Here goes nothing - I wanted to end with a bang rather than a whimper but I started nodding off at the keyboard after getting up much too early this morning....
By the way this is in honor of a large number of people, only a few of whom I can name, and most of which are (I am fairly sure) very longtime GW fans. In addition to the Academy, I would like to thank Phoenix, JejeFish, Tyr at GW Addiction, Hwsiwen, The Shinigami Project, The GW Project, The Gundam Project, The Itsy Bitsy Wufei Shrine, Shawn's GW Site, After Colony: The Gundam Wing Universe, JapaneseSnacks.com, Fayuri's Gundam World, The Gundam Wing Lyrics & Music Directory, and my friend Tsunami, you know who you are, and many others.
And without further ado:
1. You spend all night looking for GW fan sites and discover that there are not only sites, but rings, fanfic, multimedia... and say to yourself in amazement, "How did all these guys write all this stuff/make all these pages/multimedia/etc. in just two months?!!"
2. You start taping the episodes only after discovering how good it is, curse yourself for an idiot, then discover you should have been taping at night, *not* afternoons, because it really *is* uncut.
3. You howl with joy when you realize that the "Full Cycle" means the start of CN running the eps on Saturdays too, leaving you only one day of the week (Sunday) to suffer withdrawal.
4. You beam with happiness because they really *are* starting the series over from the beginning for the Saturday run, giving you the chance to record those eps you missed in your woeful ineptitude, then you gnash you teeth with frustration when, after clearing a whole days' worth of obligations and preparing to record a "whole day" of GW and get maybe 8 more episodes, you realize they are only going to show the first two eps over and over all day.
5. You still tune in anyway, all day, to watch the same two episodes, even though you now have them on tape, because you can't help yourself.
6. You suddenly discover something called "fansubs", by reading web pages, which might give you the chance to see the whole series, before CN broadcasts the rest of the eps, and in the original Japanese, then you discover that because of the American release, all sources for fansubs have dried up like fruit on the vine in a drought year.
7. You start scanning eBay for GW stuff, and get very excited, because there are people auctioning more GW stuff than you ever expected, and you promptly spend way too much money in a bidding war for a poster of all the G-guys in uniforms you've never seen - and wonder why they are dressed like neo-Nazis... (but hey, they look *good* so who cares?)
6. You leave ICQ up lots more than usual just so you can see your gorgeous GW skins. And you decide you are going to have to break down and learn to make skins yourself, because there aren't many good ones for some of the apps you use (like Real Jukebox).
7. You peruse sites on which you cannot read one word because the characters are replaced by little boxes (it's in Japanese), but you don't care (much) because they have the best collection of wallpaper-sized images you have ever seen.
8. You read fanfic until you have facial sunburn from your monitor and your eyes are bulging and watery, jaw dropping at something called "yaoi" and "lemons and limes" and then sit up straight in your chair grinning happily, exclaiming, "Slash! They have GW slash! What will they think of next?!"
9. You reflect on the irony of the idea that while you thought the writers probably put Relena in the story to give young female fans someone to identify with, in fact for the most part, all the female fans despise her with an occasionally violent passion. (This doesn't bother you much because you didn't really identify with her yourself, for completely different reasons).
10. You join a GW mailing list, and again your face is monitor-burnt and your eyes bloody from reading online for hours, and you feel very, very old. (Possible reason for the non-identification in #9.)
11. You actually like most of the voice actors for the dubbed version, because it's what you heard first and the glow of discovery makes you feel warm and runny when you watch the little vid-collages CN uses around the show, and hear Wufei yelling, "It's too late for that!" and Zechs screaming, "FOOOOOOOOOLLLSSS!!" and Heero saying, "Mission Accepted."
12. You can't sleep in anticipation of the arrival of a set of subtitled tapes with the original Japanese voices which you managed to find (drought notwithstanding) and pay way, way too much for, and you wonder if it would be possible to see all 49 episodes back to back when it gets here, even though it's probably going to be mid-week and you can't take a sudden vacation from work.
13. You spend still more money you can't afford to order something called "pocky" from an online source, and then discover you can't get through a week without it.
14. You get very excited about writing your own first fanfic, then get very depressed because you know you can't think of an idea that hasn't been done before, then watch your tapes and smile to yourself because you don't care anymore, it's not a desire, it's a necessity.
15. You get so caught up in the thrill of it all that you start emailing people you don't know to gush about how much you enjoyed their fics online, find out the webmaster for the archive site you've been reading from is overburdened (sheesh, no wonder!) and on impulse, volunteer to help convert fics to HTML, thereby leaving yourself no time to write your own. ;) (Then you realize that isn't true - you can do both. It's sleep you don't need, really.)
16. You decide you *have* to get a copy of the song that is playing in episode #3 when Quatre and Trowa emerge from their Gundams for the first time to meet - you know it sounds like the theme but it's up-tempo, and there are words in Japanese being sung by female voices and it is just so totally kick-ass and exhilarating... you email people you don't know who are auctioning anime music CDs and ask your question, only to feel your face burn in shame as someone kindly tells you that "that cool song" is simply the original opening theme. Then you scream with joy and surprise when the kindly one who informed you actually spends their own time making an mp3 of it and putting it online for you to download.
17. In watching the earlier eps for the second time on Saturdays, you briefly wonder why the actor who dubbed Septem sounds like PeeWee Herman yelling, and you cheer Lady Une for dumping him out of the transport. (The first time you saw them, you were just so totally caught up in the amazement of how cool the show was to notice such minutia.)
Probably to be continued.... be afraid, be very afraid....