When you understand that kids and teenagers being salty about literary symbolic analysis comes from a very real place of annoyance and frustration at some teachers for being over-bearing and pretentious in their projecting of symbolism onto every facet of a story but you also understand that literary analysis and critical thinking in regards to symbolism is extremely important and deserves to be not only taught in schools, but actively used by writers when examining their own work to see if they might have used symbolism unintentionally and to make sure that they are using symbolism effectively:
When you understand that a lot of the reaction against literary symbolism is because we don’t educate about symbolism as a communication form (people have historically used x symbol to mean y) and instead is taught as a fact (x symbol means y) so it strips analysis of any relevance to the world or other texts AND we don’t teach tropes/archetypes/genres from a young age so students are being exposed to literary analysis for the first time as 13-16 year olds and rightfully feel like it’s been made up
