How do you make the "I'm an orphan" backstory interesting?

[Tinkerer]

Help me to understand why so many of you embrace this background archetype?

It is trite, lazy flimflam. Even worse it is dull....the epitome of boring, like shredded roleplaying iceberg lettuce. Many of the above examples bear out those points.

As it's often said, cliches are cliches for a reason. Orphans generally lived a hard knock life. Orphans don't have familial ties weighing them down. Orphans are fairly common in a world where life can be brutal and short. You only have a half an hour to come up with a backstory and you want to focus on his time training with his mentor rather than his family. If your character is older than a pup there's the chance that your parents could've died of natural causes (still... technically an orphan?). There are a ton of reasons to play an orphan.

Any decent character can get away with a cliche in their background. Nearly every single comic character is an orphan. Being an orphan isn't a problem. Being an orphan combined with a half a dozen other cliches, or having "orphan" as your one word character description is.