Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome: Difference between revisions

|''[[Angel]]'', "A New World"}}

 

 

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.

* [[Older Than Feudalism]], amazingly enough: 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. (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]].)

* In "Twenty Years After," the sequel to "The Three Musketeers," King Louis XIV is underage and thus being manipulated by the regents, his mother and her lover. In some scenes he seems like a precocious ten-year-old (i.e. when the people demand to see that he is asleep in bed, and not fleeing the city), and he is referred to as a child. However, towards the end the queen remarks that in a year he will be of age-making him a young man in his late teens. It's possible that Dumas just called him a child because he wasn't an adult yet, but his actions don't quite seem to match up.

* In Robert Heinlein's ''[[Time Enough for Love]]'', when Lazarus Long saves Dora from her parents' burning house, she seems to age several years over at most a few weeks. When her father tosses her out the window and Lazarus catches her, she seems to be a toddler (he identifies her at first sight as a "baby"). On the ride into town, she talks well enough to be three years old or so. When he takes her to visit her parents' grave not long afterward, she acts kindergarten age at least. Of course, Heinlein's later fiction has a sentimental preoccupation with what he calls "baby girls," by which he can mean any human female who hasn't reached puberty, so maybe he wasn't sure himself how old Dora was when Lazarus adopted her.

* In the ''[[Adrian Mole]]'' series, Glenn is born in 1990, but is already twelve years old in 1997 (when Adrian discovers he is Glenn's father) and then becomes a soldier in 2002 at age seventeen.

* ''[[My Family]]'' appears to take place in real-world time with a year between each series (judging by in-show references and the Christmas specials) but Kenzo, born in series four, is mentioned as being nine years old in series ten. Also extends to Janey, who is fifteen years old in the first series and claims to be "almost 30" in the tenth.

* Lily on ''[[Modern Family]]''. The twins who originally played her became increasingly difficult to work with during season two, and were replaced by four year old Aubrey Anderson-Emmons for the next season, also making it an example of [[The Other Darrin]].

 

=== Soap Operas ===

* Thank you [[Guiding Light]], for giving us Leah Bauer. Sending her to boarding school when she was about a year old was one thing, but when she came back a year later she was 14, twelve years older than her ''older brother.''

** Phillip Spaulding on [[Guiding Light]] was introduced in 1977 as being approximately eight years old; after leaving for a time in 1980, he was recast and returned in 1982, now played by 22-year old Grant Aleksander. The character's age progression, from 1982 on, paralleled that or Aleksander, who would continue to play Phillip, off and on, through Guiding Light's 2009 cancellation.

 

== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:This Index Happened Offscreen]]

[[Category:Aging Tropes]]

[[Category:Plot Time]]

[[Category:Characters and Casting]]

[[Category:Actor Swap]]