Functions with subscripts?

As you note, this is mostly notational choice. I might call the $\theta$ a parameter, rather than an independent variable. That is to say, you are meant to think of $\theta$ as being fixed, and $x$ as varying.

As an example (though I am not sure of the context you saw this notation), maybe you are interested in describing the collection of functions $$f(x) = x^2+c$$, where $c$ is a real number. I might call this function $f_c(x)$, so that I can later say that for $c\leq 0$, the function $f_c$ has two real roots, while for $c>0$ the roots are uniformly convex. I think these statements would be much more opaque if I made them about the function $f(x,c)$.