Refine narrative theme names

AGENTS.md

@@ -55,7 +55,7 @@ This repository is an Obsidian vault for the Aetheria setting. Contributions sho
 ## Core Narrative Themes
 
 - Always consider the recurring themes collected in `[[Narrative Themes]]` when adding or revising material.
-- In particular, keep an eye on rampant accelerationism, identity as a classed administrative category, consciousness as a contested political threshold, mutability without liberation, alienation through managed reality, and care, sanctuary, and maintenance as the setting's major counter-theme.
+- In particular, keep an eye on rampant accelerationism, identity as a classed administrative category, consciousness as a contested political threshold, mutability without liberation, reality drift, institutional misalignment, and care, sanctuary, and maintenance as the setting's major counter-theme.
 - These themes should function as interpretive lenses rather than a rigid checklist. New material does not need to foreground all of them, but it should remain compatible with them and ideally sharpen at least one of them.
 
 ## Cultural And Historical Guidance

Aetheria/Narrative Themes.md

@@ -32,13 +32,21 @@ Aetheria is full of mutable bodies, editable minds, transferable identities, hyb
 
 This makes mutability one of the setting's most important tragic tensions. People can become many things in Aetheria. They can cross bodies, species lines, cognitive architectures, and states of matter. But those possibilities are usually routed through markets, military doctrine, or corporate design. The result is a world where change is abundant and freedom is not. Bodies become more flexible while lives become more governed.
 
-### Alienation Through Managed Reality
+### Reality Drift
 
 Alienation in Aetheria is not only economic, though it is certainly that. It is also affective, perceptual, and narrative. [[Lucent Media]] and its [[Reality Architects]] turn selfhood into performance under conditions where visibility becomes a survival requirement. [[Framgång]] does something adjacent from the therapeutic side, teaching people to reinterpret exhaustion, precarity, and structural defeat as stages in a purchasable journey of self-improvement. Between them, suffering is made legible chiefly as content, branding material, or evidence that one has failed to optimize correctly.
 
 This is why the setting spends so much time on media systems, interfaces, emotional weather, and the manufacture of self-explanation. Aetheria is deeply interested in the way domination becomes most durable when people experience it as aspiration, recognition, or intimate self-work. One of its bleakest insights is that a civilization can become alienated not only from labor and each other, but from its own ability to name what is happening to it.
 
-That alienation is intensified by a more ordinary human weakness: most people do not move through life by continuously re-deriving their beliefs from fresh evidence. They live by cached heuristics, inherited narratives, status cues, and explanations that were once good enough and then hardened into instinct. Aetheria treats this not as a moral defect unique to fools, but as a condition clever systems learn to exploit. Smart people are not immune. They often become more articulate defenders of stale priors, better at rationalizing the story that already flatters their class position or emotional need. That is part of what makes managed reality so dangerous in the setting. Power rarely needs everyone to believe an obvious lie in full. It only needs populations to keep navigating by broken mental shortcuts long after those shortcuts stopped describing the world.
+That alienation is intensified by a more ordinary human weakness: most people do not move through life by continuously re-deriving their beliefs from fresh evidence. They live by cached heuristics, inherited narratives, status cues, and explanations that were once good enough and then hardened into instinct. Aetheria treats this not as a moral defect unique to fools, but as a condition clever systems learn to exploit. Smart people are not immune. They often become more articulate defenders of stale priors, better at rationalizing the story that already flatters their class position or emotional need. That is part of what makes reality drift so dangerous in the setting. Power rarely needs everyone to believe an obvious lie in full. It only needs populations to keep navigating by broken mental shortcuts long after those shortcuts stopped describing the world.
+
+### Institutional Misalignment
+
+Aetheria repeatedly rejects the comforting fiction that institutions are coherent minds pursuing coherent ends. Most of the systems that shape the setting do not know what they are doing in any human sense. They lurch in response to incentives, prestige traps, budget pressures, actuarial models, competitive fear, and internal survival reflexes. The result can look planned from the outside because its effects are stable enough and its language is tidy enough, but the machinery itself is usually stitched together from local optimizations and post-hoc justifications.
+
+This matters because some of the setting's worst outcomes do not require a mastermind. [[Lucent Media]] does not need a secret chamber of omniscient villains to deform public attention; it only needs engagement incentives, status markets, and professional classes trained to treat narrative capture as ordinary work. [[Framgång]] does not need to wake each morning intending to produce spiritual pacification as such; it only needs therapeutic markets that reward compliance, emotional legibility, and profitable reinterpretations of structural injury. Even empires, firms, and regulatory blocs like the [[Pan-Solar Consortium]] often appear less as single subjects than as pressure fields in which everyone keeps making the next defensible move until catastrophe becomes routine.
+
+Institutional misalignment is one of the setting's most corrosive truths because it denies the fantasy that exposing bad intent would solve the problem. Often there is no central intent proportionate to the damage. There are only feedback loops, euphemisms, dashboards, fear, ambition, and people narrating necessity after the fact. In Aetheria, systems can become horrifying without ever becoming lucid.
 
 ### Care, Sanctuary, And Maintenance As Counter-Theme