks smarter for it to match the surrounding phrase (maybe that’s my OCD flinching)
Agreed in that I don’t know what a reasonable policy would be there. Better to avoid (admittedly not super common) potential formatting conflicts, or hew toward a card that is presentable and reasonable to look at?
I think, given license to muse, it feels wrong to mix-and-match styles within a phrase, right? ‘Fixing’ the brackets avoids what might be a very small percentage of display hiccups against a very high percentage of 100,000+ subscribers who are going to see the normal iteration hundreds (thousands?) of times across their Anki career?
Forest for the trees, baby-with-the-bath-water vibes?
I think I trust your instinct there. Leaving it to appropriately match its surroundings might be the more credible, and defensible, stylistic convention (typography professors and copy editors around the world will breathe a collective sigh of relief)
Lol, valid points, valid points. Let’s sit on it for a few days and give my (our) self-diagnosed OCD some time to think it over haha
Let’s do non-italics, why not! 
(on a whim)