I have contrarian tendencies. When I watch movies, for example, I often find myself secretly rooting for the bad guy; operating under the theory that the winners write the history books, I try to imagine how the story might be different had the bad guy won. Might the Emperor have been more sympathetic if he’d had a chance to tell us his side of the story, instead of being thrown down a reactor shaft by his trusted protégé and having his Death Star blown up, not once, but twice, by a handful of self-righteous rebels? Had not a bunch of lily-white men and elves defeated his dark-skinned, multiracial, multi-species armies, might Sauron be seen as a wise and compassionate champion of the downtrodden of Middle Earth? There’s little doubt that’s how he would tell it, if he hadn’t been so rudely dispatched by some meddling riverfolk.

My contrarian habits extend to nonfiction characters as well. (I can tear down pretty much any historical figure, no matter how revered; I’d be happy to take requests.) Recently, I found myself ripping a new one on a contemporary hero—that paragon of the American work ethic, the great Cal Ripken Jr., recently inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame.

Despite an outstanding career in the field and in the batter’s box, Ripken is known in popular culture almost exclusively for The Streak, the incredible 2,632 games in a row he played between 1982 and 1998. It’s an article of faith that Cal Ripken Jr. represents the hard-working ideal, a self-sacrificing team-player who just wanted to win baseball games—so much so that he’d play through injuries, the flu, hemorrhoids, anything. But let’s look at Ripken through a contrarian lens. Setting aside the tremendous luck required for such a streak—both his genetic luck-of-the-draw durability and freakish avoidance of serious illness and injury—should we join the crowd and laud Ripken’s achievement?

Perhaps not. Consider that a baseball season consists of 162 games—that’s a lot of games even for a relatively undemanding sport. Consider also that even durable players can benefit from the occasional game off. If you want to maximize the probability of winning, it makes sense to have your best players take some time to recuperate, resting against weak opponents so that they can be fresh against stronger ones. What this means is that there were almost certainly times when it would have been in the best interest of the team for Cal Ripken Jr. to rest—but this would have meant breaking The Streak. In other words, Ripken may very well have sacrificed his team’s success for his own personal glorification. (That this was done with the complicity of his managers and probably teammates as well indicates that he wasn’t the only one willing to sacrifice the team’s performance for personal goals—in this case, the reflected glory of being a manager or teammate of the great Cal Ripken Jr.)

One can plausibly argue that winning isn’t the only goal of baseball, and defend The Streak on the grounds that it increased the value of Ripken’s team more than the extra wins would have. This is quite possibly true, but that’s not the argument people make; The Streak is always couched in terms of hard work, dedication, and doing whatever it takes to help your team win.

Despite being mainly ironic fun, there is a serious undercurrent to these sorts of thought experiments. Trying to imagine how the Emperor or Sauron might have been wronged by the official accounts—or how Cal Ripken Jr. might not be the humble, selfless team-player of media legend—is like push-ups for your critical thinking muscles. It’s only too easy to believe what everyone else believes, simply following conventional wisdom wherever it leads. I find that habitually going the other way is a useful mental exercise, even—or perhaps especially—when it leads to Palpatine the Merciful, Sauron the Just, and Ripken the Self-Aggrandizing Egomaniac.

And don’t even get me started on Scrooge the Misunderstood.