Why do people always want to skip Skypiea and Thriller Bark?
Some people feel the lagged in the middle and weren't exciting enough, I guess. I loved Skypiea the entire way through, though I'll say that Thriller Bark could have stood to be slightly shorter IMO. Nonetheless, the both had phenomenal endings and more than enough wonderful content in them to make them well worth reading (multiple times).
Even if an arc wasn't your favorite, telling anyone to actually SKIP any part of One Piece is just horrible to me and I cannot understand it. You can't read the plot points on an arc on Wikipedia and think that's enough. When you do junk like that you have no idea what you're actually missing, and it takes away so so so so much of the actual experience. If you just read a plot summary of Thriller Bark, you might know that Kuma almost killed the crew, but you'll never experience the gut wrenching shock of seeing an unstoppable force completely crush the Straw Hats and the anxiety of not knowing how the hell the Straw Hats could ever survive the battle.
Even for arcs that weren't so incredible, like the Davy Back Fight... you still get to see the characters you're supposed to love interacting with each other. There's no part of One Piece that doesn't have plot or character development relevance on some front, and I am not okay with people encouraging other people to just skip entire chunks of the series, thus depriving them of something that they might have enjoyed immensely and also deprived them of knowledge of events and characters that then lessened the importance of future events and interactions in the story.Â