Immersive Lessons from Chive Guy

I’ve recently encountered an Internet Main Character known as Chive Guy. Naturally, I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about immersive theater.

Who is Chive Guy?

Chive Guy is reddit user and kitchen worker F1exican¹, who, since Oct 7, 2025, has been on a quest to cut chives perfectly. In service of this, he posts a picture of some chopped chives almost² every day, at which point commenters pile on to point out any mistakes they can find. He’s nearly always brought down by the sin of a bit of chive slightly longer than the others. “See you tomorrow, chef,” the commentariat smirks, and he tries again.

Here’s an example of a Chive Guy post:

These chives were deemed imperfect due to a single slightly-too-long chive that I don’t want to bother finding myself.

There’s a few things of note here:

• The user flair: “Chivelord, Redeemed.” Flairs work a few different ways on reddit, and I haven’t bothered to check what r/KitchenConfidential uses, but I’m pretty sure the moderators applied that label to him manually.
• The twenty-one thousand upvotes that this picture of chives has received. If math isn’t your strong suit, let me assure you that twenty-one thousand is generally considered to be a pretty big number as numbers go.

This also happened:

Let this be your evidence that Chive Guy is kind of a big deal on reddit dot com.

I’m not writing this blog to explain what’s going on with Chive Guy; while it is a (mildly) fascinating saga, I don’t really care enough to do a full writeup on #chivegate. I’ll leave that to someone else. But I do think that we can draw some insights from Chive Guy that we can use to make better immersive theater.

The Part Where I Actually Talk About Immersive Theater

So: Why the heck is Chive Guy so popular? I was never a regular reader of r/kitchenconfidential, but I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t usually do such crazy numbers. And at least from my perspective, Chive Guy does not seem to be, as the kids say, an industry plant. The reaction to the Philadelphia cream cheese ad was pretty negative; the community bristled at Chive Guy being monetized. It really does look like someone just woke up one day and decided to post chives on Reddit, and then everyone got really really into it.

But why?

Some of it, I’m sure, is that “chive” is kind of a funny word; and the whims of the algorithms cannot always be predicted.

But I think Chive Guy was set up for success from the very beginning. The very structure of Chive Guy posts lends itself to participation! Commenters easily fall into a shared task, and then community forms, and then you get someone building Chive Guy a wooden cutting board, and someone else developing a chive cutting video game, and twenty-one thousand people upvoting a picture of a pile of chives.

From the very beginning, Chive Guy wanted feedback. His early attempts were, apparently, a bit messy:

While r/KitchenConfidential is targeted at food industry professionals, the barrier to entry for spotting a chive train is extremely low. But it’s not just that the posts are easy to understand; it’s that what’s being asked of you in the first place is very clear. Chive Guy posts have a structure:

1. Chive Guy asks for feedback.
2. Commenters look for long chives.
3. Commenters post pictures of long chives.
4. Chive Guy agrees that his chives are not perfect and comes back tomorrow with more chives.

There’s a few things here that I think make the posts so compelling.

1. Commenters have the clear role of “critic.” The idea of providing food criticism is familiar to both food professionals and the general public, so it’s easy to embody.
2. The difficulty of performing the role of “critic” is very low; the task required is very achievable.
3. When commenters provide a critique, they’re directly rewarded with another post the next day.

You can also do all these things in immersive theater.

I recently took an immersive theater writing course from Third Rail. We learned about giving audience members clear roles to keep them comfortable in the scene; tasking them with actions that are clear and achievable, even if they’re strange; and directly rewarding engagement with the story, even if audience members aren’t going exactly where you’d expect.

And, hey, look at that! Chive Guy is basically the same as immersive theater³.

From day one, Chive Guy’s post titles showed that this was meant to endure (although maybe not quite this long).

That gets at something else that I think is important about the Chive Guy phenomenon: the default is for the posts to continue and for commenters to fall into the “critic” role. It would actually take more friction for the chives to end; someone would have to step up and declare that the chives were perfect. This doesn’t feel natural in the critic role, so the chives continue. The very structure of the posts encourages Chive World to continue snowballing until the end of time.

With a clear role for commenters, it’s easy and rewarding for new people to hop on the chive train. Particularly dedicated commenters can put their own spin on it—I am not going to get into whatever’s going on with Plane Guy—but there are thousands of other people just dipping their toes into chive criticism, and you know what? They also feel like they’re part of something. We are all critics in this kitchen together helping a guy improve his chives, and it’s beautiful.

Of course, there’s also a lot of emergent narrative going on here. People just think it’s cool and fun to be part of something goofy! I don’t really have an analysis of that beyond that I, too, think chives are fun. You can design for emergent narrative, but I don’t think anyone could have cooked up the Chive Guy Extended Universe in a lab; sometimes a group just goes somewhere really fun and unpredictable. I do, however, think that the clear invitation for participation in Chive Guy posts is one of the reasons it was able to go viral in the first place.

Sure, we can go full Then She Fell⁴: “Cut these chives for me.” But Chive Guy teaches us that, sometimes, all you need is to ask: “Are these chives perfect?” You may just get the response you want: