SORAS - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome

Gunn: Couple of weeks ago he was wearing diapers. Now he's a teenager?
Cordelia: Tell me we don't live in a soap opera.
Angel, "A New World"

SORAS (Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome) is the device by which writers — possibly frustrated with a Cousin Oliver — send a young child off in order to get back someone old enough to remember lines and have hot and steamy romances.

On daytime soaps, pregnancy is a staple storyline. However, the resulting child is rarely seen after his paternity and/or baby switch has been resolved. When a few years have passed, he returns as a teenager old enough to have a summer romance.

Different from Plot Relevant Age Up in that the latter is at least explained via magic/Applied Phlebotinum/Bizarre Alien Biology, or the transformation is actually shown on-screen. Do not confuse the two when adding examples.

Stephen King referred to this as the "Kid Trick" in Danse Macabre, his text on American horror media in the 20th century.

Not to be confused with a certain character from Kingdom Hearts. Contrast with Not Allowed To Grow Up and Comic Book Time.

Examples:

Andrew from Family Ties and Alexander from Star Trek The Next Generation are both examples of this. Interestingly, both were played in one of their incarnations by Brian Bonsall. (Alexander's change, though, was Hand Waved with the explanation that Klingons mature more quickly than humans.)
- Molly O'Brien also had this happen to her. Unlike Naomi and Alexander, she's human, meaning that you can't turn to the "alien" explanation (instead some fans have used this to claim that stardates aren't supposed to match up with calendar dates).
Star Trek Voyager also had this with the character of Naomi Wildman who went from Just Born in the second season to being about eight or nine years old the next. Although this could be explained by her alien biology (the father was non-human), its never specifically addressed.
- Interestingly, its also somewhat inverted by the exact same character; her mother is pregnant with Naomi in an early episode of season 1, but doesn't actually deliver until fairly late in season 2. A 15-month long gestation period! Hand Waved in a later season episode in that this type of species crossing results in extremely long gestations.
EMH: The early stages of Ktarian development are astounding. Naomi has grown five centimetres since her last physical, and that was only three weeks ago.
WILDMAN: It seems like every time I turn around I'm recycling her clothes back into the replicator.
Victoria on The Young And The Restless aged from 8 or so to 22 in a single summer, after aging more or less in real time up to that point.
The cumulative effect of this led to Tom Horton and his great-great-grandson Scotty Banning both working as doctors in the same hospital at the same time on Days Of Our Lives.
- It also led to a man sleeping with a girl and her grandmother, and it being only mildly creepy each time.
- Belle was taken upstairs as a non speaking baby one day, came down a teenager the next. Her SummerRomance also received a plot relevant age up from preteen to teen.
  - Though not as pronounced, Maxie Jones of General Hospital went from toddler to 7 years old in a few weeks, as well. Notable because she would eventually be played by the same actress who played SORASed Belle (Kirsten Storms).
  - GH also contains one of the more notable aversions in American daytime: Robin Scorpio, who's been played by the same actress (Kimberly McCullough) since 1985, when both were six years old.
  - Also on General Hospital, Sonny Corinthos' son Michael was put into a coma that lasted for a few months at best. When he awoke, he was at least 6-10 years older and played by a new actor. His brother Morgan and half-sister Kristina were also aged accordingly, and returned played by new actors. The newly teenaged Michael lampshades this by asking Kristina: "When did you become such a hottie?"
- Days Of Our Lives is even more fond of this than most Soap Operas. There is only one character that is even close to her correct age (a year off), and she was recently Put On A Bus.
The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air called attention to this when it replaced the newborn Nicky Banks with a six-year-old actor (Ross Bagley): Nicky walked in the room while Jazz was talking to Will, prompting the latter to ask who he was. Will says "That's baby Nicky!" while mugging to the camera and making a "growing" gesture with his hands. A frustrated Jazz shouts "Man, I'm going back to the streets where things make sense!"
Step By Step featured the young baby of the family aging from an infant in one season, to a speaking toddler of pre-school age in the next.
Growing Pains also featured this trope with Chrissy, though they didn't implement it for until a season after the actual birth.
In Boy Meets World, four-year-old Morgan Matthews disappeared for a season or so, then unexpectedly reappeared significantly older. This was lampshaded when one character commented on her long absence and she said, "That was the longest time-out I've ever had."
- Cory, Shawn and Topanga also age an extra two years; Mr. Feeny says in an early episode that they're part of the Class of 2000, but they graduate from high school in 1998.
Among a host of SORAS'ed characters currently on All My Children: J.R. Chandler, born 1989, an adult husband and father since 2003; Jamie Martin, born 1990, now a med student; and Colby Chandler, born 1999, who somehow just celebrated her 16th birthday (in 2006.) However, when we first met Lily Montgomery in 1993, she was played by 8 year-old Michelle Trachtenberg. In 2006, she's 18 (and her portrayer is 16.)
British soaps like East Enders are surprisingly void of this trope. Characters either have the same actor from childhood, or, as a child, they move away, and years later come back as a different actor (but, importantly, as the correct age for the time they have been away). They generally pull this off by having an invisible age between being a baby and a small child where the character is not seen (Coronation Street's Tracy Barlow, for example spent several years "upstairs, listening to music", before she was finally old enough to do interesting things like have a teenage marriage, or sell her baby from a later relationship (only to decide she wanted it back when she set her sights on the father again), or murder her abusive/cheating boyfriend). It does happen occasionally, but only by a year or two - Ian Beale of East Enders turned 21 two years after turning 18.
