Is there anything stopping me from animating the background rotation with jQuery? That would add to the accordion effect if it works.
Because the pseudo-elements aren't part of the DOM, you can't use jQuery to animate the rotation. At the moment, CSS animations and transitions can't be applied to CSS pseudo-elements either.
data:text/html,<style>div::before { color: green; content: "text"; } div:hover::before { color: red; -moz-transition-duration: 5s; }</style><div>
It does look like Webkit doesn't support this, though. Which is a bug, per the current spec draft. All the transition stuff is specced to apply to ::before and ::after.