Continuing my internal debate about giving a character’s backstory, I wonder if this is partly an issue of pacing. With a lot of fiction, we have internalized expectations about how quickly the plot will move. Anything that seems to slow the pace is regarded as a problem.
I’m not saying this expectation is bad or wrong. We’re just so used to a fast pace that we’re unsettled by a different approach.
For example, if you watch a lot of anime, you’ll notice that the pacing is handled very differently. In Japanese storytelling, they’ll start an episode with a fight of some kind, but then the action pauses while one of the characters will stop and think back about a formative experience that led to them being in the fight. They’ll also mix in briefer bits where someone talks about which technique they’re about to use and how it’s their family heritage or some such.
As a result of this approach, it can take three or four episodes to resolve just one fight in an anime. That pace is glacial compared to American animation, where the whole fight will take just a few minutes on screen. However, the Japanese fight will often end with a feeling of empathy toward the losing side, which would never happen in an American show.
Reflecting on this, I may be inclined to experiment a bit with my pacing and the amount of backstory. After all, The Tale of the Drakanox is about the characters grappling with their past. The backstory isn’t just set dressing, but an important facet of their growth. Besides, if I feel like it’s too much, I can interrupt with other action to space things out.
But, I promise, nobody will stop the action to explain how their special technique is a family treasure!
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Wyrmflight 
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I believe backstory can also be used as setting, which is important. Some histories are more important in the speculative genres.
Even in America, the pace of much entertainment has changed quite a bit. A few decades ago, a half-hour TV show would typically have very few scenes, most of them lasting several minutes. And there would typically be just one main storyline, or one primary and one secondary story line. But I just watched a new episode of a popular half-hour show. It had four main story lines with some scenes lasting less than a minute.
And if they did the 1960s program *Mission: Impossible* today, they could cut the hour-long program to 30 minutes and still cram in several more scenes and storylines.