The Finnish soap opera Salatut Elämät (which this editor only watches for the unintentional hilariousness, honest!) Has two kids first age from babies to schoolchildren during one summer, and later, from that to teenagers, during a time, which in show accounted for one apartment fire. Incidentally, one of the kids helped catch the Evil Twin (yes, they did that) bad guy, yet she was kidnapped by said bad guy when she was a kid just one season ago.
Sunny Baudelaire's speech receives this treatment between the final two chapters of the final book in "A Series of Unfortunate Events."
- Although, to be fair, realism wasn't exactly part of the books.
Why wait until the child is even born? In Stargate Atlantis, Teyla goes from not visibly pregnant at all and still trying to undertake semi-dangerous missions to hugely pregnant between episodes. A conversation from the previous episode is referenced in a way that makes a Time Skip seem unlikely. Possibly explainable by Bizarre Alien Biology, but as the Stargate Verse's Human Aliens are descended from actual humans, that, too, is unlikely.
- The actress was pregnant. This probably falls more under the category of real-life changes impinging on the unreal timelines of fiction, due to the filming schedule.
In Ghost Whisperer, Delia's son Ned aged from a boy just celebrating his 13th birthday (actually was a part of the plot in one episode), to a high school Junior (at least) in less than six months.
In book three of The Aeneid, Ascanius, Aeneas' son, is young enough for Dido to hold him on her lap. By the next book, which takes place no more than a year later, he's old enough to ride a horse and command the respect of the other Trojans. That makes this trope, amazingly enough, Older Than Feudalism. (Virgil originally wrote Ascanius as being old enough to command men, then began a rewrite where Ascanius was younger and managed to get the first three books done, before suffering a case of Author Existence Failure.)
On the first season of Degrassi High several of the freshman were only in seventh grade the season before, on Degrassi Junior High, the most obvious being Arthur's younger cousin Dorothy, who's now in the same grade as him.
In the first season of The OC, Kaitlin Cooper is referred to as a fifth-grader. Two seasons later, she's, er, supposedly fourteen, which means an extra year has been added on somewhere. I say "supposedly" because she looks older than 14, and definitely looks more than two years older than she did in her previous appearance. Strangely enough, in a show rife with Dawson Casting, the actress playing Kaitlin didn't actually turn 14 herself until just after the first episode with her fourteen-year-old character had aired.
Quentin Kelly went from being around eleven to about fifteen on Grace Under Fire when the former actor left the show.
Parodied in Killroy And Tina: "Yes (she had her baby), on Tuesday. It is now 16 years of age.
Catherine's daughter Lindsay, from CSI, is a roving time warp all on her own. Fans of the show are advised not to bother keeping track of her age, lest they go mad from the multiple contradictions.
In the first decade of Peanuts, some characters aged far more rapidly than others. Notably:
- Schroeder, introduced in early 1951 as an infant, within a year became first a toddler piano prodigy, and then not only fully verbal but apparently the same age as Charlie Brown, Shermy and friends.
- Linus, introduced in late 1952, was somewhere between infant and toddler for two years, and a typical preschooler for the next year or two. Then, in 1957, he rapidly became the precocious Christian theologian he would remain ever after. (He never gave up his security blanket, however.)
- Also happened later on. Sally Brown was the first character born into the strip, in 1961 (Snoopy mentions waiting "until her eyes are open" to go visit her). Theoretically, this should make her at least several years younger than the rest of the cast. But by the early 70s she was more or less the same age as Linus. Similarly, almost overnight in the 90s, Rerun Van Pelt went from a toddler to kindergarten age.
In the novel The Amorous Umbrella (sequeal to The Incredible Umbrella), Our Hero ends up in a universe based in 1950's soap opera tropes, where he is trapped for several years. Being a dimensional outsider, he notices the SORAS cases, but nobody else does, even when it's pointed out to them. It worries him that a stepson he acquired, now an infant, will be an adult in five or six years and may - in an Oedipus Rex-inspired plotline common with 1950's soap operas - attempt to kill him.
Word Of God stated that this was intentionally averted with Hera Agathon, the first Human/Cylon hybrid in Battlestar Galactica.
Lost had the problem backwards - since like a month passed per season, the Walt kid was getting too old for the role and was Put On A Bus until the Three Years Later plot jump.
- And then lampshaded a little by having a character observe that he, Walt, grew up real fast.
In a somewhat rare animated example, the 1951 Donald Duck cartoon "Lucky Numbers" made Huey, Dewey, and Louie into teenagers for just one short, as the plot required the trio to be able to drive a car.
Elle Robinson in Neighbours was 19 years old in 2005. Quite an achievement when she was only born 16 years earlier.
Duncan Stewart (son of Alf and Ailsa) in Home And Away - originally aging normally from baby to toddler to young child, the character then disappeared only to reappear again as a teenager a couple of seasons later.
Full House was a little bit more subtle about this. Jesse and Rebecca's twin boys Nicky and Alex go from infants in season 5 to pre-verbal, long haired toddlers in season 6. Not as egregious as most examples, but a bit noticeable.
- And of course the three girls were a direct subversion, as they aged along with the show.
Gordon's kids in the Nolan films. In Batman Begins, a scene where Batman goes to talk to then Seargeant Gordon briefly shows Gordon's wife feeding two little kids in high chairs, one a toddler boy and the other a baby. Only about one or two years are supposed to have passed between Batman Begins and the Dark Knight, but the kids now look to be a lot older - I'd put the girl at about five to seven and the boy at eight to ten. This was apparently done so that Gordon could have a deeper relationship with the son but it gave this troper a headache trying to figure out exactly what the timeline for the two films was.
In the Terminator series, Terminator 2: judgment Day is set in 1994, ten years after the first Terminator film. This means that John Connor is under ten years old during the events of Terminator 2, although he looks and acts several years older than that.