The essence of a good satire is its awareness of the fact that it is indeed satirical. This is not the same as forcing the audience to recognize it's self-awareness by making in-jokes, breaking the fourth wall every few minutes, or worst of all, making a bad genre piece on purpose to make a statement. No, awareness means that the show consciously takes a formula that has been worked to death and plays with the structure, taking each element to a hilarious extreme or making a deliberate comment on how ridiculous that element is in the first place. We as the audience are aware that Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! is a parody from the moment we see that it's a gender-swapped magical girl show, but the key is not to convince us that the show is satirical, but rather to show us what there is to lampoon in the first place. Happily, it does just that, avoiding the massive pitfall of spending twelve episodes laughing at its premise and instead delivering a well thought-out look at the magical girl show, or at least at how ridiculous they've become.
The first shot is of the Binan High School's Earth Defense Club relaxing at the family onsen of Yumoto, one of the five members in the club. The show uses this shot to play off the stereotypical conversations that classmates often have in magical girl shows, choosing for them to talk about chikuwabu's place in oden and other useless topics as a way of ensuring that this conversation couldn't possibly have any emotional meaning or plot relevance, the hidden agenda of on-screen conversations for most shows. Or so we think, but later on in the episode a chikuwabu monster comes to attack the school, and the Earth Defense Club members find themselves being transformed into magical boys wielding the power of love to protect the school.
What does love have to do with anything? All of the enemies they face are normal high schoolers who were transformed into monsters representing their inner anxieties and turbulent emotions. This has been played seriously hundreds of times, not the least of which being the seminal Revolutionary Girl Utena, but here the monster transformations are ridiculous parodies on this sort of external imagery, such as the chikuwabu monster being a representation of feeling too ordinary and unwanted like the chikuwabu in oden. And to complete the joke, he is defeated not with a friendship speech, but with Yumoto talking about the different flavor profiles in an oden and how inconspicuousness is a flavor in it's own right, ending with a meaningless statement that the earth is oden and oden is the earth. It follows the magical girl speech trope to a T, but both the audience and his other club members are fully aware that the final result doesn't make a bit of sense.
Funny enough, with this monster-of-the-week structure playing out for all but the last two episodes of the show, the theme of “love” actually fits here better than in most of the works it parodies. Everything boils down to Yumoto contriving the most ridiculous speeches about how love relates to remote controls, melons, and everything else while the other four try and decide if it's even worth it to play the straight men. The attacks get arbitrary names and all of them are nondescript beams of colored light regardless of what they're called. The key finishers in every episode are the merging of all five of their magic staffs, and Yumoto casting “Love Shower” over the monster as they revert to their old human selves. Yumoto then finishes it with the exclamation “Love is over!”, which sounds pretty cool but actually runs counter to everything they do.
Besides this recurring structure, the key to Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE!'s success is in solid—albeit meaningless—dialogue. Every conversation revolves around random topics the way actual conversations would go between friends in real life, and the spot gags usually come from them busting each others' chops to kill some time. They get juxtaposed against the villainous student council, who talk like B-movie villains and sit in a high-class tea room all day in impeccable white outfits. Or maybe their dialogue would be right at home in any other magical girl show, but when put side-by-side with the Earth Defense Club, it seems ridiculously forced, just as the show intends it to feel.
It's good that the writing was this way, because in making this parody there aren't a lot of jokes to be had, and so the reason to watch more than two or three episodes is simply that the dialogues and speeches continue to stay fresh. It's easier to watch the opening episodes as a parody and then the rest as a surreal slice of life, up until the plot reemerges at the very last moment. Rest assured that there is a conclusion, prompted by a random coincidence involving curry and a door that for some reason no one had thought to open for the rest of the show. Even in setting up the final conflict the show decides to throw all logic away, practically slipping it in to an established slice of life episode and disrupting ten long episodes of the show's established formula at the drop of a hat. The rest of the show revolves around a plot twist so ingenious and yet so utterly self-defeating that I couldn't help but laugh.
So why are they boys? The usual answer would be for the homoerotic tension between them, Japan's trademark in both magical girl shows and in every male friendship that anime could ever corrupt. It turns out this flat out isn't the case here; one episode makes express fun of that possibility, while another features two friends making up in such an overblown way that it could either be a joke or an actual touching reconciliation scene, depending on how you prefer to look at it. Half the show takes place with them all naked together in Yumoto's bathhouse, which pretty much eliminates all chances of it actually having homoerotic tension. Ultimately there is no reason for them to have been boys, which itself feels like a statement on how much the magical girl genre has pigeonholed itself. At most it's a giant red flag, saying “nothing serious is going to happen here”, a promise it sticks to to the very last.