Narrative tension is the accumulated incoherence between a constellation's metanarrative and experienced reality. It is formally analogous to slope in Bak's sandpile. A well-designed constellation must monitor narrative tension through criticality sensors: tracking the rate and distribution of challenges to core claims, evidence contradictions, unresolved flags, and growing incoherence between the metanarrative and environmental feedback. When the distribution of challenges shifts from power-law to concentrated, the system may be approaching an avalanche-scale restructuring.

Strongest rival: Narrative tension is not measurable in practice - the analogy to sandpile slope breaks down because social systems have no equivalent of a physical slope measurement and attempts to quantify metanarrative coherence will produce noise not signal