What the FLAMES letters mean

FLAMES is an acronym, and its six letters are the game's whole vocabulary. When the elimination ends, the surviving letter gives the verdict — here is what each one traditionally stands for, in the spirit the game intends.

Letter	Word	The game's reading
F	Friends	The comfortable result. The game places the pair in the friend zone — which schoolyard tradition rates far higher than it admits.
L	Love	The result everyone is quietly hoping for when they start counting. The game declares love, on the authority of the alphabet alone.
A	Affection	Warmth without the full declaration: fondness, liking, a soft spot. The game's gentlest romantic verdict.
M	Marriage	The most committed letter in the circle. Landing on M has started more playground teasing than any other result.
E	Enemy	The dramatic one. Pure pantomime — the game casts the pair as rivals, which in most stories is just romance in a false moustache.
S	Siblings	Family energy: close, teasing, and permanently stuck with each other. The game reads the pair as more alike than apart. (The S has also been read as "Sweetheart" in some schoolyards — house rules vary, and the counting is identical either way.)

One game, six endings

Which letter survives depends only on how many letters remain after the two names cancel their shared letters — a number between 1 and however long the names are. Change one letter of either name and the count can shift, taking the verdict with it. The meanings above are labels for the outcome of a counting race, nothing more; how the race itself runs is set out on the FLAMES calculator page.

Questions

Which FLAMES result is most common?

It depends on typical name lengths, but mid-range remainders — the counts produced by ordinary first-name pairs — visit every letter of the circle fairly regularly. No letter is rigged to win.

Is "Enemy" a bad sign?

It is a sign that a counting game landed on E. Romeo & Juliet land on Enemy too — see famous couples' scores — which should settle how seriously to take it.