Buttons play an important role throughout The Friendship War, for they are the catalyst for Grace’s character growth and her realizations about herself, Ellie, and Hank. As the school-wide obsession with buttons redraws social boundaries and affects friendships and group dynamics, Grace learns about the traits that define good friends, and she also learns that difficult truths must sometimes be voiced in order to save a friendship. Buttons therefore symbolize both internal and external conflict, and to this end, Grace’s feud with Ellie follows the natural progression of the button fad, increasing in intensity as buttons become popular, becoming more strained by disputes over special buttons, and hitting a breaking point with the destruction of the pinwheel button. Grace’s external conflict against the fad, which is truly an internal conflict with herself, is brought into the open when she nearly gets in trouble for dumping buttons in the schoolyard. This action symbolizes the universal truth that avoiding an issue only causes it to fester until it grows completely out of control.

The various buttons and the ways they are used also represent the myriad manifestations of creativity and the many forms that a trend can take.