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.

 

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[[Category:This Index Happened Offscreen]]

[[Category:Aging Tropes]]

[[Category:Plot Time]]

[[Category:Characters and Casting]]

[[Category:Actor Swap]]