Hammer and sickle, tovarishch!
(I kind of want to make a one-shot character who dual-wields whips, just for the ridiculousness of it.)
In practice, the differences are generally too small to notice in actual play - reach is only semi-useful, and 1d8 vs 1d6 barely registers if you pick something other than damage to judge by. So I'd go back to the somewhat unhelpful advice of 'do whatever sounds fun" - although in this case "sounds like it'd look cool" is the definition of fun I'd use.