Why meatgrinders are terrible for creating backstory

[Thrudd]

The prequel to the first Dragonlance book was IIRC a short story/vignette in Dragon Magazine that described Raistin's trial in the towers of high sorcery. (And it was a great tease for the first book, I'll admit). It was a trial that could have ended in his death. There's a meatgrinder for you, but, it wasn't a whole party who went through that, it was Raistlin.

lol, how is that a meatgrinder, by any stretch of imagination? A meatgrinder backstory would have involved the entire party of the novels, along with at least a dozen other characters, involved in a horrible and dangerous scenario in which most of them perish, and in which the narrator doesn't give the reader any hints regarding who is going to survive- we don't know who the "main" characters are until the end of the story. If I were writing a "meatgrinder" origin story, I'd likely have described a small party of heroic adventurers as the "mains", leading a larger number of low-level followers into a dungeon. The heroes get the most description and character in the beginning, and they all get killed off, one by one. Drama ensues between the followers as they break into factions, disagreeing about what they should do. By the end, most of the followers have fled or been killed as well, possibly a few of them at the hands of the others, and the survivors are those who worked as a team and stuck together to escape the dungeon. There's the party, stitched together by necessity. In the next story, we find out that they've probably separated for a while, but then seek one-another out when one of them is drawn to pursue an adventure that might require the skills of some of their survivor-acquaintances...

This is not an epic heroic adventure...it might start out looking like that, but this is a misdirect. It's a horror movie full of jump scares, crazy creature VFX, gore and body horror of all manner. Scene after scene of people getting torn apart, eaten, melted by acid, exploded, burned, mutated by magic, killed by all manner of weapons, etc. The soundtrack is stoner/doom metal, not orchestral scores or symphonic or power metal.