I can't tell who is being silly and who is being authentic and the beauty of furry is that it's allowed to be both, and this is something that is unceasingly true throughout the changes over generations.
It's harder to tell with lots of queer furries growing up and starting to explore the ideas that All This Was Worth A Damn, and more and more stuff is starting to emerge that just feels also deeply authentic and i don't know if that's me and my worldview that's changed or what.
maybe it's a bit of both. I mean, we've all had to radicalize, and come to increasingly embrace what we have as important while we have it and that feels, in a bittersweet way, inevitable in a way. It may end up meaning different things for each of us and that's beautiful.