Fantasy
Magical oaths are only interesting once somebody starts asking who gets to decide they count.
If the words do the work, fine. If the witnesses do, that gets messy fast. If the punishment is what makes it binding, then the real power sits with whoever controls the cost of breaking it. Which is usually where the loopholes live. Sworn on a dead god, witnessed by a lying court, broken in a way that technically doesn’t count. Very tidy. Very suspicious.
The system is never the point. The enforcement is.
If the words do the work, fine. If the witnesses do, that gets messy fast. If the punishment is what makes it binding, then the real power sits with whoever controls the cost of breaking it. Which is usually where the loopholes live. Sworn on a dead god, witnessed by a lying court, broken in a way that technically doesn’t count. Very tidy. Very suspicious.
The system is never the point. The enforcement is.
The awkward bit is that a lot of stories use oaths as if they were furniture. Sit on one, and it holds. In practice, any binding vow worth reading about ought to have an escape hatch, because people do. The interesting part is who wrote the hatch into the thing in the first place.