I was basing the movie off a fanfic I was writing over a year ago. Sgt Obsidian was a custom character. I was thinking, how do you get the audience to care about the movie? You need a character that people can remotely identify with. Most people can't identify with GI Joe so to bring in a newbie that has an open slate AND do the movie somewhat from his perspective, it'd work better than established chars that only the fans care about.

I'd like to use the 1st X-Men movie as an example. The writers couldn't just throw the team together and have the casual viewer be interested. So they wrapped the story around Wolverine and Rogue and gave them a relationship. Look at Doom or Aliens. Numerous chars but in the end, it has to center around someone. I don't believe GI Joe has the luxury of just throwing chars on screen and hoping the crowd will like it. They did that w/ VvV and you saw how far Link got with people.

And I don't need Firefly. The 2nd half of the Joe list are 2ndary chars.