does the modifier have to be applied before the rotation works?
Hey, are you rotating in edit mode or in object mode? If you have a different object set as the mirror origin, you'll need to rotate that object as well. I don't think you should need to apply the mirror, unless you're working on a part I'm not thinking of. A screenshot would help if the above doesn't solve your issue.
Thank you i fixed it but i don't know exactly how haha. Yesterday i applied all transforms and set the origin of stuff somewhere useful a bunch of times but it didn't help. Today i re-applied all transforms without the mirror modifiers and it just works. idk... anyway there's a screen of what it looked like. the mirrored parts rotated in the opposite direction...