I have a little backstory! I haven't spoken about it much, since the majority of my energy for making Original Stuff goes towards Can Of Worms,,, but it is there!
It's a distant future where humans have settlements on every planet, but haven't figured out interstellar travel yet. They are working on it, but that's when the Sun (specifically, an alien light entity tied to the Actual Sun, somehow) shows up and reveals it's been protecting them from the stuff Outside The Solar System since forever. The problem is, if they leave, it won't be able to follow and defend them from all the much weirder, scarier, deadlier stuff in deep space.
Its solution is to pick out one volunteer from each planet's settlement to be "guardians" with thematically-relevant superhuman traits. If they can defend humanity, the Sun will consider that proof that humans can be independent and don't need it following them around.
From there, if I had infinite resources, this would be a villain-of-the-week thing, where I can take weird space stuff (like hypothetical toroidal planets) and make up a cool problem for the characters to deal with, while also dealing with their own personal problems (like alienation and failure)...
...but I usually just use them to make silly drawings.