#in all the shatterspaces hates him how is he going to cope with all this?

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

...Do you ever think about how Sonic truly is the only person who cares about Nine now?

[oddogoblino]

Sonic Prime Theory

(TLDR at the bottom)

Prime Sonic isn't usually a hugger or rude and never was before the events in the show, he's just so stressed and trying to cope with what he's done that he's mentally trying to replicate how his friends behave to somewhat pretend they're still around. He hugs Nine because Tails would hug him sometimes. When he split up somewhat with the prism, he wasn't becoming different Sonics, he was mimicking how he views his friends. He's not a hugger and usually would hate hugs, but he can't help but resort to this after seeing different versions of his friends but not the real deals anywhere. He hugs Shadow because that's the only piece of his friends he has left and he's just been tossed around from many of his friends who werent...them.

Without his real friends, he feels like he's missing something and it's unbearable to him and he hasn't addressed it yet. He's projecting, he's joking around, he's getting easily agitated (and thus quick to ruder remarks), he's shaking and struggling to breathe, and he's trying to ground himself by becoming what he feels his friends are like to try and make things feel more normal. But he's not them. He'll never be them, because he only knows his pov of them and doesn't think like them, so it's not working for him and just making him slip up more. Shadow is the only one who can ground him here as one of the pieces to sonic's sense of reality and he can't even be in constant contact with him, he can't always talk to him while in the other worlds like he could with Nine for a good portion of S2.

Sonic is trying his best to keep being the Sonic he usually was, the one many know him to be, but he can't even catch a second to process what he's going through and he's snapping a little because the shatterspace was made practically adapted to his mind, including what hurts him most deep down. Like cmon, it can't be a coincidence that he is afraid of/hates water and then we get an entire world where it's all water and everything he loved about his home is submerged where his distaste of water won't let him reach. The shatterspace trying to do exactly what Sonic did to the paradox prism, shattering/breaking him.

TLDR: Sonic isn't taking how different each variant of his friends are to his og friends very well, so to cope, he's subconsciously mimicking their og behaviors (like being more affectionate) to try and fill that void/sense that something is missing as he goes along in the show. Getting rude/more reckless bc he's freaking out.