Luffy's "This is MY adventure, and I'm going to do it on my terms and nobody else's" energy is one of my favorite character traits of his, I'm not gonna lie.

Not to mention a short cut might rob him of opportunities for MOAR XP!

Luffy's real reason for doing this:

"Hat Snatchers don't get to make decisions on my ship!"

True dat.

The fact that he did this with a RAFTEL log pose in one of the movies is even more proof of being a badass.

He knows that the real treasure is the people they punch along the way. Also maybe actual treasure.

Might as well state the obvious, just so others like me don't feel the need. Oh, and SPOILERS for how Alabasta ends.

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So yeah: if they'd accepted the shortcut, they'd probably all have died. They needed the journey to get strong enough to handle Baroque works.

Plus they picked up some help at possibly the most important time to do so.

One interesting piece of info that is dropped somewhere completely unrelated through the story is that the "Nanimonai" that the log supposedly leads to is not actually an island... but instead there was a fish so giant that the turds it left were also so giant that somebody mistook them for an actual island.

Initially I wanted to say that this means that Robin's lying about being able to reach Alabasta with this route (though possibly one that allows their survival by diverting them from the conflict rather than leading to their doom), but then I realised that... the Log... still points at something...

Which means that either the Log is somehow fake, or giant turds in One Piece have magnetic fields. I'm not sure how to feel about this anymore.

In case someone is really foolhardy and still reading past the first warning... SPOILERS AHEAD.

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I may be remembering wrong, but I think this is addressed sometime during the Little Garden arc. If not directly, then through explaining some things. Namely, the giant goldfish in question eats islands. So it isn't that fecal deposits naturally have magnetic fields like Grand Line islands, but that that Grand Line islands may still maintain their magnetic field even after a giant goldfish consumes them and expunges them as waste.

I absolutely could be mistaken, but I don't think this was just my headcanon. XP

[THESE SPOILERS AREN'T FOR YOUR CAR




The goldfish that poops islands was first mentioned in Usopp's story for Kaya, just before Kuro is introduced. It was one of his first lies-turned-real when Dorry & Broggy covered the Strawhats' departure by killing the goldfish when it tried to eat them. I've never heard Nanimonai being a poop-island, it must have been an SBS.