Do Pledges have to be spoken?

[Vintervalpen]

This is something I started thinking about recently. How does pledges work through online media, if at all?

Can you swear a Motley Oath over Discord, only in typing? If your roommate writes to you that they promise to do the dishes, can you seal that promise? Can you make a Pupil's devotion oath via voice/video calls?

Or in less contemporary settings, could you write a contract on a piece of parchment and use your signatures as a way of creating an Oath? Or do you have to speak the words to use Pledges at all? If so, could a mute changeling not join a Court? What about text to speech or other similar technologies?

To make a sealing, you need to witness someone make a statement of intent. If you are playing a video game and your teammates write "I swear if you win this round I will give you one one millions dollar LOLOL", could you seal that? Could you have a Freefold where joining a Court is an event that happens on Facebook?

[Van Owen]

To make a sealing, you need to witness someone make a statement of intent. If you are playing a video game and your teammates write "I swear if you win this round I will give you one one millions dollar LOLOL", could you seal that? Could you have a Freefold where joining a Court is an event that happens on Facebook?

At least in 1E, this could very easily happen, and it gave examples of Changelings and Gentry turning such declarations into Oaths, which were then enforced by the Wyrd, the upshot being "be careful of what you say in the presence of the fae."

[Satchel]

"[A] sealing requires that a fae being see or hear someone make a statement of intent. […] If the changeling were to see a person type or write a statement, she could seal it."

"All participants must speak the oath aloud or write it out, and seal it with a point of Glamour. Oaths also involve a physical gesture; two changelings swearing an oath of camaraderie might cut their hands and mingle the blood, while changelings swearing eternal love usually kiss. A changeling joining a court might clasp hands with a ranking member of that court, while a changeling joining a motley could embrace each of the other members in turn."

My reading is that oaths can't be conducted remotely (can't shake hands with someone through a video call, though meeting in dreams would work) but can be conducted without spoken language, and sealing requires you to see or hear the person making the statement (otherwise you get into tangled nonsense around intent if you try to seal someone through a text media account that's not theirs).