I had zero contact with the movies when I read LOTR and also never asked anyone about it because uh….I guess I maybe thought everyone else in my family’s opinions were bullshit? idk. But anyway, my assumption wasn’t that it was like dying, when I was like 11, and for a period of years after that which I can’t remember now, I thought of going west as like, well I def imprinted on the Earendil Was A Mariner poem (though I skipped it a lot during re-reads) and on Galadriel’s quenya song, but I didn’t like….comprehend it as A Place that was Known and administrated by an organized Population and overseen by the Valar, because I never consciously Sought Out To Figure Out What The West Was, I just kinda assumed.

BUT I thought of it as like, stuff closer in tone to the things I keep quoting under my the tale of earendel tag. it meant an uncharted question mark off the edge of the map, various lands and presences among shadowy isles and unknown things like the sublime/non-horrible equivalent of the chasm gandalf and the balrog fell into. Like, the west being something that was defined more as “places overseas that were not middle earth” rather than “this place.” You had tiny glimpses of some of the things there that song and rumor told of – a white city, a Valhalla-ish golden hall of drinking and revelry, something about death and beren and luthien, a beautiful green country, and maybe if you searched far enough and in strange enough places, you could possibly even cross paths with Elbereth, a star-goddess thing – but the west as defined as not-middle-earth was uncomprehensive and uncohesive and certainly not overseen by anyone.

I kinda assumed (though not like, explicitly thought) that the reason it was A Thing in the book was because it was like….the place where there was still magic, and the reason the elves and Frodo and Bilbo and Gandalf were going there was because Middle Earth now Belonged To Humans/Dwarves/Hobbits and wasn’t really a Fantasy World anymore…? Something along those lines!

Anyway I liked my vague 11-year-old subconscious assumptions! They’re good imo. Tbh nowadays I still like to headcanon that, for the most part, outside of Tol Eressëa and Tirion and Alqualondë and Valimar, post-Akallabêth Aman HAS become more like the way 11-year-old me-imagined “the West,” over the course of the 6,000+ years that have passed, the huge change in the population makeup, and the cataclysmic fundamental restructuring that ensued during the Akallabêth.