SORAS - Television Tropes & Idioms

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.

Contrast with Not Allowed To Grow Up.

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 calender 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! Justified in a later season episode in that this type of species crossing results in extremely long gestations, but the delay between the trope and its justification means it was probably a Ret Con.
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.
- 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."
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.
This trope is ridiculously common in chat-based RP Gs. Characters end up pregnant and deliver the next week. Then, within a month, the children are able to walk and talk. Within a year, the children are teenagers, and within two years they are having their own children.
- Averted by this troper! His character found a six month old baby about to be eaten by a troll! Upon saving her, he kept her for six months, during which she aged... six months. She was then given to some NPC family of his that lived further away, after having said her first word: JAAACKAAAAAAAAASS.
- Averted also by this troper, who keeps meticulously detailed records regarding the dates of conception, birth and the relative aging speeds of the races involved for all his characters and all the children of his characters, all in a convenient little Excel file (together with a lot of other information, including formulas to tell him whether or not his female characters are menstruating). He has been playing long enough that one of his characters has a five-year-old daughter, who, due to a dash of elven blood, actually appears closer to four.
- This troper isn't sure if the chat RP she participates in uses this trope or averts it, because all the characters age at the same (standard human) rate, but it doesn't take place in real time; it mainly runs on Webcomic Time, with timeskips of weeks to months to keep the timeline relatively reasonable. And, to complicate matters, some characters have spent time in suspended animation.
- Roughly averted by the R Ps of this wannabe troper, although we rarely keep exact time characters do age, and time progresses.
- This editor is fond of skipping some parts of the growth of children, but of course all the characters age accordingly and the things that happened in those years are carefully planned.
- In an RP this troper was a part of, the roleplayer in question explained it away as Bizarre Alien Biology, but it was no less absurd in practice. Of course, given the relative setting, it was one of the least weird elements.
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.
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 Kilroy And Tina: "Yes (she had her baby), on Tuesday. It is now 16 years of age.
Also used in Twilight, starting with Renesmee's conception through her birth a month later leading to talking within a few weeks and reading Tennyson within a couple of months. Justified with the explanation that all expectations are off with the offspring of a vampire and a human, plus the fact that the parents do react with at least some degree of shock when their two-month old is talking in complete sentences, walking, and reading Tennyson.
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.
I assume Padme going from 'not even showing' to 'giving birth to twins' in the course of, what? a week? hasn't been mentioned because we're blocking bad memories?
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.)