I actually came up with this term a few years ago. I thought I might have used it somewhere, but apparently not (unless it was in a video).
This was a term I came up with when reviewing movies and television shows – I think specifically it was when I was reviewing Star Trek Discovery that I thought of it. I remembered it again when watching reviews of Agatha All Along recently. (I haven’t actually watched any of Agatha All Along – the MCU turned to shit a while ago. I just watch the reviews.)
The word cliché refers to an expression that has been used so often – an expression that’s so tired and worn-out – that it has lost all meaning, and often is used only by people who cannot think of anything original or interesting to say.
The term avant-cliché refers to something that, though it has never been done or said before, is immediately a cliché the moment it is used – because it is something so predictably pathetic – such an obvious pattern in an absence of thought or insight – such a blatant appeal to overly-ruminant, self-indulgent, vapid, narcissistic emotion – that even though it is the first time it has been done or said, it feels as though you’ve seen or heard it a thousand times before.
I forget the thing that I originally saw that made me think of the term, but in the clips I’ve seen from Agatha All Along in the reviews, that stupid song they sang made me think of it. As a piece of music, it was so luridly bland – utterly lacking in interesting melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre – that it was as though I’d heard it thousands of times before, even though I’d never heard it before.