Contemporary writers love backstories for popular characters. So too it would seem, do contemporary readers and viewers. I am not sure which came first, the demand or the supply, but it seems to have embedded itself into our culture.
Thus superheroes from Batman to the Black Widow are given backstories - presumably so we can understand their psychological motivations better. This, whether we need to or not. Jack and Jill went up the hill merely to fetch a pail of water and not because one of them was unloved as an infant.
Often the backstories lack imagination or relevance and aren’t necessary. An old favourite, Perry Mason, was given a silly backstory in a recent TV series which must have made his creator Erle Stanley Gardner turn in his grave.
