Requiem of Whirlplash

Requiem of Whirlplash (IPA: /ɹiːkwaɪəm əv wə(ɹ)plæʃ/) was a popular Flarlandian website. It was basically an entertainment website before being acquired by Couch Slave Entertainment within less than a year and, having lost its prime in the mid-2000s, sold it before shutting down completely in 2010.
==Name==
The name came from the creator of the website, who initially called it "Requiem for a Whiplash". However, at one point during the summer of 1996, he had a dream in which he mispronounced the name and that the word "requiem" was mispronounced as "re-QUI-em". "For a" was replaced by "of" and "Whiplash" was replaced by "Whirlplash", a word imagined when the creator woke up.
==History==
Requiem of Whirlplash started on August 1st, 1996. The website was one of Flarland's first comedy websites and the first not to contain anything deemed "mainstream", as the first comedy pages were basically the same jokes repeated over and over again. Cory Brooke was its founder, who at the age of 17 began programming a website using minimal effort. Like Khyber Waterman's first website, it used the same principles: basic HTML, black text and white background. This was in a time when Flarlandian internet was in its infancy, and speeds were slow, therefore a website like this could load quickly. The site had two pages: the first claimed that it was a comedy page unlike anything else and the second contained ideas for television programs. The contents were kept in successive changes to the site.
In June 1997, Couch Slave Entertainment bought Requiem of Whirlplash from Cory. The website now ran on two servers in order to avoid issues and the contents of the website substantially grew. Among the most popular sections of the new site were the webcomics, a nich that was later popularized by Keenspot in the United States. By the turn of the millennium, the website started branching out into what eventually became its most popular feature: webtoons. The site benefitted heavily from the rise of new technologies and Flash webtoons were starting to become the norm.
By 2000, Requiem of Whirlplash was Flarland's tenth most-visited site, within months it became the fifth most-visited. New admins from Couch Slave's Tech division began to make RoW their corporate site, acting as some sort of hub for Couch Slave properties, as well as Channel A, at the time part of Exceeda. The Exceeda-Couch Slave merger brought mixed fortunes to the site. The site did earn traffic, especially from outside of Flarland, but the costs of running the operation were complicated for Cory, who sold his minimal stake in the website in November 2000.
By 2001, following changes to Channel A's structure, the website was heavily modified. In an overwhelming response to the shutdown of many Flarlandian webtoon sites, the main section was now Requiem of Webtoons. A news section, featuring clips and headlines from Channel A News, was later added. In 2003, Exceeda split and the website was now entirely owned by Couch Slave again.
Requiem of Whirlplash had some stiff competition from sites like Newgrounds and the local Camp North (2002-2009; 2010). Central to Requiem of Whirlplash's activities was the inclusion of user-submitted content, often made using Macromedia Flash and either as animated films or web games. The key difference is that the website had a section where the admins (around twenty during the site's golden age) and that user-generated content was to be posted on another website.
Things changed by 2006 as some users decided to post their works individually (in a similar way to The Quintessence), whose webcomics and webtoons were technically split in 2002 as a separate site. Channel A stopped hosting its site on RoW and opted to revert to a separate one as part of the 2006 rebrand.
Limitations were imposed in 2008 to certain content creators, leading to the crisis of the website. Furthermore, concentration of Flarlandian users on Newgrounds and the move of some animators to other platforms has led to Requiem of Whirlplash losing its prime. This situation was worsened with the "temporary shutdown" of Camp North in the second half of 2009. The Requiem of Whirlplash team was reduced to four by September 2009 and the forums became more active due to it being the only source of RoW-related news.
It was announced on October 30, 2010 that Requiem of Whirlplash was going to shut down on December 28, 2010 and that content creators would have to donate to the Couch Slave Archives.
==Productions==
===Webcomics===
*Borehood
*Housemates
===Webtoons===
==Controversies==
===Telecrappy Funland===
In 2000, IBC began showing Teletubbies and quickly generated a controversy, as some kids were enticed to play a spoof on Newgrounds, Telebubby Funland. In late response, Requiem of Whirlplash users created a Flarlandian adaptation of the spoof, Telecrappy Funland. While it didn't have the same level of controversy as its Sierran counterpart, Telecrappy Funland was met with backlash.
==Web Animation Nights==
Between April 2000 and 2006, Requiem of Whirlplash presented a half-hour television series called Web Animation Nights, including RoW webtoons and webtoons from third-party companies, on Saturday nights. The series was shown on Channel 14 yet was also shown, oddly enough, on Flarland TV (despite half of the webtoons coming from countries other than Flarland) and was also frequently repeated on Channel A.