The place: My living room, Kadena Air Force Base, Okinawa, Japan. The time: A random Wednesday in early 1996, shortly after Dragonball GT finished airing, so probably around 7:30PM.
What 13-year-old me saw: Some anime about a female swordsman with red hair and a cross-shaped scar, but when she hit a dude with her sword, the guy didn't get cut in half. It was like the sword was dull or something, but she just kept beating guys over the head with this sword-shaped aluminum bat, and was fighting some guy in white with a spear the size of a tree. I was sold.
I also had no idea what I was watching, as I could barely understand any Japanese at all and was only just starting to get the hang of reading the language, much less speaking or understanding it well enough to watch a prime-time mostly-aimed-at-kids TV anime. Yeah, I was watching Rurouni Kenshin, the beloved series about a former assassin (who is in fact a dude--that was quite a shock for me) who has sworn to redeem himself for his blood-stained past by never killing again, and only using his unique reverse-bladed sword to protect those who can't protect themselves.
Not many of you got your start with Rurouni Kenshin in the same way (and most of you probably rubbed your brain cells together hard enough to make a spark and realize that he was a man), but the series has a lot of qualities that make anime fans of all stripes look back on the series fondly, even if they usually don't care for Jump-style fighting anime.
The anime was based on Nobuhiro Watsuki's million-selling manga that ran in Weekly Shounen Jump alongside Dragonball, Slam Dunk, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and Rokudenashi Blues--an amazing line-up of titles. The darker, more serious story came out of Watsuki's desire to make a shounen series that was different from the lighter, more stereotypical series of the time, as leading man Himura Kenshin was a hardened killer pushing thirty, as opposed to the young men (or man-children like Dragonball's Son Goku) taking the lead in other major shounen manga.
In fact, those differences really helped the series gain ground among fans in Japan and in the US--back in ye olden dayes of anime fandomme when we had to order fansubbed VHS tapes from shady sources, I can remember people who couldn't care less about Dragonball or Yu Yu Hakusho eagerly devouring Rurouni Kenshin. While the series still had lengthy battle sequences, characters shouting out the names of their special moves, and half the stuff that every other fighting series had, it just felt... different. But how?